05-08-2023, 09:08 PM
(05-08-2023, 06:23 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: Budweiser made the crucial mistake of not knowing their core demographics.Boycott declarations of victory are almost always self-congratualtory. They are based on some imagined criteria and the goalposts move. A lot. It all ends up being what it was in the beginning, ie a bunch of people who don't like something making each other feel like they taught that something a real lesson.
With that said, I think their "losses" are being overblown in an attempt to make the boycott seem more successful than it has been. The 5 billion dollar or 6 billion dollar or whatever number is thrown around nowadays is based on the price of the stock.
Per this article written on April 13th, the stock price for BUD was $66.73 per share. On the close of Wednesday, April 12th, the price had fallen to $63.38 per share. They call this a 5.02% drop in market value or $4.562 billion dollars in market cap. "Market Cap" is basically "This is how much all the shares of a company are worth if they were all simultaneously sold for the current market price and that sell off did not change the price of any share in the period of time it took for everyone to sell their shares." Or, in other words, "price per share x number of shares."
It is now May 8th, 2023. BUD's stock price is now sitting at $64.57 per share. So they've regained 35.5% of the market cap they lost from the boycott (or approximately 1.62 billion dollars), and it is likely to continue going up.
Why?
Well...because boycotts don't work.
Or, maybe I should say, they usually don't work. At least not political ones. And this is true for boycotts from the right of the left.
It's part of outrage culture and social media culture that things like the Budweiser boycott catch fire fast, get a lot of attention, and then slowly fade away. And, in some cases, they can backfire entirely, bringing more attention to something and potentially increasing their sales/value instead of decreasing it.
The left has tried to boycott Chick-Fil-A and Harry Potter shit. Neither worked. The Right has tried to boycott...I mean....so many things. Make up that has used trans and gay spokesperson, Amazon, Apple, Carhartt, Goodyear tires, Keurig, M&Ms, NASCAR, Nike etc.
They just don't work. People don't have the attention span for them.
Libs sang the evils of Walmart from the highest mountain throughout the 90's and into the 2000's. They wrote entire books about how shitty it was to patronize the megastore. Impact was minimal if at all. Lots of people claimed they'd never go there, but they inevitably did in most cases. The only thing that stopped Walmart was the rise of an entity even more lethal to brick-and mortar business, ie Amazon. And damn near all the anti-walmart folk probably have prime memberships, too.
Conservatives killed the NFL back in the Kaepernick kneeling days. By gosh, Trump even called them players a bad name once. It crippled the league from a financial standpoint when the nation stopped watching on the order of their president. Players were forced to take real jobs. Goodell lived in a homeless shelter for a brief spell. Stadiums were torn down and replaced with NASCAR tracks. Then Covid came and the league was totally unable to weather the crushing power of MAGA in all of it's glory. That's what I think happened, anyway.
Most people won't actively protest anything that they genuinely like or that saves them money. They'll say they do, but that's largely perfomance art.
