Sounds like you’ve got good taste. I love Spaten Optimator and Franziskaner Dunkel. I used to think they were the best beer until I had some Mendicino Brewing Company Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout on tap at Flying Pie Pizza in Boise, Idaho. The creaminess mmmmm. It makes me lick my lips just thinking about it. If you ever get a chance, it’s pretty good even from a bottle. I’d really like to have the opportunity to have some really fresh Spaten in Murchen some time. I’m sure it has the same marked improvement when fresh and on tap that I tasted in the Rasputin.

Most of the guys I work with are imported beer snobs – the pressure of mindless conformity in Corporate America almost requires it. If I go out with people from the office, I get the Miller High Life, and ask for the bottle, and dreaming of earning a free Miller High Life Beer Truck Delivery Driver shirt.

Short term vs. long term is always the struggle in Corporate America. Ditto for Washington D.C.

I agree with you Dynamic88, about the Honda Civic anology. I praise the word of Da Honda and love driving their cars… (if only they’d release a hatch for 5dr Civic hatch in the US..)

As I always say.. ya dont buy a good car cheap, just a cheap car.

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michaelC

I agree with you wholeheartedly michaelC about the Toyotafication of Subaru.

The Impreza used to be a good looking yet fast as hell vehicle.. coated in nice shiny blue, lightweight and fast. Even though their interiors.. have still much to be desired.

They’ve turned the Forester.. from a lesbian driven squared off vehicle with some idea of shape and design.. to a muted dumbed down piece of molten garbage that even the rat bastards wouldnt drive.

Nort to mention…
I heard they want to cann the awd unit used in the cars and start using 4cycls (need to start cutting weight for that to happen properly) for better economy. Apparently, their fuel economy isnt great. DUH!

I coulda told ya that.. a awd unit is weight.. jack it up higher and lift the roof.. and you got one porky bastard.

And the Tribeca.. what a waste of space. Their PR line.. people want more room

When in fact they just want to compete with Honda and Toyota.

Another one bites the dust.

I just have to say.. what the hell happened to their nice front clips.. and intetresting grills? They were nice to look at and melded right with the body.. now they got some plastic injected snot, that wouldn’t feel right.. on any imposter of a vehicle.

Coca-Cola cheaped out I recently found out. They did this years ago when they replaced cane sugar with corn syrup. I found out last month. VBG! No wonder the current version doesn’t taste as good as the ones we drank as a kid.

Frankly I’d be happy to drink less Coke and get the real stuff. Of course their accountants don’t want to hear that.

I keep watching the EV car companies. Several of them are bringing import vehicles to America and then adding the EV systems to it. A few must get around crash testing their vehicles by restricting them to neighborhood vehicle speeds (less than 30 mph). A few are going all out (Phoenix and Miles for example).

The Phoenix Motor Cars SUT is really a Korean SsangYong Actyon (how do you say that?). Think Ford Ranger in size.

I think the difference between microbreweries and micro-automakers are the hurdles an automaker has to clear with the government to sell and the number of units they have to sell to make a profit.

I thought when gas was up near $4 a gallons that Americans would jump all over any alternative to gasoline, now I think we are “getting used to it”. Gas is $3.50 a gallon here right now and somehow it doesn’t seem like as much of a shock as when gas climbed immediately after Katrina.

Whether this is intentional by the commodities brokers or by chance I don’t know. Would like to though.

Read an article recently that predicted oil will rise again by the end of the year to $150 a barrel. Dunno if I believe that but I do expect we’ll be another 75 cents more expensive next summer than this summer.

I’d jump for a SsangYong – well whatever you call it as an EV if I could afford one. GM/Ford/Chrysler ought to take notice of the appliance drivers who don’t care what their car is powered with as long as it is easy and cheap to own. I can see the FUD campaigns now playing on folks’ fears of not having a gasoline engine to carry them home on a dark, rainy night through bad neighborhoods.

Detroit could release a few existing designs as EVs if they wanted to.

If Detroit goes broke or if they stick with their SUV/Musclecar/Pickup truck model lines that could give the little guys a chance. Or it could be that Honda/Nissan/Toyota will instantly crush any small car companies that arrive on the market. I hope there is plenty of competition. I really hate only having Wal-Mart to shop at after they’ve run everybody else out of town.

I’d take a really sporty looking Aveo GTi EV or an Astra EV. The Volt holds very little appeal to me b/c existing EV tech can provide me with a vehicle that exceeds my second car needs. Only problem is that my budget can’t deal with the price tag even if in the long run the savings on fuel for 200K miles would make the EV pay for itself.

