A Canned Beer That Tastes Like Bottled Beer

     The Coors family firmly believed that stewardship of their empire entitled them to public advocacy of the family's traditional conservative social agenda. Management at companies like IBM, Georgia-Pacific and Kraft scrupulously protected their firms' image and avoided public controversy. But Coors family philanthropy sponsored everything from the Right to Life movement to the Nicaraguan Contras.
    ...In 1975 when Miller Brewing introduced Miller Lite...sales of Coors Banquet Beer dropped by .5 percent per year from 1975 through 1980, while sales of Miller Lite increased by an average of 36 percent...Instead of taking bold action to reverse a decline, the Coors brothers set out on a series of public-relations blunders...Coors workers struck in a salary dispute in 1977...Striking lineworkers were fired and replaced by non-union employees...labor unions nationwide instituted a national boycott of Coors beer. Sales continued to plummet after Bill Coors's alleged racist remarks before a gathering of minority businessmen in March 1984. The Rocky Mountain News reported that the Coors Chairman of the Board not only claimed blacks in Zimbabwe lacked the intellectual capacity to govern, but that "one of the best things they [slave traders] did for you is to drag your ancestors over here in chains."...Not wanting to be left out, Joe Coors, as a card-carrying conservative and member of President Reagan's informal kitchen cabinet of advisors, decided to buy Oliver North... a 65,000 plane to be used by Contras in the Nicaraguan civil war...covertly supporting the Reagan Administration and the CIA's controversial Central American activities...Members of the Coors family provided financial backing to such conservative organizations as the Heritage Foundation, the John Birch Society and the Moral Majority...Coors was also a major environmental polluter.
     A manager in the Human Resources Department dramatized Coors problem by telling me, "We used to be the top selling beer in Colorado, but we turn down about forty thousand people a year for jobs, and a lot of them fail the polygraph test . That's a lot of people running around hating Coors." 
In combination with the introduction of Miller Lite, the public-relations furor drove down sales of Coors Banquet Beer by 11 to 13 percent per year from 1980 and 1983 which cost the company $360 million in lost sales revenue...Their product was no longer unique, and to the drinker with a conscience, drinking a Coors was like buying a share in a Contra plane, or union-busting...
     And the trouble didn't stop there. Appearing to be bigoted, ultra-conservative, and anti-union, the Coors brothers and the company were also rumored to be supporting almost every right-wing cause known to mankind. Large constituencies of customers, including gays, blacks, Catholics, Jews, Teamsters, women, and environmentalists felt they had a reason to avoid drinking Coors beer....
     (By 1986) Coors was running out of options. The war on the new-products front, including the battles over Colorado Chiller, Crystal Springs Cooler, and Masters III had failed miserably. The company was also running out of money, as constant price discounting of Coors Banquet and Coors Light were draining valuable cash reserves...The General noticed that Coors was the only the only major brewer without a malt liquor product. While Colt 45, King Cobra, and Schlitz Malt Liquor dominated this market, the General decided to explore the opportunity for Coors to market a menthol-flavored malt liquor...A new malt liquor product could bring black beer drinkers into the Coors fold. Or, as the General noted, "We [Coors] need the coons." He decided to proceed with Project Cool, commissioning focus groups to test consumer interest...Focus group participants in Los Angeles were enthusiastic about the menthol-flavored product. As one drinker in noted, he would drink the Cool Beer because it would "keep his shit off the streets." In Chicago the reaction was much the same.
     Shortly after we returned from Chicago, Project Cool was tabled. According to the General, engineers from the brewery had warned that menthol could contaminate Coors beer lines.
  ...Coors was the only major brewer without an economy beer. In the fall of 1987, Pepe noted in a staff meeting that "Miller's got Meister Brau, A.B. has Busch, Stroh has Old Milwaukee. We've got a real gap to fill."...I blurted out, "Jeez, if Miller can have draft-beer taste in a bottle, then why couldn't we have bottled beer taste in a canned beer?" "Yeah," he responded excitedly. "Yeah! Beer drinkers are always telling us that they don't like the tinny or metal taste of canned beer. Why couldn't we give 'em the smooth, cool taste of bottled beer in a can?"..."How do we make the beer in our cans taste different?" Captain Kangaroo asked.
     "Well, that's the part we're going to have to figure out. Maybe we could brew it differently, you know, with a new process or something. Or maybe... can we do anything different with the can?" I asked.
     "What do you mean?"
     "Well someone in the focus group suggested we line the beer can to make the beer taste like bottled beer."
     "With what?" he asked. "Trash-can liners?"
     "No, glass."
     "Glass. Sure, each beer will weigh five pounds."
     That's the last I heard of bottled beer taste in a canned beer, until that fateful spring day when the project team met with Foote, Cone, and Belding to discuss potential marketing strategies. As [they] unveiled the agency's concepts for Coors new economy beer, I was generally unimpressed: Tommy D's, a beer brewed in a fictional character's basement...Bighorn, a Canadian-style economy beer ...Nightlife, the beer for after dark...and then finally...a canned beer that tastes like bottled beer.

