DATE: Sunday, September 21, 1997            TAG: 9709210095

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL

                                            LENGTH:   50 lines

BURGEONING SODA TREND IS HARD TO SWALLOW

It hit me Saturday that the soft-drink industry, bent on tempting us into drinking ever-larger bottles of pop, may bring us to the point that the entire population self-destructs in a single great belch.

Returning late Saturday from an emotional early morning mission in Richmond, I stopped at a roadside convenience store and pulled a Coca-Cola from one of the white plastic racks in a gigantic glass-doored cooler.

Only at the cash register did it dawn on me that the bottle, the smallest on sale, contained 20 ounces of beverage.

The beginning of this ever-swelling tide began in the late 1930s when Pepsi-Cola, coming on the market, upped the content of its bottle to 12 ounces to top Coca-Cola's then-standard 6.4 ounces.

It launched on the billows a little jingle that began: Pepsi-Cola hits the spot/12 full ounces that's a lot/twice as much for a nickel, too/Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

It was a staggering breakthrough, especially to boys playing baseball on a summer's day. We figured that was the ultimate upsurge, just as people gasped when the stock market topped 1,000.

By the way, tipping the 20-ounce bottle Saturday, I left off about a third of the way, replete. It was near the 6.4-ounce mark, just what you would expect from a hidebound, never-changing conservative.

Indeed the rapid expansion in bottle capacity over the past two years or so didn't make much of an impression on me. The 16-ounce Gulp struck me as just another marketing gimmick. Only lately did the 32-ounce Big Gulp surface, followed rapidly by the 44-ounce Super Big Gulp and, finally, the 64-ounce Double Gulp. Or is it ``finally''?

Dare we go higher?

What in the world, you ask, does anybody do with a 64-ounce drink of soda pop?

That was exactly my question and one young colleague, a sight more observant than I, noted that mothers with two or three offspring - and fathers, too, no doubt - pass the Double Big Gulp cup, turn by turn, among the children in the car, all sipping from straws like elephants drawing with their snouts from a communal water hole.

A young man, a coach of a sandlot team, recalled that a fellow coach at the end of a game bought a Double Big Gulp ``just to see what it was like,'' as he put it.

``And do you know,'' the second coach reported to his sidekick the next day, ``to my astonishment, when I reached home, I was astounded to discover that, without realizing it, I had drunk by myself the entire 64 ounces of the Double Big Gulp.''

It does make one gulp, doesn't it?

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