Beer, boats and accusations: Watching KSDK’s Anheuser-Busch investigation
We want to thank the dozens of readers who wrote in and commented on KSDK’s planned investigation of an Anheuser-Busch corporate retreat at the Lake of the Ozarks. (Read our earlier story here). The station (Channel 5 on your dial) aired the piece last night, and we have to admit we found it interesting. KSDK got good video of the late-April event, complete with a ride on a large lake cruiser.
Here’s one of the key passages from the story (script and video are online here):
We watched as the group enjoyed the company’s fully staffed, million-dollar 51 foot sports yacht. They chatted, drank and cruised on the lake. On the second day of meetings, 20 people from finance and accounting department lost their jobs.
Financial analyst Juli Niemann with Smith Moore in Clayton said the message to employees was potentially damaging: From the story:
“In this day and age of corporate excess being cut way back on and we’re all watching our costs, there is nothing wrong with sending out for sandwiches and meeting in the company conference room. That communicates exactly the right message. It focuses on what is paramount: cutting costs.”
Niemann told KSDK the retreat conveys the message that the managers are “special people. They have a separate set of rules while the rest of us share the pain. This is similar to the outrage people felt with AIG when everyone was going off on junkets. It’s violating a sense of fairness.”
Whether the story is fair to Anheuser-Busch, we will leave for you to decide. Sure, it’s a little sensational, with a voice-disguised anonymous source and all. Much is made of A-B sending over an unsigned press release to be attributed to a generic “spokesperson.” That is fairly standard practice over at A-B, so we weren’t sure what all the fuss was about.
One random thought on the larger point: For all the anger directed at the new owners of Anheuser-Busch as layoffs mounted in recent months, the company is not AIG. It has not required or accepted a government bailout. Nor has it imperiled the global financial system.
And another thing: Lager Heads sincerely believes the “outrage” and “populist anger” over the bonuses and junkets at AIG were trumped-up baloney all along. To our eye, no one has seemed truly outraged over these things. Not the journalists, and certainly not the politicians who were shocked (shocked!) over bonuses they themselves had approved. The rest of the country was perhaps mildly frustrated by the AIG situation, at most. Regular people, we think, have more immediate concerns - their families, their own jobs, and the Cardinals‘ starting pitching.
In any case, we’ll also leave as an open question whether the new way of doing business at Anheuser-Busch is fair to all parties. Anheuser-Busch says it respects both current and former employees. But here are the facts: Any actions at One Busch Place will be scrutinized and weighed not only against Anheuser-Busch’s long history, but also against Anheuser-Busch InBev’s stated goal of being “The Best Beer Company in a Better World.”
That’s a high bar to set, and nobody forced executives to adopt that slogan or repeat it endlessly. We are all watching to see if it’s boilerplate, or something more. If “best” turns out to be just a synonym for “the brewer with the lowest ratio of debt to earnings,” St. Louis - and perhaps America at large - will be singularly unimpressed.
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...
Jeremiah McWilliams is a native Virginian who came to the Post-Dispatch in early 2007 to cover beer and other consumer products. He previously covered manufacturing for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Va. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University. 
I disagree with the Lager Heads when they say common citizens were not upset about the AIG bonuses and trips. Everyone I know was pretty angry about it. Good article.