Measurements of CPI during that time point are of more questionable accuracy, CPI measures many different types of goods (not all go up together), and a doubling of CPI over that many years is relatively low inflation. I didn't disagree there was inflation in any of my comments. Further, the article admits at the very end that increasing inflation was ultimately what forced Coke to raise its prices. Doesn't that imply that the lack of high inflation was part of what enabled Coke to maintain low prices initially?
"Measurements of CPI during that time point are of more questionable accuracy"
I am not sure what you mean here - "of more questionable accuracy [than CPI measurements today]", or "of more questionable accuracy [than gold in reflecting the cost of producing a coke]"? If the former, I grant it, but not (automatically) that it's enough to make a difference. The latter seems absurd - as I elaborate on a bit below.
"CPI measures many different types of goods (not all go up together)"
Coke is made out of many different types of goods (in terms of everything it takes to put a bottle on a store shelf), plus labor of people who want to buy many different types of goods. CPI should be expected to track the cost of producing a coke quite a bit better than a single commodity that isn't even involved in the manufacture and which experienced changes in supply that had nothing to do with coke.
"[A] doubling of CPI over that many years is relatively low inflation."
Relatively low, but not absurdly low, and certainly not completely flat; and note (!) that the end points picked here are not representative. 1930 CPI is the start of the depression; inflation in the 1920s was higher than anything we've seen since (says wolfram alpha) and the price of coke did not move.
To the general, implied counterfactual - "would Coke have raised it's prices sooner if there were much higher inflation?" - I think we have to answer "of course", but that doesn't necessarily mean that unusually low inflation was a significant part of it. Earlier periods have experienced less inflation, but coke's price lasted an unusually long time.
