Bud Light’s distributors are in a tough financial spot right now, as sales of the beer have crashed following the company’s ill-fated partnership with social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
So, to try and keep them alive as the boycott of Bud Light continues with no real end in sight, and even worsens with the left now getting mad at the company for trying to back away from its relationship with Mulvaney, Bud Light is now resorting to the desperate step of buying back unsold and expired beer from its distributors.
Such is what the Wall Street Journal reported in its recent report on Bud Light’s painful financial situation and the utter disaster of its Mulvaney experiment, saying:
The company now plans for the first time to include Bud Light in the brewer’s long-running sponsorship of a veterans organization, wholesalers said. Bud Light is also leaning back into television commercials on themes like football and country music. The brewer recently told its wholesalers that it would buy back unsold cases of beer that have gone past their expiration date.
The WSJ also hinted that Bud Light might not have made the Mulvaney decision had it taken the advice of its distributors and moved its US headquarters out of New York and closer to distributors, who could have told it that that was a terrible idea for a beer that mainly appears to working-class Americans. Reporting on the “out of touch” factor, the WSJ said:
Anheuser-Busch works with 385 independent distributors, or wholesalers, across the country. Many of them are family-owned businesses that have carried Anheuser-Busch products for generations. The move of the company’s sales and marketing hub from St. Louis to New York in 2015, several years after Anheuser-Busch was acquired by global giant InBev, has been a point of contention. Some wholesalers have pushed the brewer to move those marketers back to St. Louis, arguing that executives in New York are out of touch with the drinkers of the company’s flagship brands. Anheuser-Busch also has marketers based in St. Louis, Austin, Miami and Los Angeles.
And this new step of buying back unsold cases of beer isn’t even the first dramatic step Bud Light has had to take to save its distributors. It has also had to financially backstop them, as The American Tribune reported in early May, saying:
The independently-owned distributors who sell Bud Light have taken a massive financial hit from the Bud Light boycott. Anheuser-Busch is attempting to repair the strained relationships with these distributors facing the consequences of the disastrous Dylan Mulvaney marketing scheme.
Amid the controversy, these distributors are dealing with angry consumers who voice their frustration with sales associates and delivery workers and an accumulation of unsold inventory from the boycott. “This situation has impacted our people and especially our frontline workers: The delivery drivers; sales representatives; our wholesalers; Bud owners; and servers,” Anheuser-Busch CEO Michel Doukeris told investors on an earning call last week.
Doukeris also announced his company would mend the relationships with its distributors by investing in funds to support them while the Bud Light brand attempts to recover. “We are providing direct financial support to the frontline teams that work for us and our wholesalers,” Doukeris said. Reportedly, Anheuser-Busch will also pay $500 bonuses to delivery drivers, sales representatives, and other employees who are dealing with the consequences of the backlash firsthand.
"*" indicates required fields