In what people from Manhattan call "Upstate New York" and what real human beings call "Central New York" the soda/pop divide is pretty interesting.
From just east of Syracuse and on east to Albany and New England, we uniformly call it "soda".
From Rochester west to Buffalo and the Canadian border, it is called "pop" by all.
And from east of Rochester to Syracuse, there is shaded overlap.
My theory is that it is proliferated by the Buffalo-based Wegmans grocery store chain calling its generic soda brands "pop" and advertising sodas as "pop" and... the easternmost Wegmans grocery store being in Syracuse.
I'm sure that, you know, in general "pop" is Midwestern and "soda" is Northeastern/Middle-Atlantic and the linguistic border would fall somewhere between the Buffalo metro area and the Albany metro area but...
It appears that the difference that finally sifted out was whether you lived in Price Chopper (and formerly Big M or P&C) grocery territory which used the Albany-based nomenclature or Wegman's grocery territory which used Buffalo-based nomenclature.
When it sifted out that Wegmans only penetrated as far east as Syracuse and, indeed, Price Chopper did not penetrate much further than Syracuse's western suburbs... so sifted out what people call their fizzy drinks.
That's why, being from the eastern suburbs of Utica, I use the correct word "soda".
As the power of the region chains and, indeed, regional media fade, future generations will probably be less influenced by this divide but... the difference was uniform as my parents grew up in the 60s and still prominent as I grew up in the 80s...
So my using "soda" is still an artifact of regional chains and their media influence as opposed to growing national retail and media forces which... seem to be pushing for "soda" anyway.
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