While Seated [016]
20160814 — Weird to see the sequence of emblazoned COREY logos last week; the first, of a rainbow theme, the second, bright purple letters, and the third, perhaps celebrating USA in the Olympics — red, white, and blue.
It’s odd because this is the same digital sign that endorsed Trump and gloated about the Don’s primary victory here in Georgia. Might it be possible to be a sign-owner on a smokestack in the South who simultaneously believes:
- a big digital-sign on a (smokestack) tower will legitimize our brand
- Donald J. Trump should be President of the United States
- let’s use this sign thing to support the LGBTQ community, too!!
That feeling when you co-found a brewery in 2002 but it gets big fast and by 2010 you need money for expansion, so you sell a 21% minority interest to Miller/Coors and try to be quiet about it lest you rankle the hordes (who’d surely be rankled if you sold 26% of your brewery which, at that point, could no longer be referred to as “craft”, having eclipsed the 25% ownership threshold) and you keep on rolling for a few more years and then run the numbers and realize that in order to compete at the next level, you might as well upsell Miller/Coors’ stake so that they own the small-town craft brewery you created, and by that ownership, the small-town craft brewery you created ceases being “craft”, and a day or two after the the sale is announced, it’s also announced that you, as a co-founder, have stepped down because that’s what co-founders do when they sell everything they worked hard to create to a behemoth that doesn’t care about your story, your community, the veil of your brand’s authenticity, or (gasp) your feelings, but you’re suddenly flush with millions and the horizon is wide, so what do you do a few weeks later — you buy someone else’s craft brewery in a neighboring state and change the name.
If I were a 74-year old United States Senator who’d just finished an unsuccessful campaign for President, battling against a system I knew and everyone else knew to be corrupt and intractable, I’d want to return to my home state, buy a $600k summer house on an island in the middle of my state’s biggest lake, leave the same political party to become an independent (again) and wave at the rest of ya’ll from my deck chair.
