Which is why, today, it’s looking like the recent
Trump-favorable remarks by the inventor of Sam Adams are not going
to hurt beer sales, calls for a boycott notwithstanding.
Let’s back up to the start of this story.
On the night of Tuesday, August 7, Jim Koch, founder of the
Boston Beer Co., which produces Sam Adams, was
among 13 business leaders invited to a dinner-conference at
the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It was a political event designed to
highlight the president’s economic agenda and record.
Following a brief speech, the president asked every business
leader in the room to stand, introduce himself, and offer brief remarks. When Koch’s turn came, he said, in part:
“I’m not quite sure why I’m here. I’m like the smallest company by far. I’m Jim Koch and I started making Sam Adams
Beer in my kitchen 37 years ago…I guess I’m sort of speaking on behalf of what
is now 7,000 small brewers in the United States.
“When I started Sam Adams, American beer was a joke, and it
pissed me off…now, American brewers make the best beer in the world…the (Trump/Republican
Party) tax reform was a very big deal for all of us because 85 percent of the
beer made in the United States is owned by foreign companies…
“I’m the largest American-owned brewery at 2 percent market
share. We were paying 38 percent
taxes…and competing against people (foreign brewers) who were paying 20…now we
have a level playing field and we’re going to kick their ass.”
The next day, I read Koch’s comments in The Boston Globe and
was surprised he had stuck his neck out that far. Maybe he’d been over-served his own product
last night, I thought. Purveyors of
consumer products are famously reluctant to take outspoken positions for or
against policies and elected office holders for fear of turning off their
customers who might feel otherwise. When you live and die by volume sales, it’s
best to steer clear of hot-button political issues.
And here we had one of the most successful entrepreneurs in
the history of Massachusetts, if not the USA, throwing political caution to the
wind.
Koch is a genius-level business visionary and one of the
world’s best salesmen -- a man with
three Harvard degrees (BA, MBA and JD) who quit a $250,000-a-year job with the
Boston Consulting Group in 1984, took his life savings and parlayed it into a
company that, 34 years later, is worth more than a billion dollars.
Soon there were calls for a boycott of all Boston Beer Co.
products, with the sharpest-edged one delivered by eight-term Somerville Mayor
Joseph Curtatone. “We need to hold these
complicit profiteers of Trump’s white nationalist agenda accountable!”
Curtatone tweeted, adding a few minutes later:
“I will never drink
Sam Adams beer again!”
It’s been over a week since Curtatone slammed Koch for
“sucking up to Trump” and floated his boycott idea. There have been no reports so far of a
negative impact on sales of Sam Adams.
One thing is clear, however. The controversy has not hurt
the price of Boston Beer Co. stock. As
of this morning, company shares were trading at $307.70 apiece, only slightly
below their all-time high of $314.52 in January, 2015, and miles above their low
point of recent years, $163.05, which was recorded in February of this
year, a mere seven months ago.
I waver on Koch’s Bedminster escapade. I think he was acting servilely and selfishly
when he endorsed Trump’s deficits-be-damned/make-the-grandkids-pay-for-our-lifestyle
approach to stoking the economy. On the
other hand, I think he deserves credit for having the guts to stand up in
public and hail a widely reviled and detested president for actions that have strengthened
his company and benefited his shareholders.
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