And this illustrates the problem that the Bud Light/Anheuser Bush people have with this business.
No matter how much they fear the Human Rights Campaign and getting on the bad side of the left in the end their product is bought by regular people and the regular people who buy this product do it at a location where they are a ton of alternatives to their product for sale.
It takes no effort to grab a case of Miller Lite or Coors lite or a dozen of other beers when you’re at the package store.
And even if you’re at a bar or a restaurant, almost nobody sells Bud Light Exclusively.
Take Longhorn’s steakhouse. They offer both Bud light AND Miller Light as a discount beer. It takes no effort to grab a Miller lite instead of Bud.
Like it or not as Budlight is now, as the wags are putting it: “tranny fluid” and while there will always be kids who will buy a cheap beer to get drunk on But has a choice.
They can either publicly disavow their actions and fire the manager involved
Or
They can settle for a smaller American market share permanently
No amount of flag waving is going to fool people, they’ve chosen to take a public side in the political /cultural debate Now they have to decide whose favor they want.
Closing thought:
The moment Donald Trump’s son called for conservative to forgive Budweiser the DeSantis for President crowd must have been high fiving themselves. This is a losing issue for the Trump campaign and I’ll bet real money you won’t see the Donald repeating that mistake.
Some big news came out of Chicago on Tuesday. For the first time since 1996, and only the second time since the riotous year of 1968, the Democratic National Convention will be held in Chicago next year.
But more consequential news arrived Tuesday as well. America’s largest retailer, Walmart, announced it was closing four of its Chicago stores, half of its city presence. These outlets lock their doors for good tonight.
Chicago’s relationship with the big box giant has been a hate-love-hate one. In the early 2000s, the term “food desert” came into use to describe areas without access to fresh food, but really, what theses apologists were talking about were neighborhoods where supermarkets pulled out because of high crime, mostly shoplifting. In their place sprang small stores, family-run operations usually owned by people from the Middle East, or south or east Asia. Of course, these merchants charge shoppers more for goods because, without the volume discounts that the retail behemoths enjoy, they have to.
And it was in the early 2000s that Walmart, and its primary big box rival, Target, wanted to open stores in major cities like Chicago. Target, even though like Walmart is non-union, got a pass from the opposition–the Chicago City Council and its union allies–because Target is a creature of the left. Walmart’s corporate philosophy was decidedly conservative then. So the City Council, that failed body that sees one of its members convicted on corruption charges every eighteen months or so, passed an anti-big box retail store ordinance in 2006, which Mayor Richard M. Daley vetoed. I believe it was his only veto in his 22 years as mayor.
So Walmart arrived in Chicago, opening eight stores, some of them in impoverished areas. That’s the love part.
And now for more hate.
Widespread looting during the George Floyd riots in 2020 hit Chicago retailers hard. North Michigan Avenue, one of America’s premier luxury shopping areas, was devastated by a second round or looting two months later, igniting a retail exodus. As for Walmart, all of its Chicago stores were shuttered, four for two months. Two other stores, including one of the outlets that closes tonight, in Chatham on the South Side, were shuttered for six months. The Chatham location, a supercenter, was also set on fire. On this weekend’s edition of Fox Chicago’s Flannery Fired Up, host Mike Flannery said of the Chatham outlet, “It was virtually destroyed.”
Now it and three other Walmarts are closing.
Late last year, Walmart’s CEO, Doug McMillon, decrying shoplifting, particularly thefts conducted by organized gangs, issued a general warning. If local law enforcement didn’t do their job, “prices will be higher, and/or stores will close.” He added, “It’s just policy consistency and clarity so we can make capital investments with some vision.”
Last week, in response to McMillon’s comments, WIND-AM’s Dan Proft remarked, “That is a very vanilla way of saying ‘We can’t do business in a place that doesn’t enforce the rule of law.'”
