Jones Soda: The Fizz is Gone

You may have thought a turkey-and-gravy-flavored soda would be disgusting. No, it gets worse. A Christmas-season four-pack of Seattle-based Jones Soda features bottles labeled Sugar Plum, Eggnog, Christmas Tree and Christmas Ham. (There's a Chanukah pack, too, complete with dreidel: latke, applesauce, chocolate coins and jelly donut.) But we're not here to be disgusting, we're here to be informative.

Jones Soda, you may recall, made a big splash with its quirky flavors and off-beat promotions a few years back. While assiduously courting taste-making skateboarders, they also managed to be named "official soda" for assorted big league sports teams, including the New Jersey Nets. Then their stock started to tank, the board threw out the founder (with a $20K a month severance), installed a new ceo (who even happened to be named Jones) and started cutting costs. Nothing helped. The stock price is three-for-a-buck, down from $20+ just 18 months ago. And now Jones wants out of the NBA deal.

The whole sad story is on DailyDispatch.com this morning, where publisher Alex Mayer admits his posts are opinionated, to say the least. He claims to be inventing a new style of journalism that combines investigative reporting, infotainment and hatred for big business. "Unchecked corporate greed has helped destroy our country," he says. "I feel we should start becoming aware of the useless products and insulting marketing being spoon-fed to us." Spoon-fed like turkey and gravy.

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