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 laughed all night at this excuse for journalism. Honestly, I cannot even comprehend the question being posed by Lager Heads because I keep harkening back to the “report” with the hidden camera, “we’ve been working for a month on this,” the disguised employee, I could go on. I only wish it was a nightly series.
The fuel cost alone to run a 51 foot boat would total $ 350 to 500. maybe more.Maybe they passed the hat.
Let the shareholders decide, everybody wants to go after the companies. AB can lay off however they feel necessary and give managers special perks.
Management is salary puts in more hours and cares a heck of alot more than most of the hourly employees. So if they want to take them out for a lavish weekend or whatever then that’s their business.
But if it’s on the tax payer dime it’s a different story. People should be very upset with AIG and Chrysler.
Who is KSDK to criticize how AB does business, or what the corporate big heads do at the lake?
Gee John, are you an AB exec or on Jeff Co. crack? There’s a lot of people, current AB employees, who want to know about the luxuries of a company that supposedly is supposed to now be worker-unfriendly penny pinchers
From the sound of it, this outing to the lake was a lot more frugal than it had been in years past. While I believe the numbers reported by AB are probably the result of creative accounting (Oh, we didn’t tell you about the $xxxx that we moved from the Hr accounts to the Ozark property accounts because that money never left the company…)
I, too, actually was outraged at the AIG bonus / trip stories
The analogy between this outing the the AIG stories simply don’t hold water (no pun intended). AB-InBev, for all of their faults, did not take billions from the US taxpayers.
This is a weak fluff piece that pretends to be a hard-hitting news piece during sweeps month. If they can’t come up with better stories than that, they need new reporters.
This is a non story. Hey Lisa Z., why not investigate the 3 Brazillanaires that own the company and how exactly did they make their zillions of pesos.
JMcW…nice to have all the Lager Heads motivated again. We had too much soft & boring fodder for the past two weeks and now we have found a topic, In-Ept Bev related, that brings everybody back. Kinda like some fiber after a week of broth. This is great stuff and a sure traffic builder. Not sure what the record here at LH is for Most Number of Comments but I bet we are close. Enough marketing inhalation of our own exhaust… Brickey is a joke and true character is in full display within KSDK’s camera. Couldn’t happen to a man with thinner integrity and weaker character. Brickey in charge of People is like having a crack addit in charge of a Walgreens. The Aramus colone must have been on full-strength as he wanted to share his corporate gene pool with all the A-B ladies…the Love Boat Sails should have been the real story. This isn’t a real story but it is great news and much more engaging to follow than a quarterly earnings report as this is at least is true and actually happened. Better create another scandal next week to keep LH traffic and hits up!
Maybe it’s me but has InBev (AB sold out) asked for one dollar of federal money? If not, then although stupid in this economic downfall, they can bask in the sun all they want. Drink themselves into a coma fine with me. That’s a privately held company and this is America. But the line is drawn at asking in any way for my money. This is simply KSDK ambulance chasing lame stories, maybe they hired KMOV’s folks recently that’s a story they would publish. I sincerely hope the employee that spilled his guts don’t find himself identified and lose his job over this.
whatisthisabout….. The story is about a company crapping on employees in the name of cutting costs, and then taking executives out for a cruise on their million dollar boat. It’s disrespectful and offensive to those that work there, and those that have recently worked there.