Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
For more than a year, Walmart and other grocery chains told PepsiCo that no one wants $7 bags of Doritos. PepsiCo responded by trying everything and anything no one ever asked for: fewer chips in the bags, multipacks with fewer bags in them, and worst of all, protein-enriched chips for the mythical “health-conscious consumer” who somehow also wants to pay more for junk food. To the surprise of literally no one except PepsiCo, none of it worked.
Win NBA tickets, or just don't buy a few bags and purchase your own NBA tickets. (madvideos/depositphotos)
Meanwhile, CEO Ramon Laguarta was busy opening a Lay’s-branded restaurant in Madrid called “Pilla Tortilla,” where a Michelin-adjacent chef was incorporating potato chips into Spanish omelets as if this were a reasonable thing for the head of a company hemorrhaging market share to be focused on. “No matter what happens with the consumer, we’re going to be the preferred choice,” Laguarta told investors in early 2023, a statement that aged roughly as well as a seven-dollar bag of Ruffles sitting unsold on a shelf. By 2024, Frito-Lay’s 53-quarter revenue growth streak had ended, revenue had turned negative for the first time in a decade, and the company had missed internal targets by over a billion dollars for two consecutive years.
Elliott Investment Management took a $4 billion stake and showed up with a list of suggestions that boiled down to “have you considered charging less for chips,” a question PepsiCo’s own employees had been asking since 2023, but which senior management had declined to entertain because they are morons.
The price cuts started appearing in early 2026. At a Walmart in Washington, DC, bags of Cheetos Simply NKD were stacked in a prime end-of-aisle spot with a rollback price of $3.97, down from $4.43, a savings of 46 cents that PepsiCo is hoping will undo two years and fifty billion dollars in lost market cap sometime before the heat death of the universe.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
