The most shocking part of the consumer exodus from Bud Light does not pertain to the brand’s decision to employ a transgender influencer who many regard as a bad influence. It involves what fills the void after drinkers abandon Bud Light.
Some people booing Bud Light may not celebrate its vanquisher.
If the relative stability of the AB InBev stock suggests all is well (all is well!), anecdotes, such as scenes of empty Coors Light pallets juxtaposed next to full Bud Light pallets, shout otherwise. More so do sales numbers.
For the four weeks ending April 29, But Light slipped 21 percent in year-over-year sales. Other Anheuser-Busch beers fell as consumers apparently took out frustrations upon the larger company. In contrast, the two similar beers looked upon as alternatives to Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Lite, both enjoyed double-digit increases.
You could live here your whole life yet inhabit an entirely different country than your birthplace.
Neither, of course, holds enough market share to topple Bud Light as the top-selling beer in the United States. The under-the-radar brand that does evokes another hot-button political issue.
A beer ad of an earlier generation joked, “Don’t drink the water.” Tipplers do drink the beer.
The Bump Williams consulting group characterizes Bud Light as “in serious trouble this year” of “losing that No. 1 position at the end of calendar year 2023 to Modelo Especial.”
Modelo Eswhato?
For the uninitiated, the Mexican beer strikes as quite like Bud Light, save for its greater calories and carbs. Its taste neither offends nor pleases. Victoria and Corona better it for Mexican beers as Michelob and Miller Lite better Bud Light for domestics. (And everyone knows Canadian beers better both Mexican and American beers.) If one drinks enough of either of the two best-selling pilsner-style lagers, then the beer inebriates the drinker at an affordable price. This not-so-secret formula always explains beer-market dominance (if only Elsinore’s Brewmeister Smith understood this basic truth).
At the turn of the last century, Pabst outsold all other brewers. At the turn of this century, Budweiser did. In between, Schlitz held the vaunted top spot for many years.
As much as beer nerds — bearded, bloated, fedora-wearing hipsters who drink, for taste and not effect, out of oversized, colorful cans with goofy names such as Whale’s Tale Pale Ale and Saint Arnold Fancy Lawnmower — insist that Budweiser, Coors, and Miller are not real beers, the broader public, which does not wish to feel like having eaten a loaf of bread after downing three beers, disagrees. The American public loves lighter, Central European-style beers. Your grandfather did. So did his father.
When Budweiser wrested the “king of beers” crown from Schlitz during the 1950s, Hispanics amounted to about one out of every 50 Americans. When Bud Light deposed, as royal siblings often do, its older brother Budweiser in 2001, that number increased to one in eight. Should Modelo surpass Bud Light in 2024, then it will become the king of American beers at a time when Hispanics constitute about one of every five Americans.
Before Dylan Mulvaney started transitioning, America did. The rise of Modelo in America, like the popularity of the name Muhammad in England, signals this transition.
Mexico primarily fueled the regional reassignment. You moved to Latin America without changing your address. Immigration to the profound degree experienced in the United States over the last four decades makes an immigrant of the native-born. You could live here your whole life yet inhabit an entirely different country than your birthplace.
The symbol of mutilation for the purposes of cosplaying as the opposite sex garnering endorsement fees to sell beer — did Alissa Heinerscheid not recognize the Schmitts Gay Saturday Night Live bit as parody? — signals a changing America. So, too, does the rise of Modelo, a beer imbibed enthusiastically among Mexicans but barely known by the native-born in the country in which it soon will reign as el rey de cervezas.
READ MORE:
