YOU'RE WOKE? THEN GO BROKE, DAMMIT!

Fox Business really wants you to believe this story, even though some of Fox's interviewees flatly contradict the story's thesis, and some of the folks who confirm it are unreliable narrators:

Bud Light suffers bloodbath as longtime and loyal consumers revolt against transgender campaign

... Consumers nationwide revolted against the nation's top-selling beer brand after it stepped "recklessly" into the culture wars last week with its new spokesperson, transgender TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, according to bar owners and beer-industry experts around the country.

Here's one of those bar owners, whose numbers strain credulity:

Bud Light normally outsells rival products Miller Lite and Coors Light 25 to 1 at Braintree Brewhouse in Massachusetts, a sprawling sports bar just outside Boston.

Not this week.

Eighty percent of Bud Light drinkers ordered something else this week, Brewhouse owner Alex Kesaris said — while the 20% who did order Bud Light "weren’t on social media and hadn’t heard yet" about its new transgender pitch person.

"They didn’t order it again," he said, after other patrons told them about the Bud Light marketing misfire.

Let's start with that first statistic. Kesaris wants us to believe that Bud Light normally outsells competing products from Miller and Coors 25 to 1 at his bar? That's utterly implausible. Nationwide, in 2018, Bud Light sold 29.4 million barrels, compared to 14.9 million for Coors Light and 12.6 million for Miller Lite. There isn't a special regional loyalty to Bud Light -- it's not Sam Adams -- so I call bullshit on Kesaris's baseline 25-to-1 number. The rest of the numbers seem to be similarly pulled out of his own ass.

Kesaris has gotten his name in the papers before. This is from January 2021:

Two businesses have been warned about COVID-19 violations after complains of overcrowding drew Braintree police to the establishments.

Braintree Brewhouse in Granite Plaza and Tokyo Japanese Steak House in the South Shore Plaza were both put on notice about violations and will be monitored for further incidents....

Braintree police responded to both eateries this month after receiving complaints about overcrowding. Currently, under state COVID-19 restrictions, restaurants are limited to 25 percent capacity.

I feel sorry for anyone who tried to keep a restaurant or bar afloat at the height of the pandemic. It sucked to be in that business. However:

A police report from Braintree Brewhouse on Jan. 15 said officers responded to a complaint about the restaurant and found it was over capacity by 26 people.

Officers spoke to the owner, Alex Kesaris, on the phone, and Kesaris said he didn't "give a f***" that the police were agents of the board of health, that he would go to the mayor and told one sergeant to "go f*** himself," the police report said.

(Kesaris is white, so I guess he's allowed to talk to the cops that way.)

I should point out that Massachusetts, and Norfolk County in particular (where Braintree is located), were seeing record numbers of COVID infections in January 2021. The vaccines had barely been rolled out. It was a bad time. But this guy wanted to do what he wanted to do.

Another source for the Fox Business story -- Jeff Fitter, the owner of Case & Bucks in Barnhart, Missouri -- has numbers that seem somewhat more plausible: "Sales of Anheuser-Busch bottled products dropped 30% over the past week, while draught beer plummeted 50%, the owner said." (Hey Rupert, when will you learn that we spell it "draft" in this country?) But what do you know: Here's a 2021 AP story in which Fitter complains about COVID restrictions. Did Fox's reporter just start cold-calling bar owners and restaurateurs who'd names had shown up in stories like this?

This "bloodbath" story is being quoted all over the right-wing media -- but when you watch the video clip that accompanies the story, you get a much more nuanced sense of what's going on:



In the clip, Harry Schuhmaker of Beer Business Daily says he's seeing some trouble for Bud Light at the moment, at least in rural areas. However, he adds:

There always a real danger in keeping the marketing toward your current core consumer, who may be aging out. And the fact of the matter is that you have to have Gen Z consideration for a beer brand as big as Bud Light to be successful.... So yeah, you do have to pivot to the values of a younger generation, and those values don't always align, as we're seeing here, with older folks.... I'm sure that in metro areas this has not affected Bud Light to a discernible degree, and maybe even helped it. We just don't know because the data won't come in for another couple of weeks. History tells us that these boycotts tend to be short-termed.

And a public relations guy name Jay Jay says:

I think a lot of people think Bud Light's gonna be hurt. They won't be hurt. They'll push through it. A company at that size, a company that's been around that long, they have enough people part of their board and their team to know what they're doing and why they doing it. They don't make those decisions just by an email. They've thought about this. They know the repercussions and what is going to happen. I think in another three months there'll be another problem with another company that everyone will be getting angry about. So I think they're just maybe pushing the noise right now, and they are getting attention and getting awareness, and I think they're gonna ride the wave.

None of this is quoted in the text of the posted story, or in any of the stories at other sites that cite this story. What Schuhmacher and Jay say doesn't fit Fox's narrative. Reality often doesn't.