Tag: chinatown

It’s marketing, Jake. Forget about it

In their respective races for total global domination of the ever-popular bland beer segment, SABMiller and Anheuser-Busch have a natural tendency to clash over events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa. And why not? Just the fan parks segment of the operation (not the actual stadia where games are going on, mind you) account for a staggering quantity of beer:

40 percent of the 100,000 extra hectoliters of beer SABMiller expects to sell during and around the monthlong tournament, Hewitt said. That’s equivalent to 8 million half-liter (1.1 pint) glasses of beer or 12 million 340 milliliter cans of the beverage.

So why wouldn’t any brewery that could manage to brew that much want a piece of that action? Well, because it’s being sold brandless. “I’ll have a beer” will, for once, apparently be an entirely accurate way to order. Meanwhile, all the advertising in and around the stadia will be done by (you guessed it):

Anheuser-Busch, said by e-mail that his company decided “more than a decade ago to focus our beer presences in-stadium” during FIFA World Cup matches.

This means that SABMiller has scored the exciting prospect of being the vendor behind 12 million can-equivalents of beer like substance. Well played, well played. AB will surely go broke chasing after the rafts of folks who have a brand preference in their choice of beer-like liquids and who may, in fact, assume that (based on all the signage) they are actually drinking AB beer-like liquids.

Eastbound and down, loaded up and trucking: SABMiller (Coors) is gonna do what they say can’t be done: sell even more AB beer based on the perceived quality of SABMiller’s own products. Burt Reynolds better get going on those sit-ups.

Realistically what I think is going to happen is that almost no significant legislation of any kind will pass until 2017, by which point the GOP will [likely] control both the White House and the Senate and immediately eliminate the filibuster via the “nuclear” approach [meaning 50 Senators vote in favor of an opinion on the part of the President of the Senate that the super-majority is unconstitutional; thus the filibuster ceases to be]. Republicans, to their credit, tend to prioritize their vision of the national interests over issues of process and ego. Democrats, by contrast, seem to have mostly gotten into politics in order to bolster their own sense of self-righteousness and aren’t especially concerned with whether or not their conduct in office is efficacious.

Matt Yglesias, positively bubbling over with optimism for the country. If the filibuster goes in my lifetime, I think this is exactly how it will transpire, though: as the first action of a Republican controlled Senate serving a Republican President.
Yglesias is also 100% right that the credible threat of filibuster reform is more potent and much more likely to end in real reform than the actuality of that process (meaning: pushing a bill to end it with everyone knowing 67 votes aren’t out there). Democrats can never get these concepts through their heads, though. So forget about it.

Well, I went to school in Ireland when I was a boy, learned the Three R’s and the Ten Commandments—most of them—made a pilgrimage to the Blarney Stone, received my father’s blessing, and here I am.

William Mulholland, on his qualifications to run the Los Angeles water system