This is in response to your distressed tale, Big Winner, by Andrew Womack. My brother and I, being extremely cheap and always looking for a new way to get something for free, hate Pepsi. But we love the iTunes deal.

And thankfully, someone at Pepsi wasn’t thinking so clearly when they thought of this contest – or else they wouldn’t have made it so easy to cheat. I won’t pretend that I made up this trick, but it is mighty clever: Turn the bottle at an angle, and you can almost make out what it says under the lid. I found looking for the words ‘one’ or ‘free’ was a pretty good sign that it was a winning bottle, while the words ‘try’ or ‘next’ generally meant it was a loser.

It’s not a guaranteed system, because, come on, you’re squinting at the inside top of the bottle looking for a coherent word. But with all of our trials (I’ve bought two out of two winning bottles), we’ve won. The only problem is the whole bit when you’re standing in a supermarket turning all the bottles on their sides, holding it to the light, trying to look inconspicuous, but really looking kinda stupid.

Sadly, the whole thing turned out to be kinda stupid, because of the fact that we don’t like Pepsi. The cost of a Pepsi is more than just buying the damn song directly. But in the end, it was more exciting going the Pepsi route.

Aliya

I tried peering up at the cap, trying to find a winner on the first couple of times I bought bottles, but the clerk glared at me, fairly suspicious of what I was doing. In hindsight, I probably should’ve taken the bottle over to the register, wallet out, and said, ‘Nope, no mice!’ – Andrew Womack