I’ve noted in the past that the biggest problem for Anheuser Busch is that it’s very very easy to boycott Bud Light so if they want to stop the bleeding in the US they will have to take actual pro-active action to do so.
Everyone knows this but nobody knows this more than the folks at the LGBTQ community so called “human rights campaign” who realize that their ability to push their agenda through cooperate intimidation can come to a screeching halt if companies decide that the potential cost of keeping the professional protester class appeased is outweighed by the cost to the bottom line, particularly for companies where there are easy alternatives to their product available.
So they are keeping the pressure on Anheuser Bush not only to just stay silent on the matter but to double down:
The Human Rights Campaign is calling on Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Bud Light, to publicly reaffirm its support for the transgender community following weeks of right-wing pushback over the brewing company’s recent partnership with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
In a letter sent this week to Anheuser-Busch’s head of human resources, Jay Brown, a senior vice president at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, slammed the company’s response to the controversy as insufficient and cowardly.
“In this moment, it is absolutely critical for Anheuser-Busch to stand in solidarity with Dylan and the trans community,” reads the April 26 letter obtained by The Hill.
So far Anheuser Busch has declined to meet with these folks as they understand how it would be received by a customer base already walking away. The real danger for the Bud folks is that one people start getting used to buying another brand it becomes easier for them to continue to do so, that’s marketing 101.
It all comes down to this: Is the potential permanent damage the Mulvaney business has caused greater than the damage the HRC folks can do, or to put it another way. Are the HRC crowd Anheuser Bush drinkers in general and/or Bud Light drinkers in particular?
If the answer is “yes” then Anheuser Bush will likely at best wait this out and take the hit they’ve gotten or at worse cave and risk a 2nd drop.
If the answer is “no” and I suspect it is, then our best move is to keep the pressure on because many other companies are watching to see how this plays out.
Those companies are the real target of the HRC letter and those companies are the reason why we need to dramatically demonstrate that caving has a price and until they are more scared of us then they are of them, nothing will change.
After mass this morning I stopped by a local combo Butcher Shop and liquor store to pick up some hamburger. As I was leaving I noticed the Bud Light guy dropping off booze and asked him how things were going with the sales.
He noted that sales were down a bit and that on the highway that morning he had one guy beep at him to give him a thumbs down. I sympathized as this fellow had nothing to do with the idiotic decisions made at the corporate level.
That was interesting but not as interesting as what happened later that evening.
Tonight I took my wife out to dinner at Texas Road House because I had a hankering for a steak larger than what’s offered at Longhorn but without paying an arm and a leg as some of the fancier steak houses in the area charge.
The place was packed when we got there with a 30 minute wait but we were told there were two spots at the bar if we were willing to sit there. To my surprise my wife jumped at the offer so we ended up at the bar with big screen carrying the NFL draft. all around. It was a few minutes before game six between the Bruins and Panthers and TV’s were duly changed when the game started.
The first thing I noticed was that my seat was directly opposite the beer taps so I could see every draft bear that was pourced.
Now I confess this is not a scientific study and there were times when I was paying more attention to the Bruins game or my steak than the taps, but during the hour plus that we spent at the bar, while I saw many a Coors light poured, more than a few Sam Adams and plenty of the local Wachusett ales going out I did not see a single Bud Light leave the station.
Again I note I cant guarantee that I didn’t miss a beer or two that went out but that I would not see a single Bud Light sold in a national restaurant in a deep blue state can not be a good sign for these guys.
Frankly if I were them I’d bring back the King from the “dilly dilly” stuff and have him pass judgement on the Marketing Department, not for trying expand the reach of the beer but for hitting the customer base in the process.
I suspect a commercial declaring they hope to share the joy of Bud light with all while sending them to the pit of despair for their disrespect of those who already enjoy Bud Light with the crowd responding “Dilly Dilly” would send the right message without explicitly saying words they don’t want to say aloud.
Until they do I suspect I will see more of what I saw tonight because no matter how many patriotic ads you make it’s just too easy to order a Coors or a Sam Adams or a Wachusett instead.
A societal seismic shift, a black swan moment, occurred for the American elite, our “betters,” on April 1. Yep, April Fools Day, but the joke was on the elites. It was April 1 when on his–yes his–Instragram page, the transgendered influencer, Dylan Muvlaney, announced his sponsorhip deal with Bud Light, a beer brewed by Anheuser-Busch that is, or was, favored mainly by macho types.
The backlash was immediate. A boycott of the brew–with conservative celebrities leading the charge began–and Anheuser-Busch has since lost $5 billion in value.
Receiving the blame for this debacle is Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, who went on a leave of absence last week.
It’s likely that Bud Light triggered a tripwire, likely, to use Bill Maher’s words, Americans are angry because “they’ve had an agenda shoved down their throat.” Like the dimwitted sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, many elites, particularly in the media, believe transgendered women are women. Most Americans disagree.
And most Americans, unless they are woke, aren’t dopes. They know that males have an inherent physical advantage over women in most sports. If they decide to think about it–they know that the annual physical for Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health who is transgendered, consists of a prostate exam. They are aware that after “gender-affirming” surgeries, some trans people want to switch back.
