Disappearing drinkers is bad for the booze business

Programming note: No Weekender this Sunday, as I’ll be taking a break for the holiday. Hope you’re able to relax as well. Fingers will be back in your inbox next week! Happy Fourth of July.—Dave.

The people that control the United States’ beverage-alcohol industry will typically do and say things that advance their interests. In many cases, they do this out of fiduciary obligation to their shareholders; in other cases, they do it out of greed. A distinction without a difference, really.

This is (hopefully?) a fairly well-understood dynamic, and it’s hardly unique to the bev-alc sector. I bring it up because over the past few months, as the Trump administration has sent masked shock troops into American cities, deported citizens and noncitizens alike to concentration camps abroad without a whiff of due process, and generally carried on like the authoritarian regime that it is, I’ve been tracking a grim new version of this bloodless corporate communications blueprint in the trade.

Most of the country’s biggest breweries, wineries, and distilleries have avoided saying anything substantive in the face of this grotesque, chaotic regime.³ Instead, they are working behind the scenes through their lobbyists and members of Congress to try to secure carveouts from Trump’s corrupt trade war while hastily abandoning their DEI programs and Pride Month promotions to avoid winding up on the wrong side of his Department of Justice protection racket. This is cynical stuff, but it’s clarifying. And you can see a self-interested logic in there. What do I expect, for example, The Brown-Forman Corporation to do to prevent “it” (fascism) from “happening here?” Honestly, not much. And like most firms at that level, it hasn’t. Publicly, at least.

Less expected, and frankly more disturbing, has been hearing what bev-alc executives say when the logic of self-interest dictates they should probably say something.

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