Memorial Day customarily kicks off summer and the beer beverage industry generally looks forward to the enhanced sales that come from summer. However, if the recently published reports of Anheuser-Busch sales are accurate, which includes a stunning 60% sales drop during the holiday, the brand position of Bud Light is in freefall.
While the impacts do have a regional trend based on consumer boycotts and patterns, when the Daily Mail reports, “numbers are suffering primarily due to a decline in Bud Light sales that reached as high as a 60 percent drop off over the week that ended on Memorial Day,” we can be certain the executive offices of A/B are watching closely. The feedback from wholesalers and distributors to the parent company must be something beyond alarm.
Worse still, the forward-looking data trend doesn’t offer any hope. Things are getting worse for the parent company.
(Daily Mail) – […] For the week ending May 20, Bud Light sales across the US fell nearly 26 percent compared to the same period last year. For the week ending May 6, in-store sales plummeted 23.6 percent. And the week before that, ending April 29, sales dropped by 23.3 percent.
This follows declines in sales for the week ending April 22, which saw a 21.4 percent decline. Seven days earlier, the dip has been 17 percent, according to NielsenIQ data provided to Dailymail.com by Bump Williams Consultancy.
The data – showing that US sales of Bud Light are dropping by as much as 20 percent each week – is being uniformly viewed by industry experts as a negative trend that may not reverse itself anytime soon.
Beer Business Daily editor Harry Schuhmacher told Fox News Digital that the ‘whole industry is in shock’.
Bye Bye Anheuser Bush, you should have known better than to piss off the redneck country boys