The High End fires 90% of its salespeople
The story has reverberated across the craft beer cosmos. Some are calling it a bloodletting, but let us be clear: this is no haphazard despatch of 400 top craft beer salespeople. This is a cartel disposing of dead weight.
I do not impune the fine people who just lost their jobs. I am sorry that their successful work for their employer got them fired. I know some of them personally, and a friend of mine got out by the skin of his teeth right before this happened. Myself, I got hammered in Mississippi’s tort reform massacre of 2005, so I know what it’s like to succeed yourself out of a job. Just ask all of the street lawyers who were working as asbestos and silicosis defense counsel in the Corpus Christi MDL in 2005. That gravy train suffered an earth-shattering kaboom.
This is a sign of a matured industry. The low hanging fruit has been picked by the big boys, and they no longer need the people that tended that fruit lovingly. Now, The High End can just literally require their distributors to purchase x quantities of a given brand to maintain their distributor bonuses. Even in states with a fair-dealing act, like Mississippi, you can expect to see the distributors told in no uncertain terms that they must carry products from each of the breweries in The High End.
In states without a fair-dealing act, you can expect The High End beers to be subject to quotas issued to distributors, and retailers being squeezed by the distributor. So you want the allocated product, that triple-A barleywine that’s rated 98 on rateBeer? Sure, you can get a case. But you have to buy 10 cases of the shitty Heady Topper clone the same brewery put out to capitalize on the NEIPA trend. And no returns, or we’ll never sell you the allocated product again.
And that’s the bottom line, suckers.