And these same folks are fed up with being called a bigot or some sort of “phobe” when they raise their objections to the transgender ideological movement.
And they are sick of transgendered women appearing in clothing ads wearing garments designed for females.
As for the elites, many of whom like Heinerscheid have an Ivy League education, they’re the types of folks who don’t interact with smelly people who drink Bud Light. These smug know-it-alls are stupefied that the Mulvaney sponsorship has damaged the brand.
The elites live in their bubble, which makes them quite vulnerable to a black swan moment.
What has happened to Bud Light takes me back to 1979 and the Disco Demolition stunt that was part of a Chicago White Sox Teen Night promotion during a twi-night doubleheader with the Detroit Tigers. Oh, “Disco Sucks” wasn’t just a Chicago thing, I saw my first “Disco Sucks” T-shirt a year earlier on sale on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland.
I was a 17-year-old when Steve Dahl, a morning disc jockey for rock station WLUP-FM, began humorously “blowing up” disco records during his show. He’d play some crappy–aren’t they all?–disco tune for thirty-seconds or so, and then blow them up, not for real, but with sound effects. Dahl also took his act on the road, including a mock “takeover” of a suburban disco club, and the same thing happened at each event. Crowd control was an issue–too many people in too small of a space.
Surely, Mike Veeck, the son of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, thought that Comiskey Park, the home of the White Sox, could comfortably host Dahl and his minions, known as the Insane Coho Lips. The ballpark had a capacity of 45,000.
But the doubleheader sold out and there were an estimated thirty thousand others outside Comiskey Park clamoring to get in. Teens who deposited disco records at the turnstiles were admitted for 98 cents, which was dirt cheap even in 1979.
Dahl, in faux military garb, as you’ll see in the YouTube clip, exploded the records in spectacular fashion as the Insane Coho Lips chanted “disco sucks” following the conclusion of the first game of the doubleheader, a White Sox defeat. Immediately afterwards, about 7,000 of the rockers stormed the field and a riot broke out, one that included destroying the batting cage and igniting the crate from where the records were exploded. It was rock and roll’s first saturnalia. Police in riot gear promptly ended Disco Demolition 90 minutes later, and because the field was deemed by the umpires as unsafe for play, the second game was forfeited to the Tigers.
I watched the game at home on television with my parents and my brother. I hated disco and loved rock and roll, so I looked on with mixed emotions because I was also a Sox fan. I didn’t object when my brother pointed at me and said, “Hey, mom and dad, there are thousands of them on the TV, who are just like your son, tearing up the field.” Hey, don’t forget, I was 17 at the time.
Retro historians, often people who were born years after Disco Demolition, have tried to turn that night into a racist or anti-gay thing. Wrong. The people I knew who listened to disco were shallow and vapid–just like the music. It was love at first sight for them.
Here’s the disco black swan moment.
The Disco Demolition coverage from the media, particularly the national media, was one of shock. Even more so than now, the elite media was based in New York, and they were the people who hung out at disco’s hallowed temple, Studio 54 in Manhattan. They lived in their ’70s bubble, one that didn’t include people who loved rock music and wore “Disco Sucks” T-shirts.
Up until Steve Dahl blew up those records, disco was seemingly everywhere–on TV shows, in commercials, and in the movies, most notably, with John Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever. Rock acts, including the Rolling Stones, the Kinks (sadly, one of my favorite bands), and Rod Stewart, recorded songs with a disco beat.
But post-Disco Demolition Night, the media, as well as the advertising and marketing “experts,” realized, after the totality of the riot, that more people hated disco than liked it. Disco didn’t die that night–even a freight train experiencing engine problems can’t be stopped on a dime, but disco went into a fatal tailspin. A month after Disco Demolition, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, a disco album, was released. It enjoyed brisk sales and a lot of airplay. But Jacko’s next album, Thriller, was more of an R&B album, it even included the King of Pop’s only hard rock song, “Beat It,” which was graced by guitar work from Eddie Van Halen.
Rockers had stopped cutting disco tracks well before Thriller was released.
A couple of weeks before Off the Wall arrived in record stores, principal photography began on a movie starring the Village People, Discoland . . . Where the Music Never Stops. Sensing trouble because of the anti-disco backlash, the film’s producer, Allan Carr, changed the name of his project to Can’t Stop the Music. It’s remembered as a legendary Hollywood box office bomb.
As the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.” One of supporting actors in Can’t Stop the Music was Bruce Jenner, who now goes by Caitlyn.
By the early 1980s, the expression “As dead as disco” was common.
Transgenderism isn’t going away. Over my life I’ve known a few men who have gone thru procedures that allows them, sort of, to live as women. Fine, it’s their life. If, as an adult, men and women want to transform themselves into something different, well, no one should stop them. The same goes for people who want to obliterate their faces with tattoos.
On the other hand, don’t shove your choice down our throats and demand us to celebrate you.
In the advertising and marketing world, using transgendered spokespeople to promote mainstream products just might be as dead as disco.
No one wants to be the next Alissa Heinerscheid. Her job was to sell Bud Light, not to drive people to avoid it.
There was never a Can’t Stop the Music sequel.
Marketing people must not be good at math. One percent of the population identifies as transgendered. Which means of course means 99 percent doesn’t.
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.
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