Not sure my credit union would finance one of a $40K EV… VBG!

Market research has shown that for American mass-market beers, most people cannot tell the difference between them in blind taste-testing.

So, the quality of the product is, in a sense, irrelevant. Instead, it is the brand, and all of the consumers’ associations with that brand, that are important.

In contrast, most people can tell substantial differences between cars in terms of styling, appointments, performance, handling, NVH, etc.

This makes the automaker’s job doubly tough. Not only do they have to maintain the brand, they have to produce a solid and differentiated product.

That’s what companies like BMW, Porsche, Honda and Toyota/Lexus have done, and what the Big 3 have failed to do (except in narrow niches like Corvette, Viper, Cadillac, Ford F-150, etc.)

BTW, I got the arrogant bastard (a product of Stone Brewing Co., Escondido, CA) reference.

It came to me in a (green) flash…:-D…

http://www.greenflashbrew.com/

Nice allusion that is probably lost on everyone else here. Kudos!

(Anchor Porter currently is my favorite brew, BTW, but Arrogant Bastard ain’t bad.)

Anheuser Busch became the leader because it added brands, marketed them heavily and grew in size enough that it could dominate shelf space in supermarkets, which helps to keep the competition out. Shelf space dominance is important for consumer products like these, and A-B is effective at this.

Consumers liked these beers — God knows why, but they did — and responded well nto the branding, which gave A-B increasing market share and allowed it to control the supply chain more effectively.

The analogy to cars is most effective with respect to the marketing side. A-B became the GM of beers, adding multiple brands to serve multiple customer niches.

But this structure ultimately makes more sense for consumer disposals than for cars, because there is no badge engineering comparison for beer — you can simply change the taste of the beer, rebrand it, and be done with it. You can support eight beer brands if the marketing budget is sufficient, but eight car brands is a disaster in the making.

Wall Street is obsessed with perpetual exponential
sales growth. But this can’t be maintained forever. Sometimes a company’s got to accept its reached its maturity. Still growing sales is probably at the bottom of the big 2.8’s to-do-list at the moment. Just hanging on will be a big enough achievement.

I keep pointing out to people that a Honda Civic costs quite a bit more than a Cobalt or a Focus.

I disagree with you there. At least with the Chevrolet, the risk level for sacrificing an undue amount of time and money (yes, vacation time spent waiting in the service department ARE MONEY, even if it is covered under warranty) is greater than with the Honda. At least in my experience, waiting for the car to be finished usually produces better results. Which is cheaper in the long run.

So your Chevy or maybe even your Ford may be cheaper on an “out the door” basis, yes. But not necessarily so after you’ve accounted for the intangible costs.

…the fact is people will pay for quality, if they can.

Yes they will! But I am one of those who will pay for it because that “quality” can be translated into value, and for even the moderately mathematically capable, it can be translated into MONEY SAVED.

HAHAHA, thanks for the laugh! But honestly, I never drank Schlitz. Or Goebel. But I may be guilty of an indiscretionary night or two with some Rolling Rock…

No, I’m razzing you, NEVER Rolling Rock!

What ever happened to “Stroh Signature”? Maybe it never made it out of Detroit?

I keep pointing out to people that a Honda Civic costs quite a bit more than a Cobalt or a Focus. People are surprised by that, but the fact is people will pay for quality, if they can.

I’d rather buy a six pack of Bell’s Oberon for the price of a case of Bud. I’d also rather pay more for a Honda than an “equivalent” Chevy. I’m not a rich man. My taste in beer means I have to have fewer beers, but get more enjoyment from each one. Buying a Honda is actually cheaper, because it will give me 150K miles w/o trouble.

Bud just came out with an Ale. It took them about 2 decades to figure out that people really do like Ale, and that they aren’t getting any of that market. The D3 still -seemingly- have not learned that there really is a market for quality small cars, and they aren’t getting any of it.

Bell’s, Founders, Arcadia – Michigan may not make the best cars anymore, but we make some of the best microbrews.

Gosh, if reading about Schlitz produces those mental associations for you, thank goodness Dederer didn’t write about an old St. Louis brand, Griesedieck Brothers Beer.

There’s an old joke about who likes Schlitz and Griesedieck, but it’s not fit for a high-class website like this.

Truly a 3 beer joke.

