Bud Light to buy back beer from wholesalers as consumers shun the brand – report

In a rare bit of good news for Bud Light wholesalers who have been stuck with a glut of aging products on their shelves as consumers continue to seek out other alternatives for their beer-drinking pleasure, the company has said that it will buy back cases of the unsold brew once it reaches the expiration date, according to a report on what may go down as one of the most disastrous marketing decisions in history.

Anheuser-Busch continues to navigate the crisis resulting from the ill-conceived idea of a “woke” female marketing exec who sought to reboot the popular Bud Light brand’s “fratty” image by partnering with transgender Tiktok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a move that spectacularly backfired with customers furious over what many likely saw as an endorsement of a lifestyle that many find to be repulsive and who expressed their dissatisfaction through the only avenue available to them.

In an extensive article entitled “How Bud Light Blew It,” the Wall Street Journal breaks down the ongoing catastrophe and the company’s efforts to repair the damage from its wading into the culture war by appearing to take sides on one of the most contentious issues roiling America politics today.

According to the WSJ, “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. ”

(Video: The Daily Mail)

That could be a lot of beer with figures showing that the cratering of Bud Light sales is continuing with the contagion beginning to spread to other Anheuser-Busch brands, a troublesome time as alienated consumers remain persistent heading into the three-day Memorial Day weekend, a likely boon for other brewers who will seek to capitalize on their larger competitor’s self-inflicted wound.

The company is also facing the wrath of the powerful homosexual lobby over its lack of support for Mulvaney amidst the boycotts with the nation’s most powerful LGBTQ+ organization, the Human Rights Campaign following through on its threat to punish Anheuser-Busch, which it did by at least temporarily stripping the company of its coveted 100 score on the Corporate Equality Index, a sort of Chinese-style social credit scoring system to enforce “woke” conformity in Corporate America.

In more fallout for the alcoholic beverage giant, two Senate Republicans, Ted Cruz of Texas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee are demanding answers on whether the Mulvaney ads were used to target kids as potential future customers, a demographic that the failed actor appeals to with his little girl schtick.

“Dylan Mulvaney, a massive percentage of Dylan Mulvaney’s audience are kids, and Budweiser was trying, I believe, with this ill-fated marketing attempt to target teenagers,” Cruz told Brian Kilmeade during an appearance on Fox News last week.

“If you look at things Dylan Mulvaney has online, it’s things like ‘days of girlhood.’ There’s another video where Dylan Mulvaney is singing, ‘My name is Eloise and I am six.’ There’s another one where Dylan Mulvaney is shopping for Barbie dolls,” the Lone Star State senator said. “These are clearly things aimed at teenagers and even children younger than teenagers, which violates the rules.”

“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,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “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.”

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Chris Donaldson

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