And in Chicago and elsewhere Walmarts are closing because leftist public officials refuse to enforce the rule of law. Two weeks ago Chicago elected a neo-Marxist leftist, Chicago Teachers Unions product Brandon Johnson, as mayor. What did Johnson, then a Cook County commissioner, say about looting in 2020? He refused to denounce it. In fact, Johnson minimized it because looted businesses have insurance.
Sheesh.
The mayor-elect was a defund-the-police proponent, until this year, when he wasn’t. Johnson favors something he calls “Treatment not Trauma,” he wants to send social workers instead of cops to domestic disturbances.
In a press release announcing the closings, Walmart said, “The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years.” Hey, but at least, as Johnson pointed out, Walmart has insurance. Of course, insurance companies never lowball claims, they never raise rates, and they never cancel policies due to risk factors. Right?
As for Johnson, he’s off to a wretched start as mayor-elect. In his first national media interview after his runoff win over moderate Democrat Paul Vallas, Johnson blamed large companies for Chicago’s high crime and poverty rates. “We have large corporations,” Johnson replied when asked about criminality in the city, “seventy percent of large corporations in the city of Chicago — in the state of Illinois, did not pay a corporate tax.” That’s probably false–and while Chicago does have sales and property taxes, it doesn’t have a Detroit-style municipal income tax. Johnson claims he’s against a city income tax, but in a February Flannery Fired Up appearance, he repeatedly dodged questions on whether he supports one.
The day after the store closings were announced, Fox Chicago reported that six televisions were shoplifted from the Chatham Walmart. In a way, the five-finger-discounter was participating in a going out of business sale.
Chicago’s meddlesome priest, the obnoxious and bombastic Father Michael Pfleger, is one of the loudest voices condemning the Walmart closings. He is threatening to lead a boycott of a Walmart supercenter located just outside of Chicago’s city limits. Good lord, Pfleger is a bigger goof than I thought. If that suburban Walmart closes because of a boycott, it will mean one less shopping choice for Chicagoans–and an even larger food desert.
The Chicago Exodus began in 2020. It’s accelerating now.
One more thought: On Saturday night a very large group of what the media called “teenagers,” thugs is a better word, descended on downtown Chicago. They smashed car windows, set some vehicles on fire, and two people were shot. I call that a riot. One woman watched helplessly as her husband was beaten by a mob. There was a similar gathering the night before at a South Side beach.
Chicago’s criminals are emboldened.
Hell has arrived. I’ve seen what an urban hell looks like. It’s called Detroit.
Let’s go Brandon!
John Ruberry is a regular suburban Chicago Walmart shopper who blogs at Marathon Pundit.
This week Air, an Amazon Studios film, opens in movie theaters nationwide. It tells the story of Nike’s development of the Air Jordan line of sneakers in the mid-1980s. The shoes were the expensive footwear of Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan, who still appears in Nike ads.
What you won’t see in Air is the failed boycott of Operation PUSH in 1990 of Nike. Chicago-based PUSH, now Rainbow/PUSH, was, depending on who you talk to, either a major civil rights power of the late 20th century, or a shakedown operation. I belong to the latter camp.
PUSH was founded in the early 1970s by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, but he departed PUSH to be serve as a shadow senator for Washington DC–what does that entail?– and to lead a new group, the National Rainbow Coalition, which merged with PUSH in 1996. Leading PUSH during the Jackson-less interregnum was the Reverend Tyrone Crider.
Jackson’s gameplan for PUSH followed this pattern: He’d smear a corporation as racist, call for a boycott, then demand that these corporations hire more Blacks and other minorities–as well as more minority contractors–and then declare victory. But often those hired were cronies and relatives of Jackson. Coca-Cola, some CBS television affiliates, and Anheuser-Busch were prior targets of PUSH.
Shortly after taking the helm of PUSH in 1990, Crider picked a new villain, Nike. Unlike past targets/victims whose founders were either retired or long dead, Nike’s founders, scrappy entrepreneurs Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, were still with the corporation in 1990. Knight was the chairman of Nike at the time, he was only a quarter-century removed from when he was selling running shoes at track meets from the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant.
