"This wasn't a sellout move for me," said Meg Gill, president and co-founder of Golden Road. Gill said she hadn't planned to sell to a beer conglomerate but "as soon as we saw that vision, both companies were excited to be a part of what the other was doing."Yeah, sure. What InBev was doing was probably offering you a boatload of cash.
Sure, it's a good fit, since InBev is mostly known for passing off watered-down horsepiss as beer. And they have a lot of cash.
Mostly because they have a lot of cash. Gill clearly found her "golden road".
That's what qualifies as a "free market" today -- a market where a few giant companies own everything because if any possible competitor actually starts taking market share, they either buy them out or crush them.
ReplyDeleteBelieve me, if this craft brewery had not sold out, the beer conglomerate would have set up their own craft brewery right next door, stole the first brewery's recipe, then sold the result for well under the price to make it, taking market share until these guys sold out. This sort of predatory behavior is called "standard business practice" today. Just ask Martin Shkreli.
A brother-in-law started a radio repeater business with a friend. Twenty years later, a conglomerate in that arena made them an offer of 30x yearly profit to buy them out. They looked at the hassles they were running into from people who lived within sight of their mountaintop tower, when they wanted to enlarge the tower for more antennas, and took the offer. They figured that those deep pockets might enable them to set up a competing business and drive them out, if they didn't take the money. There was an ongoing nationwide consolidation of that type of business, and that company was one of the big players.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, my BIL lost the money in the market crash in '08.
It's a world ruled by giant thunder lizards, and we are but the small marsupials scurrying around underneath trying to avoid being eaten and surviving on the scrap leavings that fall out of the dinosaurs' gaping maws.
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