I saw this video posted on the Aleuminati and laughed so hard that I just had to post it here. If you like Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, or even if you don't, you'll love this little episode about InBev buying out Anheuser-Busch.
Oh that IS a rude awakening!
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Stephen Colbert anguished by InBev
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7 comments:
i don't understand why people are mad about this everyone i know rants about how good belgium beer is. should bud get better because of this. by the way huge beer convention in lafayette louisiana this weekend.
I think the whole thing springs from the fact that Anheuser-Busch is one of the biggest American icons that were still out there. With the value of the dollar plummeting, American companies are being sought out for easier acquisition. This is reason enough for most Americans to get upset. Say nothing about the quality of Bud or Belgian beers. I love Belgian beers, but only see this as an act of foreign aggression. How many more American companies need to be bought out before we have little left that is purely American?
http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2008/07/ksk-presents-waffled-the-belgian-invasion-of-the-american-beertatorship.html
This is fairly entertaining.
That was a great clip! I guess we get what is coming to us when companies go, or are already, public. The shareholders start chasing the dollar instead of focusing on the customer. Harsh? Maybe. This deal probably won't play itself out for another 12-24 months. A-B and InBev are both two large to make immediate changes. I feel bad for the folks up by you if jobs do start to get cut. They take the brunt of the hit while the shareholders cash in.
From a beer quality standpoint, the nationality change is irrelevant. Both A-B and InBev are giants. They both see marketing and distribution efficiency as the keys to sales, not beer quality. InBev isn't going to change Budweiser, but maybe the blowback will lead more Americans to drinking Sam Adams and the like, as Bud is no longer "All-American."
We have to be careful not to confuse the fact that InBev happens to have their worldwide headquarters in Leuven, Belgium with the fact that they are not, truly, a Belgian brewing company. Rather than being a Belgian brewing company, it might be more accurate to say that InBev is brewing company in Belgium. Their upper management is predominantly from the AmBev side (Belgium's Interbrew and Brazil's AmBev merged in '04) and are Brazilian, not Belgian.
Make no mistake, although InBev has a couple of Belgian'style beers in their portfolio (Hoegaarden and Leffe, for example), the beer they brew is, by and large, a far cry from the Belgian ales we beer folk have come to know and love.
For me, I just don't like the idea that companies have to buy up other companies in order to survive. ather than coming up with new innovative products, these companies simply look for someone else who has a great product and buy them up. Perhaps I'm a bit too influenced by the results of company mergers. At my job, the CEO keeps buying up other companies and then having to lay off more people. It's irritating.
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