In a culture where most people's most effective way to make their voices heard is with their wallets, many people, both left and right, often declare that they will boycott a company they don't agree with.
However, boycotts often fail to gain much support, or consumers eventually forget to resolve them when it gets too difficult.
But with Bud Light, conservatives have done so much damage to the company in the wake of its brief and ill-advised partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, from which its parent company, Anheuser-Busch, may never recover.
Now this damage comes at a high price.
According to a report in CNN, Bud Light lost what may be a staggering $1.4 billion in the wake of the US boycott.
Anheuser-Busch executives tried to put a brave face on the loss, with CEO Michel Dockeris saying their slow recovery is “not at the rapid pace that we expected or that we were working toward.”
“But still, there is progress,” he added.
Other analysts were not reassured by his positive trend.
“In the US, performance remains very disappointing with revenues declining at double-digit rates as the group loses market share,” one equity analyst, Arin Chekri, told CNN.
Fortune didn't have much of a positive outlook either, reporting that the problems the company has been experiencing in 2023 will only continue until 2024.
U.S. sales fell 9.5 percent last year, and the resolution of a potential Teamster strike was some of the only good news the company had received in about a year.
Are there any other brands in American history that fell so quickly and so disastrously at the height of their power?
For two decades, Bud Light has been America's number one beer, the self-proclaimed “King of Beer.” After Mulvaney's sponsorship, it only took a few months to inspect this position for Modelo Especial.
Clearly, the company's brief flirtation with an ultra-progressive agenda proved disastrous, damaging Bud Light significantly, if not permanently, in the United States.
Thanks to its public endorsement of a turbulent ideology that most Americans find abhorrent, Bud Light has become a cautionary tale, as well as a humble beer that most Americans now avoid like the plague.
Although the outcome may be tragic for Anheuser-Busch, it could at least provide a great lesson for other companies and companies that tend to sell themselves to progressive ideology.
This article originally appeared in The Western Journal.
