Synchronised Coca Cola Drinking

I did a calculation some years ago when I read that Coca Cola sold 78 million bottles a day. I figured that on a rolling basis, everything that was sold was drunk, so that meant that 78 million bottles were drunk every day.

Then I estimated that it took five minutes to drink a bottle of coke. That's on average of course. Some people will just guzzle it down and other people will take it slow with their burger and fries, or tacos, or noodles, or whatever - because Coke is a worldwide brand.

So how many five minutes are there in a day? And how long is 'a day'?

It's obvious that a day must be a 24 hour period. So that's 12 five minutes in an hour and 12x24=288 five-minute periods in a day.

So if there are 78M bottles sold every day, then there are 78 million divided by 288 being drunk at any one time. That's 271,000 people.

Of course, they won't all be synchronised and lifting the bottle to their lips at the exact same time, but even chopping that number by 10, that's still probably 27,000 people who are lifting a bottle of coke to their lips anytime you do.

That's at any time, wherever you are, night or day. When you drink a coke, there are more than a quarter of a million people doing the same thing in the same five-minute period and probably somewhere around 30,000 people who lift their coke to their lips just when you do.

Anyway, on SimplyZesty I read that the number has gone up and now it's 1.7 billion bottles (and cans) being served every day. That's quite a step up.

That's 18 times as much.

So the up-to-date statistics are:

Any time you drink a coke, somewhere around four-million-eight-hundred-thousand people are doing the same. And somewhere around four-hundred-thousand people are lifting their drink to their lips more or less when you do.