The New World Of Coca Cola - the Coke Company’s loving shrine to itself - is a big, shiny new building right in the heart of downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Downtown Atlanta, Georgia is very, very hot, and that’s one of the best reasons to visit the New World Of Coca Cola. You know at least it’s going to be cool in there.

You enter and stand in a large, white room with some giant, hand painted Coca Cola bottles, reminiscent of Ukrainian Easter Eggs - faux folk art. This mock warmth is offset by the large, red digital numbers ticking on the wall, counting down the time before this next batch of tourists is squeezed by peristaltic pressure into “The Greeting”. (Well, why not…Coke WAS originally marketed as a laxative, among other things. And that would make us…?). Pressure builds. Then suddenly, you’re spasmed with a few hundred other folks, into…

THE GREETING.

You pile down a long ramp into Blade-Runner street-scene illumination, all lurid reds and violets, mostly neon-ish light spilling from the glow of dozens of Coke machines. Vision adjusts and you find yourself jammed, standing, in a room festooned with hundreds of Coca Cola artifacts and ads from the past. Raquel Welch. I’d like to teach the world to sing. It’s the Real Thing. The Beach Boys singing a Coke Jingle. This, I assume, is supposed to evoke warm memories. Instead it feels like a high-pressure enema of synthetic nostalgia.

Everyone is very friendly in the Coke museum. It’s a bit…creepy. Like being at a convention of Mormons or Stepford Wives or something.

And then we are excreted into…

THE HAPPINESS FACTORY

…where a smiling young woman makes people on one side of the room yell “Coca Cola”, and then gets the other side of the room to yell it louder, and then the first side has to try again, and then we watch an eleven minute long commercial (which is pretty funny- weird little animated creatures talking documentary style about how much they love working for Coca-Cola- except Nick Parks did it twenty years ago in “Creature Comforts”). And then with one final compulsory “Coca Cola” Group Shriek, we are pooted forth into the Museum proper, wherein we may meditate upon all things Coke.

Well, not ALL things. There isn’t much about sugar and caffeine dependency, or pesticide levels in the water used by third world bottling plants, or the various political boycotts in Guatemala and India and Columbia and the Middle East. But in fairness, they’re paying for the museum.

The neatest part was the area where you get to try little shots of all the Coca Cola products bottled and sold around the world…not just the various Cokes past and present (Cherry and Vanilla and “new” and “classic” and so on) but some truly weird variants in different markets, including a sweet apple flavoured Coke product marketed in China, and a thing called “Beverly”, described much better than I can by a writer at McSweeney’s:

Beverly looks innocuous. The push-button dispenser says, blandly, “Italy: Beverly,” and then, underneath, “Bitter Aperitif.” So you think, Cool, maybe this will wash away that China: Mandarin Orange funk I just choked down. And then—this should totally tip you off that something bad is about to happen—as you reach your hand out to push the button on the dispenser, the World of Coke staff takes a step toward you in disturbing unison. They pretend they’re not looking at you, but you can so totally tell that they are. You push the button, you toss it back, and then it hits—it’s as if you’d crushed a thousand Imodium AD caplets, made them into a paste, and painted your tongue with it. The bitterness seeps into parts of your throat where taste buds should not exist, but somehow do. The museum staff falls all over themselves laughing at you, and then they get a mop.

The floor is kind of sticky in the tasting area, but there are lots of those weirdly friendly kids with mops.

The climax of the tour (we’ve switched away from the digestive metaphor, did you notice?) is the STORE, which enables you to “Take the Excitement Home With You By Choosing From a Large Selection of New And Redesigned Decorative And Apparel Items!” It is at this point that even the most hardened tourist or Cokeophile HAS to say…

“Wait A Minute.

I have paid a not-insubstantial fee in order to immerse myself in an environment whose ONLY purpose, engineered and fine tuned with the finest psychological and marketing expertise available to humanity, is to convince me to buy more of their product for the rest of my life.

And now they want to charge me for the privilege of advertising their stuff on my clothes.

Is there any way in which that makes sense? Anyone? Please?”

One final interesting bit of trivia. The Gray Lines Coach Tour of Atlanta allows its visitors a total of thirty minutes to visit the Martin Luther King Memorial Centre, the Civil Rights Museum, the
Ebenezer Baptist Church where he preached, and his grave.

We got an hour and a half at the Coke Museum, though.