May 2, 2023
Why the Bud Light disaster could cripple the entire company’s many brands for years
By Thomas Lifson
The damage done by the casual embrace of a transsexual by Bud Light came at an extremely bad time for not just the brand, but for all the brands sold in the US by the parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI). The reason is rooted in a critical aspect of commerce that mostly escapes public notice: physical distribution.
A consumer products company needs to get its products onto store shelves (and featured prominently by online merchants). For beer, the companies that hire the truck drivers who wheel cases of beer into stores on dollies and who negotiate with store managers to set up special displays are critical. Beer distribution is a blue-collar, labor-intensive business, and historically, beer distributors, especially those who handled the Anheuser-Busch family of brands that has dominated American market share for decades, have been local businesses. Mostly, very lucrative local businesses.
John McCain came back from Vietnam as a war hero and married the daughter of the A-B distributor in Arizona and became a wealthy man. A young woman I knew in my 20s was the daughter of the A-B distributor in a top 20 US market, and she never lacked for anything material, quite frankly admitting that she was “rich”. This for one second- or third-tier metro area.
Writing in American Greatness, John Conlin reveals how ABI has been restructuring its beer distribution, no doubt in the name of increased efficiency and market power, and thereby made itself very vulnerable to a slowdown in sales.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/why_the_bud_light_disaster_could_cripple_the_entire_companys_many_brands_for_years.html
