On Aug. 26, 1919, a syndicate of banks and brokers from around the country bought 417,000 shares of the Coca-Cola Co. The plan was to resell them to individual investors at $40 apiece. It worked. An earlier attempt at a stock offering, in 1892, had failed miserably.
The Journal printed that anniversary note on page B12 of its Aug. 26, 2026 edition. Sitting directly above it was the day’s earnings calendar. The first name on the list was Nvidia.
One page. Two ways to make money. A century and change between them.
Nine drinks a day
Coca-Cola’s first advertisement ran in the Atlanta Journal on May 29, 1886. The pitch was four adjectives with exclamation points: “Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!” You could buy the stuff in exactly one place, Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta.
First-year sales averaged nine drinks a day. Nine. That is a lemonade stand with better punctuation.
Today the company sells more than 1.9 billion beverages a day, in more than 200 countries and territories, with about 70,000 employees. Bob Greene laid out that arc in the July 20 Journal.
| Coca-Cola, by the numbers | Reading |
|---|---|
| First year of sales, 1886 | 9 drinks a day |
| Shares bought by the syndicate, Aug. 26, 1919 | 417,000 |
| Offering price to individuals, 1919 | $40 |
| Mobile bottling plants built in World War II | 64 |
| Beverages sold worldwide each day now | 1.9 billion |
The war made it a habit
During World War II, company president Robert Woodruff vowed that every man in uniform should get a Coke for a nickel, wherever he was and whatever it cost the company. That is an expensive promise. It was also the best marketing decision anyone made that decade.
Eisenhower’s North African headquarters proposed building bottling plants inside the war zone. One logistics engineer went to Algiers first. Then 148 more followed, and together they set up 64 mobile bottling plants across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific.
Service members drank more than five billion bottles during the war. The troops called those civilian engineers the Coca-Cola colonels. A distribution network is a moat you can taste.
The boring one won anyway
Now the part your neighbor wants to argue about.
In the May 22 Journal, James Mackintosh made the case against dividend stocks. The S&P 500’s yield sits near an all-time low, barely above 1%. The Dividend Aristocrats index yields 1.3% and has trailed the index over three years by the widest margin since March 2000. Half of 2026’s twenty best performers pay no dividend at all.
He named Walmart, Coca-Cola and S&P Global as the archetypes of that quiet trade. Coca-Cola then returned 30.31% for the year through Aug. 21, against 12.1% for the S&P 500.
An Aug. 10 Journal piece on retirees rethinking dividends called that result an anomaly to its face. Over the prior year the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF returned 31.7%. A low-yield growth ETF returned 17.8%. The paper reported the win and doubted it in the same breath, which is fair.
The same article carried the detail that settles the mood. In May 2026, Nvidia raised its dividend from one penny a share to 25 cents. The chip company now mails a check too. It is a small check, but it is a check.
Winning does not mean easy. Coke closed at $91.64 on Aug. 25 and $89.06 on Aug. 27, two sessions later. And the company is fighting the IRS over more than $20 billion, a case three judges of the 11th U.S. Circuit heard in Miami, per the June 22 Journal. If Coke loses, the back-taxes bill would exceed its 2025 net income. No ruling has come down, and we are not going to guess at one.