-excerpts from Silver Bullets: A Soldier's Story of How Coors Bombed in the Beer Wars by Robert J. Burgess 

October 28, 2000: My First Google Search

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10-29-00: "civil war" +"nude girls" = 871 results

          11-27-12: "civil war" + "nude girls" = 5,490,000 results

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Can You Spare a Damn?

                                               Unfreedom in the Workplace

                                              Two Charts: Profits vs. Wages

                                               Food Chain Workers Alliance

                                                Domestic Workers Alliance

                                                        Jobs with Justice

                                                            Hyatt Hurts

                                                            Unite Here


                                  

One Should Stay Alive if only out of Curiousity

                               

The Forest Trees and the Fruit Trees

The forest trees once asked the fruit trees: "Why is the rustling of your leaves not heard in the distance?" The fruit trees replied: "We can dispense with the rustling to manifest our presence. Our fruits testify for us." The fruit trees then inquired of the forest trees: "Why do your leaves rustle almost continually?" "Because we are forced to call the attention of man to our existence."
-Talmudic Fables

alt-if

Gregory Corso: "Last Night I Drove a Car"

Last night I drove a car
not knowing how to drive
not owning a car
I drove and knocked down
people I loved
...went 120 through one town.

I stopped at Hedgeville
and slept in the back seat
...excited about my new life.

Phil Lee

Section N

C.P. Cavafy: "The City"

You said: "I'll go to another country, to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed
  them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
  elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

Halloween Trajectories

                                                     
                                                                          Ugh Fields

                                                                          Party Rats

                                                                        British Angels

                                                                      Nutshell Studies

                                                                     Squalor Survivors                                                 

                                            Sleeping Like a Baby With a Bottle in My Mouth

Mashal and Nimshal

    Solutions to be found within the Hidden Realm of What Is Apparent are expressed in similarities. If that which is matters within the reality of the Apparent Realm of What Is Apparent, what matters here is that which is like...
    Reframing is another way of asking "What is this like?" But here the emphasis is on separating a given text from the context in which it is presented...When a loss occurs, for example, it is very common in the Jewish tradition to use this reframing technique to find comfort and learn acceptance. When something unfortunate but of minor importance happens- if a cup or a plate breaks- the conditioned response in a Jewish household is "Mazel tov," which means "What good fortune!" The situation has been reframed to say: "It's a good thing something worthless broke; now you've been made aware that you're preoccupied, and you can be more careful so that no more serious accident will happen." If we look at it this way, losing money, scraping a tire against the curb, and countless other situations that many other people would take as signs of bad luck can be reframed as signs of good luck. Most certainly this was a lesson learned from the hardships that have marked the history of the Jewish people down through the ages. It is survivor knowledge, as evinced in this reframing, "It's better for a Jew to lose his beard than for a beard to lose its Jew."
    Reframing is vital in problem solving because it exposes hidden elements of what is obvious. Let us consider the situation narrated in this traditional Jewish anecdote:
    A young man who worked in his father's shop caught an employee stealing. He went to his father, told him the story, and asked: "What should we do with the fellow?"
    "Give him a raise," his father replied in a blink.
    "A raise?" his son asked in astonishment.
    "If he was stealing, it means he's not earning enough," the father explained.
    The son was expecting his father to suggest some form of punishment, not a reward. But his father's understanding of the situation- which may not be appropriate to every situation involving theft- reflected a very sensitive view of reality. By reframing the event, a good employee kept his job and saw his inadequate salary raised. The son had been seduced by the aesthetics of logic, which demanded some form of punishment. If we don't know anything about reframing, our choices are reduced to a single plane of possibility: from among all types of punishment, which should be applied?
    Not binding yourself to one context constitutes a kind of perspicacity that derives from an acquired awareness of the ignorances and uncertainties inherent in our store of knowledge...
    If you are to master the Hidden Realm of What Is Apparent your mind must remain malleable, not locked into the rigors of a literal text...You must listen to propositions from a critical distance so that the aesthetics of logic do not expropriate your power to perceive...
    Reframing is a subversive way of approaching reality. It is generally an uprising against unanimity or consensus...It recognizes that "truths" can be impostors and that thought processes can be fraudulent and easily corrupted, that the act of thinking entails not only an intellectual dimension but emotional and affective dimensions as well.

-from Yiddishe Kop by Rabbi Nilton Bonder

Panagean Family Reunion

Scientific Corrobaration from Dept. of Uphill Fighting

"The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events, close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processees. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena..."

-Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs in Review of General Psychiatry, Vol.5 No.4 2001