The other mass market beers were cheaper to brew — Bud, for example, uses rice as an cheap adjunct to replace barley at the expense of less flavor — and preversely exploited the authenticity and distinctiveness of Schlitz. Dumbing down the beer consumer by advertising something other than the real product was the best way to create the mass markets that amplified their profits. One might see some of the same mass market advertising legacy in Detroit’s brand strategy to dictate American tastes in cars.

In the early ’70s Schlitz needed to increase volume on the cheap to compete. They changed their brewing process to shorten the cycle (producing less CO2 naturally from yeast and injecting CO2 like their rivals). People noticed a difference in the taste — but that wasn’t the killer. Another consequence of the change in the brewing process was less long-lasting foam in the poured glass. And here Schlitz committed the cardinal sin — they introduced a chemical to stabilize the foam. The chemical was food safe and did not affect the taste — but when word got out sales plummeted and that was the end. For consumers, the brand _was_ the product of the traditional process and ingredients. The brand had not just betrayed the loyal drinkers — proud of the distinctiveness of their brand in contrast to the bland competition (remember no microbrews in the those days) — it had committed suicide.

I like Subarus and Megan Benoit’s misgivings, to put it mildly, about Toyotafication of the new Subaru Forrester come to mind. Subaru’s many fans ignore, even celebrate, the ‘quirky’ designs because of the distinctive ingredients. Some reflection on Schlitz may be in order in Ota and Toyota City.

No new Engineering feats or introductions to announce?

Why is GM so important?

Come to Canada and pick up some Labatt’s 50 for your traps. Kills instantly.

Maybe it’s because I don’t live in America but I honestly didn’t think Schlitz was a real brand. I tthought it was to beer what 555 was to tv phone numbers…something they threw out there when they couldn’t use a real name.

You may not have seen the old “Schlitz Bull” commercials. No pun! They actually had a bull bursting through the wall; very cool.

I was really hoping for a cheerleader picture to go with this headline. I am sorry.

I think a photoshopped cheerleader riding the Schlitz bull would have been a laugh. Cue the St. Pauli Girl puns…

For steamed shrimp, one can per pound + plenty of Old Bay.

Also to fill slug traps.

Maybe it’s because I don’t live in America but I honestly didn’t think Schlitz was a real brand. I tthought it was to beer what 555 was to tv phone numbers…something they threw out there when they couldn’t use a real name.

Hard to know what to do as a manufacturer. Looking at other consumer products, the middle ground seems to be disappearing. The vast majority of products are competing on price, getting cheaper to acquire and seldom if ever worth repairing. Then there are a minority of products that are high end and individually profitable. In the consumer products market, the answer is to sell cheap crap at low prices. Hard to do with cars, it seems.

I was really hoping for a cheerleader picture to go with this headline. I am sorry.

If Schlitz, while going downmarket, had to compete with Super Happy Fun Beer Company of China selling roughly equivilant brown water for a third the price, there would be no more Schlitz. The bottom end of the car market in the near future will be a place where the developed industrial countries will not be able to compete on cost.

The Chinese (and maybe the Indians) are going to blow the Koreans out of the water in the cheap-car business. I think it explains why Hyundai/Kia are trying to move out of the perception basement…its akin to a guy trying to scramble on a lifeboat as he watches big, hungry sharks approach what used to be his patch of the drink.

GM doesn’t even have a life-preserver, much less a boat. It will be interesting to observe GM get consumed in a way by the spawn it sired in China.

Pricing is was GM’s raison d’etre. “A car for every purse and purpose” (or whatever Sloany said). If GM wanted to maintain this silly structure of a brand for every level, then pricing was the foundation, without it, the brands become meaningless. I mean, what’s the point in spec’ing out a Chevrolet Mailbu with all the gismos and gadgets possible only to find out that Cadillac do a similar version for a few hundred dollars more?

Since GM tried to make all the marques the same, all customers got were cars with the choice of a Buick badge, a Cadillac badge, a Chevrolet badge, etc.

Ford’s situation is slightly different. Yes, I know they couldn’t manage brands well (Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo and Aston Martin, treading on each others’ toes), but the real rot is with the Ford brand.

Basically, they rested on their laurels for too long before their cars were considered to be boring/redundant/crud (delete as applicable). All the R and D went to SUV’s.

But to be honest, Detroits woes are more than pricing. I won’t list them, but you know what they are.

N.B: My old boss used to say that “American beer is like canoeing…….frigging close to water…..”