Next to 30-packs of Miller Lite, on sale for $24.99, sat a stack of Bud Light. A large banner above it noted that, after a rebate, a 30-pack cost a mere $8.99.
Andy Wagner, the manager and an 18-year veteran of the store, said the Miller Lite was selling well. And the Bud Light? Not so much.
“At this point, it’s cheaper than some of the cases of water we’re selling in the back,” Mr. Wagner said, noting that sales of Bud Light at the store since mid-April were down 45 percent from a year ago. “It’s just not moving like it used to.”
Nearly three months after the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted a video on her Instagram account to promote a Bud Light contest, setting off from the right and a boycott, the beer brand is still struggling to win back loyal, longtime customers.
For more than two decades, Bud Light was the best-selling beer in the United States. Its sales exceeded $5 billion last year, roughly 9 percent of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s revenue. But since the boycott, Bud Light has been by Modelo Especial. In the four weeks that ended in mid-June, the volume of Bud Light sold nationally plunged an average of 29 percent from a year earlier, according to data from the research firm NIQ, analyzed by the consulting firm Bump Williams.
Anheuser-Busch’s stock has also dropped more than 15 percent since early April. The company did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
When Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a supposed revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 23, sending his forces on a march toward Moscow following a series of tirades against the country’s defense establishment, Washington’s expert class overflowed with an orgy of regime change fantasies.
For just over 12 hours, everyone from former US ambassador to Russia and noted Hitler apologist Michael McFaul to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to neocon pundit Anne Applebaum exploded with seemingly libidinal excitement about a supposed “civil war” that was certain to feature “Russians…killing Russians,” along with “lots of casualties” and Putin “probably hiding somewhere.”
It was as though the Soviet Union was collapsing all over again, and Prigozhin, a character named on the whom the US government has for leading what it described as a “transnational criminal organization,” was suddenly a white knight storming into Moscow to liberate Russia from “the Putin regime” on the back of a tank. Move over, Juan Guaido.
Expecting a bloodbath and seismic political upheaval, corporate networks like CNN had budgeted wall-to-wall coverage of the coup that wasn’t, filling cable news green rooms with rent-a-generals, K Street think tankers, and war-hungry former diplomatic corps hacks.
On the afternoon of June 24, however, news broke across the US that Prigozhin had struck a deal with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end his protest and go into exile. Thus ended a largely bloodless affair that ultimately saw fewer documented deaths than the January 6 Capitol Riot.
Though the supposed revolt in Russia burned out faster than a Leopard tank on the way to Zaporizhzhia, we now know that a number of serious casualties were incurred inside the DC Beltway. The Grayzone obtained an exclusive look at the massacre some of America’s top Russia experts carried out against their own credibility.
McFaul McFails, again
Anne Applebaum: “Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war”
Volodymyr Zelensky: Putin is “very afraid”
Kurt Volker declares “the end” for Putin
Christo Grozev: Bellingcat’s neocon-stradumus
Ian Bremmer, the Peter Hotez of international relations
Stephen King, lost in fantasy
Top Biden officials’ travel plans interrupted
A 66-year-old Tulare County man was sentenced to six years in prison for running a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, telling investors he could turn cow manure into green energy using anaerobic digesters.
For roughly five years, Ray Brewer stole $8.7 million from investors in Fresno, Kern, Kings, and Tulare counties, as well as other counties in California and Idaho, according to U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert announced.
When Brewer’s investors realized they’d been lied to and sought legal action, he moved to Montana and took on a new identity.