quote:
Many things happened here.

1) The NOLA east facility was buitt way bigger than originally needed, and was built in a terrible area that was also hard to get to. It also was finished at the absolute worst time... during COVID.

2) Made by the Water is a disaster of a company and was a horrible entity for Gayle to partner with.

3) DIxie Beer sucks. It has always sucked. But people of a certain generation drank it because it was local and because it meant something to them. They would rather drink pisswater Dixie instead of Pisswater Bud.

4) Going woke definetly caused them to lose the few Dixie fans they had. The 70 and 80 year old men who drank Dizie at the time are absolutely the kind of people who will change their spending patterns bscause of wokeness.

They could have survived any one or two of those things, but not all four of them.

I agree. But the name change was the absolute worst decision. In a market where every dipshit who hates working a 9-5 thinks he's going to strike it rich by brewing beer, thus creating a HUGE supply glut, almost the entire value of Dixie beer was in the name. Like you said, the beer wasn't particularly remarkable. But it had name recognition built up over decades of being in the market place. If I'm in New Orleans eating a po-boy and I want a cheap, lager beer to go with it, why not get Dixie over a Budweiser?

Once the Dixie label was gone it just became a "new" 100+ year old beer in an oversaturated market. Not to the surprise of anyone with a modicum of business sense the product failed.

This might be the most perfect example of "Go woke, go broke". There was absolutely zero reason to change the name aside from vapid virtue signaling. The only people who cheered a name change were NEVER Dixie customers in the first place and where never going to be customers regardless of a name change. On the flip side, the longstanding Dixie customers never gave a shite that the name "might be offensive".

What happened in the board meeting discussing this stupid decision:

"Hey, a black guy in Minnesota died while being arrested. We should change the name of our product in response"

"Ok. Will doing so get us a bunch of new customers?"

"Probably not."

"Do you think our current customers will stop buying the product?"

"Probably"

"So doing this likely means we lose all of our existing customers and gain no new customers?"

"Yep".

"Brilliant! Let's do it! We can pay the bills for our new factory with a loan from the Unicorn Dreams Savings and Loan bank"