Conservative country star John Rich recently appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and, during the interview segment, claimed that “cases and cases” of Bud Light have been piling up at Redneck Riviera, his Nashville bar since the Anheuser-Busch and Dylan Mulvaney partnership was announced.
In fact, Rich told Tucker that Bud Light used to be Redneck Riviera’s most popular beer, but that patrons just stopped ordering it after the Mulvaney announcement. In his words: “I think the customers decide. Customers are king. Our number one selling beer up until a few days ago was, guess what? Bud Light. That was the number one beer. We got cases and cases and cases of it sitting back there.”
Continuing, Rich said that pretty much no one has ordered a Bud Light in recent days, making it an easy business decision to get rid of it and replace it with something that people will actually buy instead of avoiding ordering or mocking others for considering ordering, “But in the past several days, you’re hard-pressed to find anyone ordering one. So as a business owner, I go, ‘Hey, if you aren’t ordering it, we got to put something else in here.’ At the end of the day, that’s capitalism. Right, Tucker? That’s how it works.”
That point is particularly important, as it shows that even those who aren’t ideologically predisposed to getting rid of Bud Light for the Mulvaney ad might get rid of it because they want to make money off of their bars and not keep stocking beer that people refuse to buy. That would aggravate Bud Light’s woes, as the loss of sales would be coming not just from people mad about Mulvaney but also people who are focused on their bottom line, which is to say pretty much every bar owner.
In any case, Rich then added that even people who used to be loyal to Bud Light the brand are now waking up to what it is doing and are ditching it to find brands that won’t stab them and their values in the back for no reason, out of the blue, just to appease people that won’t buy the beer anyway. As Rich put it: “It’s their right to market it however they want. They’re making a bet [that] this is going to sell more product… And what’s happening, Tucker, is people that have been loyal to brands for decades and decades are finding it hard to stay loyal to them, so they start hunting down other brands that they can go and support. And [there are] tons of up-and-coming American brands out there that people are flooding to, kind of like mine.”
The interview came after Rich took to Twitter to say he was changing the beer lineup at Redneck Riviera, saying, “What beer should my bar @rnrbarnash in Nashville replace #BudLight with? @RedneckRiviera”
What beer should my bar @rnrbarnash in Nashville replace #BudLight with? @RedneckRiviera
— John Rich🇺🇸 (@johnrich) April 5, 2023
So we’ll see whether that woke ideology or customer sentiment wins in the end, which will largely depend on if conservatives can stay angry longer than Bud Light can stand losing money.
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