You're ignoring the numbers on the y-axis. Single digits. Just give it time, the 3-4 major producers will buy up and suppress all of these single-digit, regional upstarts. It's inevitable.
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Check back in 10 years.
Nice of you to not pay attention to the second graph. I'm sure you would have said "check back in 10 years", but the second graph was checking back in 10 years, when craft had grown from single digits to ~25% of the market.
I've asked you to prove it. And yet the example you gave, potato chips, I showed you how the single dominant player has lost 8% market share in the last 20 years. And the example Nubbz gave, the two dominant US players (formerly three but two of them combined) have spent the last 20 years losing over 20% market share, and not to 100 or 200 competitors that they can just buy up, but to 9,000+.
Lost me they still consolidated BIG and MANY of those imports were swallowed by the other two. Same thing with the Crafts Goose Island in Chicago got bought out by one for instence.It's what they do,some may operate independently but they're still under the umbrella. Crafts undeniably have made for better quaffing however
Yeah, and it's a dynamic market. Obviously Goose was acquired by ABInbev, Lagunitas was acquired by Heineken, and more recently Stone was acquired by Sapporo. I mentioned the big acquisition (and then divestiture) of Ballast Point. Some of the craft breweries embarked on a massive expansion trajectory, couldn't financially sustain it, and became targets for acquisition.
But at the same time, craft has changed the entire culture of beer. There are aspects of it that the big boys can never replicate, and that's the idea that crafts are by definition local. It's the idea that you go to a neighborhood brewery specifically because it's
NOT "big beer" and because you can't get it anywhere else. These are properties that the big beer companies have no desire to own, and that the owners have no desire to sell. The big boys know how to sell undifferentiated beer to undiscerning customers, and they're scrambling to try to remain relevant in these new times. Scrambling so much that Bud Light might have just pissed off their core audience because they were trying to reach out to new audiences whose existence angers their core audience.
The truth about capitalism and the free market is this: you can only survive and grow if you are satisfying customers. If you fail to do that, no matter HOW big you are, you will shrink and eventually disappear. The reason that bigger breweries are trying to buy their way into the craft market is
because big beer was failing, not because they were successful.