A recent article in Mother Jones revealed that Anheuser-Busch InBev is making unscrupulous, if not outright dirty, deals with liquor distributors. These deals give them incentives to carry approximately 98% ABInBev brands, allowing for only 2% of their volume to carry small craft brewers. Please sign these two petitions and spread them around. Thanks! http://www.thepetitionsite.com/498/070/018/stop-squeezing-craft-beers-out-of-the-market/ http://www.thepetitionsite.com/569/037/875/stop-megabrewers-from-squeezing-craft-brewers-out-of-the-market/
I think that the only distrubutors that the incentives will affect are the ones that are over 90% AB to begin with. Admittedly I don't know numbers perse, but if they have to drop, say 10% of their business to get those bonuses, they'll be dropping more money than they will gain. As much as I dislike the tactics, and the fact that AB is blantantly breaking the 3-tier plan, I don't really see it making a huge difference. That said, I'm passing the petitions along.
This is the least surprising news I've heard since Charlie Brown missed the football for the umpteenth time. Craft beer's popularity is skyrocketing and the only thing they've done to compete is make fancier packaging. While I will sign this, because screw those guys; I work for a beer distributor that only carries craft beer and they are huge and growing. Any distributors that go 98% AB will just push those brands to distributors like ours. This could potentially help us a lot.
Pass, and here's why: Where I am there are 13 distributors I deal with. One of which is the AB/In Bev distributor. They have a couple "Craft" selections that they stole from other "Craft" only distributors. They will become a Bud distributor and the few nons they had will go back to guys who will properly promote them and not skip over them to build towering 4 for 5$ displays.. I say let it happen.
