Shoot Me Now
The purveyor of alcoholic beverages that I currently work for has received a slew of bad publicity lately.
Owned by a group of breweries and complete with their own retail outlets, the hierarchy is a bit of an exclusive boys’ club which is often maligned as a “monopoly”. Given that the boys at the helm refuse to distribute their product in grocery and convenience stores, they have been labeled, and are constantly crucified as such.
I like the system, but the people who run it are idiots.
Still failing to recognize that even the slightest misstep will be pounced on by the press and invite awkward, outrageous questions from the customers (leaving those of us on the front lines to do the REAL PR work), the company let it slip this week that it is planning to distribute some old product for sale in its stores.
Not old school, old product: They want to sell year-and-a-half old beer.
One of the smaller breweries in the province declared bankruptcy last year, leaving a stack of unsold suds in the stores. While it temporarily closed up shop to take on new owners and do some reorganization and rebranding, the product was sold for as long as we could do it (normal shelf life of any beer is 3-4 months), and the remainder was shipped back. That’s what we normally do with the old stuff. Beer, after all, is like food. It has yeast in it. It doesn’t go bad, necessarily, but it gets stale and downright awful in some cases.
This week, news got out that this old product was going to be reintroduced into the stores. Why? Nobody knows. The company people wouldn’t be interviewed on camera, and the PR hack simply described the product as “saleable”. Given that my spellcheck just underlined saleable, I’m thinking that’s only a word recognized in marketing circles, and you know how I feel about marketers.
As a part-timer, I shouldn’t care, but I do. It’s an embarrassing turn of events, and it’s coming on the heels of all kinds of food safety scares. They should know better.
