Ashley GongoraHere's What Coke Thinks Are The Most Popular Names In Your Neighborhood.
By now you've probably noticed all those Coke bottles with people's names on them.
They're a part of the company's borderline creepy “Share a Coke” campaign. And those suckers are everywhere.
We'll hand it to them, it's certainly a pretty brilliant summer campaign, and it sure has led to tons of folks uploading pictures of their personalized Cokes on social media, using Coke cans to announce their impending parenthood — or eliciting articles like this one.
And, hey, it sure beats anything Pepsi has come up with in recent years — although they did try adding the name “Crystal” to some of their packaging several years ago to much less success.
It got us wondering how Coke decided to send what names to what stores and if they differed depending on neighborhood one was in.
With that we hit up stores all over town to see what, if any, trends could be found. As one might expect we did get the stink eye from a number of clerks who were wondering why we were digging through their store's fridges for so long. But then there were places like the Academy in Garland where the employees were kind enough to help us search through fridges to aid in our quest.
And what did we find there? Mostly just Keiths, Treys, Brittanys and Dustins.
We then trekked over to a Valero in Oak Cliff in search of that neighborhood's own unique names. There we spotted names like Maria and Andrea aplenty.
Meanwhile, at a Fiesta in Richardson we found the names Mary, Carlos and Vic a whopping seven times in each fridge. To our surprise, there was actually a “Hunter” buried way in the back of one of them, too.
Funny enough, we also found the names Juan and Jose at a 7-Eleven in Oak Lawn amid the swath of Jasmines, Danas, Lizs and Sarahs.
Mostly, though, the northern reaches of Dallas was comprised of names like Heather, Jacob and Logan, which we found in a North Dallas RaceTrac.
In Highland Park, meanwhile, bottles baring Caitlin, Allie, Chad, Lee, Nate, Kris and Amanda seemed to be everywhere. Oh, and there was a Ken too, which was pretty hilarious at first, but took a depressing turn when we couldn't find a Barbie to go with it. What gives?
At an Uptown Chevron, Brian, Steve, Will, Kevin, Rob and Daniel were all the rage. And our Henderson Avenue stop — at a Shell — bore forth more Gabriellas, Megs and Rebeccas.
Then there were more common names like Ashley, Heather, Tyler, Mel and Kathy which turned up in pretty much every fridge we rummaged through no matter what part of town we were in.
The same can't be said for names like Ian and Linds which popped up at a Sunny Food Mart in the ever-progressive Trinity Groves.
To that end there does seem to at least be some method to Coca-Cola's madness. From the looks of things they try to cover all their bases by making sure most stores are stocked with the most popular names in the region, then, maybe, spicing things up with more neighborhood-specific gems.
Of course we could be totally of base, here. And, sure, maybe it's all just pure coincidence.
For what it's worth, though, we have met a lot of Chads whenever we've ventured into Highland Park.
