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Originally Posted by glatt
A big bowl of wheaties!
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I have a relative in the coin trading business, and I heard an amusing story about Wheaties recently. Some number of decades ago, Wheaties wanted to do a little promotion where they would include a Lincoln
wheat penny as the prize in every box of Wheaties for a month.
As they started buying piles and piles of them, the price was artificially raised to the point that Wheaties would be losing a ton of money with the promotion, but they had already invested a certain amount in developing advertising and whatnot for it, so they persisted anyway. In the end, however, it was determined that there were not even enough wheat pennies in existence to put one in every box of cereal Wheaties sold in a month. They could have done it for a couple of weeks, but by this point they were pissed off, so they just scrapped the whole idea and re-sold the pennies to collectors to recoup their losses.
Except in doing so they flooded the market, artificially driving the price down, and thus lost
even more money.