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Dawn queues, carnage and price gouging. Reaction has been extreme since the release of Prime, the brightly-packaged flavoured drink launched by KSI, a British influencer, and his US counterpart and sometime boxing rival, Logan Paul.
Just after Christmas, videos circulated of Aldi supermarket shoppers climbing over each other to get their hands on the luridly coloured bottles, targeted at tweens and teens. This week, Sainsbury’s became the latest retailer to stock it, swiftly issuing a request that customers not call the switchboard to track down the elusive soft drink. Despite a strict three-bottle limit per customer, shelves were stripped. Returning from a trip to the Grand Canyon, a colleague’s sons managed to find a supply in Arizona, and stuffed their suitcase. The scrums have made this week’s Beano, albeit for a drink dubbed “Grime”.
There is kudos even in the empty bottles. One headteacher at a north London primary told me that kids using them to hold water had been “catapulted to higher status among their peers”.
The scarcity tactic helps fuel the buzz — according to Paul, the drinks made $250mn in revenues in 2022 and $40mn in just January this year.
Influencers are not the only ones making money, though. Schoolkids are punting the £2 bottles for inflated prices. One mother told me of a child selling individual capfuls for 20 pence a pop. And that’s before it even reaches eBay. In Yorkshire, a convenience store became a TikTok hit, gaining over 700,000 followers after stocking the brand and claiming to charge exorbitant prices. There is even a Prime Tracker app, created by an independent developer, that can update subscribers on the location of the latest stock. Though as one user reports: “When you get there it is out of stock because loads of people have the app . . . so it is a [race] to get there.”
In part, the success is testimony to the power of playground hype: this point was reinforced to me 18 months ago as I…
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