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)
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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.
No, A-B Inbev is not AIG. But the group decided to go to Lake of the Ozarks to PLAN MORE LAYOFFS! And seeing the people in the video, I don’t think anyone from A-B is too surprised at their actions. You do have to laugh at the verbal gymnastics - a yacht becomes a “watercraft”, layoffs are “change” - that these people resort to.
Most people I knew were EXTREMELY UPSET with the AIG excesses and bonuses paid. And it wasn’t only AIG, but other financial institutions, such as Citibank. Citibank took taxpayer money but then went forward with funding the $400 million new stadium for the Mets. that should have been stopped in its tracks. Obama administration said, oh well, it’s about contracts etc. nothing we can do and let them pay the $400M. However, when it came to Chrysler secured bondholders, who, had superior contractual rights over the UAW, the Obama administration looked the other way and chastised the secured bondholders for wanting what was rightfully theirs. What a sham our governments have become over the last decade. They trample over our rights and we just take it.
I was extremely upset over the AIG bonuses. It seems a perversion of justice to financially reward those who ran a company into the ground. The much-criticized retreat, however, was designed to reward the best salespeople - the ones who kept the company running. This is pretty standard practice at a lot of large financial organizations. Edward Jones does the same thing to reward top brokers. Irregardless of how you feel about AIG, KSDK’s comparison of A-B to AIG was ridiculous. Based on what I saw, I wouldn’t describe that outing as extravagant even by InBev’s standards. And as far as we know, Brito did not take a bonus last year because he missed his targets.
I don’t put much stock in what Julie Niemann says. She is the same person who when AB was in the process of being overtaken by Inbev sat in her leather chair each night on the evening news and with A GLEAM IN HER EYE AND SMILE ON HER FACE!!!!!!!!!!!!! gladly spoke of the thousands of people who would lose their jobs at AB once the takeover happened. I only hope she was sitting on a ton of AB stock to be so happy over such heartache.
As far as the story, this is still America (maybe not for long) and they are not bound by any gov’t strings so they could spend their money as they see fit.
Dear lager heads, thanks as always for the good comments. We invite disagreement on the AIG outrage thing. We certainly can only speak for our personal impressions, which we tried to outline clearly. But that is not the whole story. Perhaps there were genuinely outraged people out there. Perhaps you were among them. If so, that is legitimate. Our point was that the outrage (especially the kind emanating from Washington) struck us as hollow, drummed up for the cameras or sound bites. That being said, we were pretty amazed that the AIG folks would continue with their free-spending ways - the audacity makes the head spin. But we firmly believe “outrage,” if tapped too often, becomes meaningless. We want stuff to be real.
Jeremiah – a great perspective on KSDK’s report. While I agree the report was over-hyped, I appreciate all local news regarding A-B Inbev. I’m still hoping for a more in-depth report of the influence Inbev had on the ERP package offered prior to the official buyout.
What many comments to the previous article seemed to miss is the total lack of seriousness and compassion for those loyal employees who were losing their jobs while the ‘people’ department partied. The top brass at AIG and those at A-B Inbev are comparable in that they feel entitled to special treatment and excessive rewards while they step all over the middle class of America.
Management of A-B Inbev certainly has NOT shown respect for current and former A-B employees by their actions. And the hypocrisy they display only adds salt to the wounds of those of us who were, and continue to be, directly and negatively affected by the buyout. Perhaps $1400 would not save a job, but the $2.2 BILLION in retention bonuses given the top 360 for making those cuts could have.
I did not talk to one person that wasn’t disgusted at the AIG excesses. Other than that, good article.
When I saw that last night, it looked as if they were getting into party mode. I suppose it’s too early for Party Cove?
Channel 5 hasn’t been the same since Bob Richards left. He was the best weatherman in St. Louis. Now we have that big sissy Dave Murray, who freaks out if we get a drizzle and causes a panic. He is bad for the local economy. How many events have been canceled out of the fear created by Murray’s forecasts? My softball game was canceled last Wednesday because of a bogus weather forecast.