Freakish Oddballs Who Like Diet Pepsi Pine for Chemicals of Yore

Sophisticated soda connoisseurs drink Diet Mtn Dew. Average people drink Diet Coke. Then there are the loners, misfits, and weirdos, who drink Diet Pepsi. They’re always hollering about some obscure grievance.

What is it this time, Randy? The UFOs again? Or is it a Diet Pepsi thing?

Last year, the folks who make Diet Pepsi were reasonably concerned about the fact that normal people don’t want their gross product to ever cross their lips. (Yuk!) They found some surveys that said Americans don’t like drinking aspartame, so they went and changed their recipe. Now Diet Pepsi uses a sweetener that’s not aspartame, just like you people said you wanted. And what happened? Diet Pepsi sales plummeted. What the hell do you people want, honestly? The Wall Street Journal tracked down an actual Diet Pepsi drinker to find out:

Chase Thomas, a 42-year-old nurse practitioner, used to treat himself to a Diet Pepsi every afternoon but stopped because the new version tastes “awful” and “flat.” He also doesn’t like Diet Coke or Coca-Cola Zero, instead keeping an unopened bottle of aspartame-sweetened Diet Pepsi in his fridge as a keepsake.

“It’s my Holy Grail,” said Mr. Thomas, who lives in Anniston, Ala.

Just let em have it, PepsiCo. Sometimes you gotta let your dog eat that old poop because trying to stop him is even worse.