(Headline USA) Another country artist announced this week that he’s cutting ties with Bud Light over the company’s partnership with transgender huckster Dylan Mulvaney.
Singer John Rich said he’ll no longer carry Bud Light beers in his Nashville bar, Redneck Riviera, citing low demand from customers in the wake of the controversy with Mulvaney.
“The customers decide. Customers are king,” Rich told Fox News on Monday. “I own a bar in downtown Nashville. Our number one selling beer up until a few days ago was what? Bud Light. We got cases and cases and cases of it sitting back there. But in the past several days you’re hard-pressed to find anyone ordering one. So as a business owner, I go, hey if you aren’t ordering it, we got to put something else in here. At the end of the day, that’s capitalism. That’s how it works.”
Mulvaney revealed last week that Bud Light had sent him custom-made cans of beer featuring his face in celebration of his “365 Days of Girlhood.” A video of Mulvaney with the cans included the hashtag “#budlightpartner” and featured Mulvaney in a bathtub drinking the beer.
Rich said Bud Light is “making a bet that this is going to sell more product.” But the decision will backfire, he predicted.
“What’s happening … is people who have been loyal to brands for decades and decades are finding it hard to stay loyal to them, so they start hunting down other brands that they can support. There are tons of up-and-coming American brands out there that people are flooding to, kind of like mine,” he explained.
Rich’s decision to part ways with Bud Light comes just days after country artist Travis Tritt made a similar decision to remove all Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch products from his tour.
“A great American company that later sold out to the Europeans and became unrecognizable to the American consumer,” Tritt said. “Such a shame.”
