Soft Drinks

The riders at the Devon Horse Show don't have a leg up on the Devon Country Fair volunteers. The competition between the hamburger booth and the soft drinks/ice cream booth can be as thick as a milkshake, depending on the weather. "On warm days, we make out. On cold days, they do," said Katie Zirnkilton of St. Davids, a soft drinks committee chairwoman, yesterday. "Since I am only ice cream and soft drinks, on cooler days we're dead in the water. " In her 25 years of volunteering, Zirnkilton, 35, has established a temperature gauge for the temperament of the Devon Horse Show crowd.

South Philly produce wholesalers meet this week to review a move from the crowded Food Distribution Center to a proposed $200 million Philadelphia Regional Produce Market, on a site developer Brian O'Neill controls at 6700 Essington Ave. near Philadelphia International Airport. "That's their plan. We don't know when we're going to break ground," said James Storey, head of Quaker City Produce Co. and a leader of the wholesalers. There's no deal yet, said John Estey, chairman of the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, which would become the market's landlord.

Milk is not what it used to be. In the beginning, there was whole milk, pure and simple. Then came low-fat and skim milk to satisfy consumers worried about the butterfat content. But the tinkering did not stop there. Because of the long and steady slide in the amount of milk that people drink, dairies have been seeking new ways to stimulate sales. They are reinventing their product, so to speak. Simple no longer, milk is being given new looks, new packages and new flavors.

You want a Coke at 30,000 feet? It's going to cost you $2. US Airways yesterday became the first major airline to announce that it would charge for soft drinks, among other sweeping initiatives that include layoffs, to offset spiraling fuel costs. The region's dominant airline, which transports two-thirds of the passengers at Philadelphia International Airport, also followed the lead of American and United Airlines in charging $15 for a first checked bag. US Airways said it would cut domestic capacity - seats and flights - 6 percent to 8 percent this year and next.

This week's $10 million "NFL Kickoff Live 2003, Presented by Pepsi Vanilla" suggests vast new horizons for the Mall in Washington. Now that the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior have determined that selling soft drinks and boosting football television ratings are excellent purposes for these historic acres, what else can be done with such an underused resource? The Potlatch Weyerhaeuser Pacific Lumber Activity Camp for Kids. So many elms, so little time. The ExxonMobil ChevronTexaco Monumental Core Oil Field.

The U.S.-Japan trade dispute has focused attention on differences in government policies, but last week a new issue - seat belts - seemed to focus on cultural differences. The U.S. government ordered a recall of 8.8 million cars for repair of seat belts made by a Japanese manufacturer. The company's president, Juichiro Takada, suggested that the real problem might be that Americans like to drink while they drive. He said the company suspected that spilled soft drinks caused the latches to stick shut, and that the drivers then jerked the belts open, causing them to eventually break.

While most rulers seem to be mad, in one way or another, the only ruler who was certified as mad in the Bible was Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, who ended his days nibbling on nothing but grass. This seems to be the way all of us are going these days, leaders and led alike. We are getting insane from being warned that almost everything we eat or drink is "bad" for us. Eggs are bad. Butter is bad. Sugar is bad. Salt is bad. Meat is bad. Most bread is bad, or at least not nourishing.

MANY have debated the mayor's proposed sugar-sweetened beverage tax, but it would be illegal. Pennsylvania law specifically bans the city from taxing an item that the state already taxes. As anyone who's picked up a six-pack of soda in a supermarket knows, Pennsylvania taxes ALL soft drinks at 6 percent, sugar sweetened or not. Like the state sales tax, the proposed sugar tax would fall on the consumer. If this tax were enacted, we'd pay separate taxes on the same item. In fact, the city designed this tax to fall on the consumer, claiming the goal is to change buying behavior.

They are not quite ready to replace Billy Penn with a Pepsi bottle, but the folks in City Hall think there is money to be made hawking everything from soft drinks to computer software. Street administration officials said yesterday that they planned to hire a firm to look into whether Philadelphia should allow private companies to use the city's name to market their products. For a price, then, Dr Pepper could call itself the official drink of Philadelphia, or Nike could slap its name on any number of recreation centers.

This city has long been known as the "Windy City," as much for the bluster of its politicians as for its weather. And poet Carl Sandburg famously dubbed Chicago the "city of the big shoulders. " In the near future, the nation's third-largest city might welcome a new name, something like "Chicago: MasterCard capital of the Midwest. " Mayor Richard Daley wants to trade on Chicago's famous name by "selling" it to corporate sponsors. For a fee, and possibly a discount to the city, corporations that sell soft drinks and credit cards, automobiles and computers might soon be able to style themselves as providers of the official product of Chicago.