Month: July 2014
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It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see..
Up until the early 1970s, categorizing beer was simple. At the top were imports, with the highest PTC. By far the leading brand was Heineken. As in most categories, the different imports were priced approximately the same. Slightly lower were super premiums, dominated by Michelob. In fact, in many markets, it was only Michelob in […]
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Success is never final, but failure can be…
During the summers of 1969 and 1970, AB brewery workers decided to go on strike. The AB distributor in Dallas, Ben E. Keith, ran out of beer, and the Coors wholesaler, Willowbrook, was forced to allocate Coors to the retail trade. The AB strike was nationwide, however, at the time; Coors was only in 10 […]
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Happy Anniversary… Year 2
This post begins the third year of BeerBusinessUnplugged, and as promised, I would like to comment on what has taken place over the past year, the second year of this blog. In the last 12 months, the weekly subscribers have tripled and readership has more than quadrupled. I have truly enjoyed publishing and hearing back from each of you, […]
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Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
As a young District Sales Manager for Lone Star Brewing Co. my territory was west Texas. While I had a number of distributors in this area, it really was all about low volume and a lot of windshield time. Lone Star’s volume was concentrated in Austin and then moved southward. Although the territory was west […]
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I stopped prediciting the future a long time ago.
In the early 1970s, Miller Brewing Co. chose Austin as one of the test markets for Miller Lite. Those of us that were selling beer at the time could not figure out why the consumer would buy a beer that had less alcohol and was priced 10 cents (yes, that’s right) higher than regular beer. […]