Anheuser-Busch Inbev said Tuesday that revenue growth in most of its global regions was offset by a drop in North American sales, in a sign of continuing fallout from a promotion with a transgender influencer that cost it sales.
The world’s largest brewer and parent company of Bud Light said adjusted earnings for the latest quarter rose 4.1% to $5.4 billion on revenues that climbed 5% to $15.6 billion.
Revenue in the United States for the July-September period, however, tumbled 13.5%. AB InBev, based in Leuven, Belgium, noted that sales to retailers were down “primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light.”
Bud Light sales plunged amid a conservative backlash after the brand sent a commemorative can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in early April.
ITT: “Bud Light is bad”
So are all of the top-selling beers in the world, and especially in America (which is the subject of this article).
We get it. You’re into craft beer that costs $20/pint. I like them on occasion myself. But when I want to get drunk on beer cheaply, I’m not going to my local brewery. I’m not even going to Great Lakes or Same Adams. I’m going for a cheap, light, mass-produced pilsner. PBR, Coors, Miller Lite, Bud Light, Youngling, etc. They’re all the same cheap swill.
It’s the same with everything. The average person who isn’t an enthusiast consumes tons of mediocre junk. Taylor Swift is probably a good analog for music: I don’t see a lot of academic musicians analyzing the new music theory she’s implementing, or literary analysts dissecting her lyrics. Marvel Movies are getting famous for being pretty much the same heroes journey with rushed CGI every 6 months or so. Tons of people still watch shows like Friends, the Office, and Seinfeld. McDonald still sells billions of burgers in spite of the existence of high-end restaurants.
And that’s okay. Not everything. You consume needs to be some ultra-expensive artisanal elitist product.
As for Bud Light in particular, this is a a great example of a bad PR team. Either stick to your guns or don’t enter the fight in the first place. The fact that they’ve backed down and caved to transphobes means they’re much lower on my list now.
Excellent take, but in defense of the AB PR team, I don’t think they were expecting so much backlash from giving a 6 pack of beer to a trans person. I think it was just a small promotion they were doing and they were not anticipating this blowing up into something big. Right wing Twitter caught wind of it and made it a much bigger deal than it was.
They did something very triggering to a group of people that are extremely easily triggered. To a normal person it seems like no big deal on the surface. From a business stand point, it makes zero sense to promote your product to people who don’t like it, while triggering a huge chunk of your faithful patrons.
Might be called the Butterfly effect, idk, but the token move definitely brewed up a blizzard of conservative snowflakes.
Yeah it really was a shit thing to back down on it. The right won’t buy their beer anymore because Busch tried to support trans people
But now the left won’t buy it because they lack conviction to stick to their word.
As you said, they shouldn’t have entered the arena, or stuck to their imagery now that they’re associated with it (for better or worse). Now they’re paying the price of being a bunch of wet-noodles.
But if you’re trying to get drunk as fast as you can for as cheap as possible without any regard for taste, there are are products out there that have higher alcohol content and cost less than all of those products you named. Wouldn’t that be a more efficient means to an end?
Craft beer is 20$ in the US? Wtf?
No. I mean, yeah, some beer somewhere is probably $20/pt. But most of the ones I see at the store are like $12-14 for a four-pack.
You can find bottles for over $100 of you look for them.
I’ll admit I’m exaggerating a bit for effect here. Wine, Whisk(e)y, pretty much every other alcohol is the same. It also depends on if you get it at some fancy restaurant or a case at a wholesaler.
Southern Tier PumKing is a seasonal Halloween brew that’s pretty expensive. I see my local spot is advertising it for $16 for 4 12oz bottles. $16 will also get you 12 12oz bottles of Miller Lite, so 3x the volume for the same price. Southern Tier a moderately-sized brewery: not one of the big ones, but not a local microbrewery either. I can also see there is a listing for Weldwerks Old Rio Medianoche for $428.99 for 12 16oz bottles.
So Miller Lite is $0.11 per oz, PumKing is $0.33 per oz, and $2.23 per oz for the super expensive stuff.
I’m a Belgian brewer myself. Our country is filled to the brim with breweries, but you’ll have to try hard to find beer at those prices.
I’ve been to American craft breweries several times. They’re masters at the commercial aspect, but the beer tends to be lacking to what we’re used to over here.
Is there anything special about these beers besides the obviously inflated prices? Sounds like a common marketing trick to make them more exclusive than they are.
Beer isn’t wine, whiskey or other alcohols. Beer is a lot more “short term” because of the limited alcohol strength.
Many distilled drinks, and wine can evolve their taste over decades. That’s why their prices can go up exponentially relative to age.
This isn’t the case for beer, as their best before date is fairly limited.
I find it funny how every single European brewer thinks that their country is the only one that knows how to brew beer properly. Or anything else. In America, there’s such an incredible diversity that there is not much value in reducing the whole country to such generalizations.
Interestingly, the 5th most expensive beer in history was from Belgium. The De Cam & 3 Fonteinen Millennium Geuze. So no, Belgium isn’t immune to ridiculously priced beer.
The point I was making is that there is a wide range of price points available for beer (like most products). I started by defending the existence of the low-end, cheap beer. Once you get to a certain point, you’re paying for a weird gimmick or status symbol more than the quality. This isn’t some weird American quirk, but a global phenomenon.
I would argue it is an American quirk. Exceptions exist in other countries, but in the US it seems “normal” is the marketing term everyone avoids. A side effect of the rampant capitalism there.
Lol capitalism is ramlanr across the globe to various degrees.
Is Porsche American? What about Ferrari? Lamborghini?
Or we can look at something else like cheese. The most expensive cheese in the word is Pule, from the Balkans, ranging from $600-$1300/lb. The second is Moose cheese (Swedish, $500/lb), the third is White Stilton (British, $400/lb).
Kobe beef starts at $100/lb for low-grade stuff and goes up from there.
The most expensive champagne was “2013 Taste of Diamonds” and sold for over $2,000,000/bottle. It is, of course, French.
Does anyone in Europe, or anywhere else in the world, embrace “normal” as a marketing term? One of the cores of marketing is to differentiate a product from competition, so that only becomes an option if “normal” is itself abnormal. An example of that would be noname, and they are Canadian. Aside from that, there are certainly brands in America that Americans would describe as “normal”, but that is derived from the lack of marketing rather than a converted effort to use that term.
Once again it seems like you just learned what you think you know about America from reading some news headlines, and you’re generalizing that “Europe good, America bad, no where else exists”
I had similar problems with Target when they just immediately decided to just cave
Heineken gets a lot of flak (at least in France) but imo it’s the best beer in the “almost too diluted to pass as actual beer” category
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