PepsiCo Paid $1 Million for This

The Absurdity of Design

One million US Dollars is a lot of money. In the United States, one of the world’s most affluent nations, the typical average salary is somewhere in the mid $50,000s per year. In my home country, the UK, it’s considerably worse, clocking in at ~£38,000. In those terms, you can see how a million dollars feels like a lot. I created this cool chart to illustrate it.

But when you hear that PepsiCo, the parent of the Pepsi-Cola brand, paid $1 million for the logo you see below, it doesn’t sound like much considering this business generated revenues just shy of $80 billion in 2021 with $11.8 billion of that flowing through to operating income (I created another cool chart to illustrate the contrast).