Punters have been flogging bottles of Prime drink for over quadruple their value – a day after chaotic videos showed people scrambling to get their hands on a bottle. The viral beverage, costing just £1.99, was being sold online for as much as £10 a bottle, just hours after mayhem broke out in Aldi aisles.
Adults pushed and shoved kids as young as seven as they rushed to grab a bottle of the drink, created by YouTube stars Logan Paul and KSI, at several stores. The pair have used their enormous social media clout to create huge demand for the beverage, which contains coconut water, sweeteners and vitamins.
And it seems punters that missed out are now ready to pay a nearly 400 per cent premium to taste it, with ten bottles of Prime selling for £75 on Facebook Marketplace. Other Marketplace ads show bottles being sold for £15 each and another listing offering seven blue raspberry bottles for £50.
They are some of dozens of listings offering the viral drinks for anywhere between £5 and £16 for a single bottle. Two listings were even selling empty bottles, with one Telford listing offering two empties for £4.
Student Kristina Sheppard, 19, captured a brief video from her local store in Sydenham, East London, yesterday (Thursday) as customers battled it out to get their hands on the limited edition drink. The PE and Sports Exercise Science student said: "I got there at around 7.45am and I took the video at 8.04am.
"It was just hectic. I didn't push anyone, but there was a lot of pushing and shoving going on. I thought there was a limit of one bottle per flavour, but I saw people getting cases of them.
"There were parents pushing children. There were kids between the ages of 7 and 14, they were being pushed out of the way. One of the staff was shouting 'parents, stop pushing the kids'. It was absolute carnage.
"I just got my bottles and left, I didn't want to stick around much longer."
Advertised as a 'hydration drink', Prime contains mostly water added with vitamins and minerals and has few calories with no added sugar. It is also made up of coconut water but does not have any caffeine in it.
Kristina, who managed to snag a bottle of Blue Raspberry and Lemon Lime flavours, added: "I've never even tried it before, I just wanted to see what all the hype was about. I've looked at the ingredients and it's just coconut water, it doesn't look that amazing."
Some writing on social media labelled the drink a “fad” and asked why people were willing to pay a high price for it during the cost of living crisis. One said: “What I can’t understand with this whole fad is that there are people willing to pay such an overinflated price for a bottle of juice.
“The disgrace of it all is that people are struggling to eat, heat and pay bills. What kind of world are we living in?”
Another added: “Prime has to be one of the worst things to ever hit this country."
But many others were not put off as stores across the country saw long queues yesterday after it was announced they would be stocking the drink. Around 50 people began queuing outside the budget supermarket in Gravesend, Kent, shortly before 8am.
Ellie-Louise Dadswell, 20, began queuing outside the store at 7.45am in hopes of getting a bottle of the drink for her 14-year-old brother. And while crates of the drink sold out within seconds, she was able to get one bottle of the ice pop flavour.
She said: "I began queuing at about quarter to 8 but it didn’t take long to go down as the product was all gone so quickly. No one was talking to each other really, just trying their hardest to get it. There was loads of pushing and shoving."
In Bradford, West Yorkshire, an Aldi sold out of Prime within ten minutes after queues formed before the store opened at 8am. The popular drink was initially only sold in Asda stores, but huge demand led to shortages, which fuelled massive resale prices online and in other stores.
An off-licence in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, went viral on TikTok for selling bottles of it at £25 a go - with customers travelling hundreds of miles to get their hands on it.
