Cheap Beer

So one of the cheapest beers we have at work is offering a huge growth incentive within our market.

The incentive is pretty much them giving us $125,000 and saying that we can divide it up as we see fit. Which means that my team is going to average a $1,500 bonus on this one brand (in the month of June), and that I get 1.375 times the average of my team...

This is a beer that sells for $8.00 a twelve pack. And they're practically telling us that we can print money by promoting the stuff.

I can't get enough of it.

Normally we have lucrative incentives on high dollar brands. There was a wine goal recently that we had to hit, and EVERYONE got $750 if we hit it (matching the winery's BEST MONTH EVER). So of course, an extra $750 in a month is a nice bit of change to have rattling around in the pocket, and we all busted our asses to make sure that our company beat their best month. We did, and we all enjoyed our money (I think I blew mine all on Coke and Strippers... Or maybe I bought a PS3... It was one of those two). But that was on a wine that sold for $187 a case (wholesale). This beer incentive is on a beer that costs $12.00 a case (again, cost to me, not the common man).

And there are differences in volume that are VAST (we sell a lot more cheap beer than we do moderately priced wine), but at the end of the day the dollars work out the same. We may sell 15 times as much beer as we do wine, but 12.00*15=180... So the money is the SAME and this brewery is going to give away double the dollars for a goal that doesn't even match their best month ever. It just puts them firmly in the #1 position in the category (cases and dollars sold).


Which makes me wonder if they are selling out. Traditionally there will be a big push before the owners of a brand sell the company to someone else... They want to make the company look good the the new buyers and investors, and so they will cheat the system a bit and offer very good incentives for growth, even if the dollars don't make sense given the money they make on the product. Not that it matters either way to me, we represent a ton of beer in this area, and the new owners would probably be more than happy to stay at the company that put them in that #1 position in the market.



So if next month the "largest" cheap beer brewery in America is for sale, you heard it here first!