When PUSH declared its boycott of Nike–sorry, I can’t resist–the sneaker giant pushed back. Nike quickly announced it would appoint a Black board member and a Black vice president, and hire some Black department heads, but a Nike spokesperson said that those moves were already planned prior to the PUSH attack.
Next came a nothing-but-net three-pointer by Nike from midcourt. In an open letter, Nike turned the tables on PUSH, requesting that it turn over “the membership of PUSH by geographical location, age, sex and race.” It gets better. Nike asked in that same letter, “Has PUSH been the subject of review or investigation by any federal or state agency? If so, state the name of the agency involved, the nature of the investigation and the findings or conclusions of the investigation.” Guess what? PUSH had been the target of a federal probe.
PUSH demanded proprietary financial information from Nike, at the same time Reebok, a top competitor of Nike, purchased a full-page ad in the Operation PUSH magazine. That same open letter, according to a Chicago Tribune article, also called on “PUSH to supply details in 21 categories relating to how the organization made its decision to single out the athletic-wear industry.”
None of the celebrity endorsers of the time for Nike, whose ranks included Spike Lee, Bo Jackson, and His Airness, Michael Jordan, participated in the boycott. Georgetown men’s basketball coach John Thompson, a consultant for Nike who later served as a board member, also remained loyal.
And what about Nike sales? “The boycott has had little apparent effect on Nike,” the Washington Post reported at the time, “whose earnings soared 58 percent last September, October and November over the corresponding period in 1989.”
Nothing but net.
Of course, now Nike is completely woke, Knight is retired and Bowerman died in 1999. Colin Kaepernick, a Nike endorser beginning in 2011, was featured in a series of Nike ads after he was handed his last NFL snap. In his last season as a professional football player, Kaepernick took a knee when the National Anthem was played before games. Kaepernick regularly speaks out in favor of various far-left causes, such as abolishing prisons and police departments.
For a time, Nike was gutsy. And the lesson for corporations today is clear. You can fight back against leftist threats and win.
Just do it.
When you stand up to bullies, they usually back down.
John Ruberry, who wore his first pair of Nike Waffle Trainer running shoes in 1977, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
Major Hogan: [tosses a coin to Sharpe] What’s that, Sharpe?
Richard Sharpe: A shilling, sir.
Major Hogan: The King’s Shilling, Sharpe. Our last shilling. London’s late, the Army’s broke, and we owe the lads two months’ wages… What do you do when you’re out of cash, Sharpe?
Richard Sharpe: Do without, sir.
Sharpe’s Rifles 1993
Spent a day and a half with friends crashing over for a birthday (very odd to do so without DaWife, it almost never happens) so I’ve not been close to events over the last 48 hours so I was rather surprised when I walked into DaHouse this morning just after midnight, turned on the TV and saw this ad:
It’s a very clever ad and I endorse the sentiment expressed. A lot of other people must as well since they apparently sold 100,000 bars within 12 hours so I headed over to their web site to see what they were offering.
And that’s when I saw that their base chocolate bar was $6.99
$6.99? In contrast at my local market basket a Hershey’s bar goes for about $2.
Not to worry though you can choose to order 4 bars and pay$25 or $6.25 a bar
or if that’s too much you can buy 10 bars and pay $45.99 or $4.59 a bar
but the real bargain is a 24 pack which sets you back $100. So not only are you only paying a 25% premium to tweak Hershey but you get free shipping unlike those previous orders that don’t get to the $80 free shipping threshold.
You know I’m not a fan of wokeness but most normal Americans can’t afford to spend $100 on chocolate. That’s three water bills, or 3/4 of an electric bill or 2 1/2 fill ups of my car. I’m not going to blow that amount on candy just to poke these guys in the eye.
Apparently a lot of guys can and if Jeremy’s can find people in this economy who can, more power to them that’s free enterprise.
Me I’ll just buy a different brand without the 350% premium or do without. Just as effective but without the capital outlay.
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