Pro-America Marketplace Issues Open Letter to Laid-Off Bud Light Employees

Cans of Bud Light sit in a cooler in Baltimore, Md., on June 30, 2023. Rob Carr/Getty Images

Conservative marketplace PublicSq has offered laid-off Bud Light employees help in finding employment opportunities among its business networks.

“Losing a job is always a challenging moment in one’s life, and we at PublicSq and RedBalloon would like to help you get through it,” PublicSq said in a July 27 open letter. “If you’re now looking for work due to upper management’s out-of-touch decision-making, please reach out and send your resumes to [email protected]. Both PublicSq. and RedBalloon will distribute your resume to our respective networks of tens of thousands of pro-America businesses.”

“We started our business to help people like you. The growing progressive politicization of our economy hurts Americans in so many different ways and it’s time we take a stand against it.”

PublicSq’s letter came after Anheuser-Busch, the owner of Bud Light, confirmed that it will be laying off around 350 employees, representing “less than 2 percent” of the company’s U.S. staff.

“Today we took the very difficult but necessary decision to eliminate a number of positions across our corporate organization,” Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth said on June 27.

Flags fly in front of the packaging plant for Anheuser-Busch Cos. in St. Louis, Mo., on July 14, 2008. Whitney Curtis/Getty Images

The PublicSq letter criticized Anheuser-Busch’s leadership for prioritizing “left-wing ideology over sound business practices.”

“It’s especially unfortunate that Anheuser-Busch CEO Brandon [sic] Whitworth will still earn a massive annual salary and not face any consequences for his actions, while you are the ones that suffer for Bud Light’s disastrous decision,” the letter pointed out.

“People like to say ‘go woke, go broke’ and in reality, the economic consequences rarely fall on the wealthy liberals that make the woke decision.”

The Bud Light boycott, which was triggered after the company hired transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a promotional campaign in April, has financially dented Anheuser-Busch’s s3cond-qurter performance in the United States.

“Revenue declined by 10.5 percent,” the company said in an Aug. 3 press release. “Sales-to-retailers (STRs) declined by 14.0 percent, underperforming the industry, primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light.”

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) “declined by 28.2 percent, with approximately two-thirds of this decrease attributable to market share performance and the remainder from productivity loss, increased sales and marketing investments, and support measures for our wholesaler partners.”

Distributors See Losses

The Bud Light boycott has been especially hard on employees. Some truck drivers have reported getting harassed and heckled. Distributors have lost a good chunk of their customers.

“There is an increasing feeling that this [Bud Light] decline rate could last for a while, and the distributors are worried about losing those drinkers to other similar brands,” David Steinmann, executive editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights, told the New York Post.

In an interview with Fox News late last month, Ted Jenkin, the CEO of Oxygen Financial, said that the Bud Light boycott might be an indication that Americans want big corporations to move away from progressive politics. “I think the pendulum has finally swung to the end,” he said.

Mr. Jenkin attributed the layoffs announced by the company as a move to make its shareholders happy and push up its stock price.

Anheuser-Busch’s stock is “down $16 billion in market cap, and the corporation needs to clean it up so they can try to fix the stock price for their shareholders … What’s the easiest way to do that? Make the heads roll of the people who created the problem.”

Between April 3 and Aug. 4, Anheuser-Busch stock has fallen from $66.57 to $57.28—a decline of nearly 14 percent.

Anheuser-Busch is also facing trouble in Florida where the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has ordered officials to investigate the firm due to concerns that its decision to hire the transgender influencer may have ended up harming investors.

“It appears to me that AB InBev may have breached legal duties owed to its shareholders, and that a shareholder action may be both appropriate and necessary,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in a letter last month. “All options are on the table.”

PublicSq’s Patriotic Marketplace

PublicSq’s offer to help employees fired by Anheuser-Busch comes as the online marketplace has been garnering attention for promoting conservative values.

The company went public last month, with chants of “USA” echoing at the New York Stock Exchange when PublicSq CEO Michael Seifert rang the opening bell of the exchange. The company has raised over $20 million from investors, including Donald Trump Jr.

PublicSq was founded  in January 2021 with the aim of creating a marketplace for firms with patriotic values. It now serves over a million customers and hosts 55,000 businesses.

During an interview with Fox back in April, Mr. Seifert had called the patriotic, traditionally valued, constitution-loving American citizens “the largest unaddressed market in the world.”

“There are so many entities that, for whatever reason, decided to cater to messaging that only attracts 10 percent of the country when there’s a massive cohort of 100-plus million Americans feeling like their values have been left in the dust.”

The CEO said that customers using PublicSq will not be “lectured” on politics or gender ideology. The marketplace calls itself “Pro-Life, Pro-Family, Pro-Freedom.”