This Bud’s Not For Us Anymore
You won’t be able to visit them for much longer.
If Anheuser-Busch takes the offer from Belgium-based InBev, it will probably be the final blow in the city of St. Louis. Not only for the prestige angle, but in terms of total employment and revenue generation. Since both the brewery and the World Headquarters are next to each other in south St. Louis city, all those employees pay city income taxes. And the brewery jobs left at A-B are probably the last quintessential working middle class unionized jobs left in this city. Even though, thanks to mechanization and computerization, there are only a small fraction of the people working in the brewery that there were during the days when my maternal grandfather worked there.
This offer from Belgium seems to be coming out of left field for everyone, but I don’t think it was such a shock for the Busches themselves. Question: Why did InBev make this offer? If these were the days when Gussie Sr., Gussie Jr., or August III (he never took to the nickname “Gussie”) was on the throne, do you think a foreign conglomerate would have even made an offer? The answer is no, because Senior, Junior and The Third were all loyal St. Louisans and Americans, unlike the Fourth Generation which now rules the roost, the one that’s rotten spoiled and has never known a life other than A-B being on top and the family being worth multiple billions. I think InBev made this offer because The Family has been sending signals through channels that the rest of us aren’t privy to, that it’s interested in selling. You know, it’s not good enough that A-B is constantly profitable, and The Family is worth more than $2 billion — better to gut St. Louis in more ways than one and to be worth $4 billion, isn’t it?
If my theory is right, then it doesn’t take a dummy to know what The Family’s answer is going to be.
What will the eventual purchase of A-B by InBev mean for St. Louis?
The first thing that will happen is that the actual brewery will close. The St. Louis facility was A-B’s first and currently is the largest brewery by volume in the world still, but it’s the oldest and most expensive one in A-B’s repertoire. The relative “drag” of the St. Louis brewery on A-B’s books has been an open secret in this town since about halfway through The Third’s reign, but he would have rather downed a warm Miller Lite than close the St. Louis brewery. What’s surprising to me is that The Fourth Generation hasn’t closed it down, even without buyout offers. A Belgian conglomerate would have even less loyalty to a faded town in the middle of America than even The Spoiled Brats.
The second thing that will happen is that One Busch Place will close. InBev already has a World Headquarters in Belgium, and certainly doesn’t need two. If it needs a building for its American operations (formerly known as Anheuser-Busch), then St. Louis is not a good choice anymore, thanks to another buyout of a few years ago, that being American swallowing TWA, eventually leading to Lambert losing its hub status. Surely, InBev would have such an administrative headquarters in an American city near a hub, which is much cheaper to fly into and out of. As it is, they have already set up shop in Philadelphia for its fledgling American business interests, so I have learned. I predict that they’ll board up One Busch Place, and offer some of its employees (but not all) positions in Philly.
The third thing that will happen is that this will wreck and reverse the gentrification of the city neighborhoods around The Brewery. It has already leveled off, and such an abandoned business property very near them won’t help matters. Part of the yuppie allure of Soulard, Benton Park, Dutchtown and Carondelet was that they’re literally in The Brewery’s shadow, even as the yuppie libs themselves tend to prefer non-corporate brews.
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