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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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In fairness, InBev is massive. Bud light is but one brand. The other question is what the stock would’ve done but for bid light harm. For example if it would’ve been up 1.5% then 3% is meaningful.

There's a few other factors to this IMO. Since they're so large, if a boycott was super effective, it might still take a while to produce a noticeable effect on their bottom line. And even if it doesn't hit them that hard, the real effect might be that other, smaller companies would notice and shy away from making these sorts of moves out of fear of drawing a similar response that might be much more painful for them.

Anecdotally, we're what, two weeks into this? One of my acquaintances works for a Budweiser distributor in west Alabama and from what he tells me (while being beyond tired of talking about it) things are apocalyptic, his employer is tightening the belt, they're not getting help from AB, he gets accosted by randos for wearing Bud Light shirts, etc. We're talking multiple bars pulling all In-Bev products, a whole Walmart selling two cases of Bud Light (on Rollback!) in a week, customers sitting on pallets of unsold product, nobody hitting sales quotas. At the least, this is worse than the Papa John's N-word saga and much worse than the John Schnatter comments about Obamacare (I delivered for a Papa John's while in college at the time; hearing about his antics semi-regularly got deeply annoying after awhile.)/hosting Romney in his mansion.

I don't have a dog in this fight (other than being deeply sympathetic to the local distributors who are, at this point, the ones taking it in the ass, not InBev, and who tend to be pretty red in my experience), but I agree that it may take time for the effects of a boycott to make their way up the chain.

That's pretty interesting anecdotal evidence. The logistics issues tracks more or less as expected - that it may take months for even pretty major purchasing changes to make their way through the supply chain back to the bottling factory and force them to actually change how much they produce.