Every time, without fail, the Diet Coke column is nearly empty while the Coke, Sprite, and Coke Zero ones are full. Not only that, but Diet Coke gets the smallest portion of the endcap.
My only rationale for this is that these are loss leaders, and the Diet Coke is too popular to allow too much room? I don’t know.
1) they don't want to take more of a loss than they have to go get you in the door, 2) the people who buy diet coke or diet Dr pepper are statistically more likely to shop sales than the people who buy non-diet, 3) the relative allotted shelf space and display area aren't just a store manager decision, but actually a product the grocery store sells to the manufacturers, 4) (2) & (3) imply that stores in different class areas of town might have very different which product sells quickly and utterly fail to optimize stocking of the thing you noticed when it literally never sells out at the Kroger a mile away, for example.
Just look at the pricing between different serving sizes. Their price differs often less than 30%, even if you compare 0.5l to 2l.
Me, I like cans. They’re about 35¢ apiece. That’s cheap enough to not worry about, and way better than getting a fountain soda at a fast food restaurant.
Market segmentation at its finest!
My ideal is soda fountain machines, but of course I'm not gonna have one of those in my apartment, so the next best is cans.
Same story at the vending machines at the office building that my company used to have an office in. The vending company stocked the drink machine with 2 rows of Pepsi and something like 8 rows of Coke. The Pepsi was consistently sold out by the middle of the week after the machine was filled. The Coke? Maybe 10% of it was sold by the time they came around to restock. But they never figured out that they should add more rows of Pepsi and reduce the number of Coke rows.