In my obsessive pursuit to identify parallel industries that vacation rental owners and managers can learn from, I've found myself especially intrigued with craft beer.
This is due in part to the fact that research tastes delicious. But it's also due to the last 10 years. In the face of consolidation and corporate goliaths, something strange and extraordinary has happened: the independent craft brewers have not only survived, they have thrived!
In this week's motivation, I'd like to challenge you to read this article and learn about how and why the craft beer movement WORKS. I have shared some of my favorite quotes (below) for those short on time.
I'd greatly appreciate your parallel thoughts:
So VRMB Community members, are there additional things we can learn from the craft beer movement?
Or do we need to do a little more hands-on research 🍻?
This is due in part to the fact that research tastes delicious. But it's also due to the last 10 years. In the face of consolidation and corporate goliaths, something strange and extraordinary has happened: the independent craft brewers have not only survived, they have thrived!
In this week's motivation, I'd like to challenge you to read this article and learn about how and why the craft beer movement WORKS. I have shared some of my favorite quotes (below) for those short on time.
I'd greatly appreciate your parallel thoughts:
Moreover, consolidation is supposed to crush innovation and destroy entrepreneurs, but breweries are multiplying, even as sales shrink for each of the four most popular beers: Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite, and Budweiser.
But what explains the nature of the craft-beer boom? From several interviews with economists and beer-industry experts, I’ve gathered that there appear to be two big reasons—a straightforward cause and a more complex and interesting history. The first cause is something simple yet capricious—consumer tastes. “At the end of the day, the craft-beer movement was driven by consumer demand,” said Bart Watson, the chief economist at the Brewers Association, a trade group. “We’ve seen three main markers in the rise of craft beer—fuller flavor, greater variety, and more intense support for local businesses.” These factors are hardly unique to the beer industry.
...even as federal antitrust enforcement in the last 30 years has shifted to favor conglomerates, a groundswell has created the perfect conditions for the craft-beer revolution—or, more accurately, several distinct craft-beer revolutions.
More recently, many states have made exceptions for small craft breweries to sell beer directly to consumers in taprooms. These self-distribution laws are controversial. Technically, they create an exception to the cherished three-tier system in a way that advantages smaller breweries. But economists and beer fans alike often defend these rules, since they can help small firms establish a fanbase and then phase out when a brewer makes it big.
The craft-beer boom shows that the burgeoning of small firms stimulates both product variety and employment. Second, sometimes consumers have their own reasons to turn against monopolies—particularly in taste-driven industries—just as they are moving away from Budweiser and popular light beers toward more flavorful IPAs and stouts produced by smaller breweries.
Third, even in an economy obsessed with efficiency, sometimes it is just as wise to design for inefficiency. Alcohol regulations have long discouraged vertical consolidation, encouraged retailers to leave room for new brands, and more recently made it easier for individuals to introduce their own batch of beer to the market. Those are the aims the country should adopt at the national level, both to make it easier for small firms to grow and to make it harder for large firms to relax.
A phalanx of small businesses doesn’t automatically constitute a perfect economy. There are benefits to size. Larger companies can support greater production, and as a result they often pay the highest wages and attract the best talent. But what the U.S. economy seems to suffer from now isn't a fetish for smallness, but a complacency with enormity. The craft-beer movement is an exception to that rule. It ought to be a model for the country.
So VRMB Community members, are there additional things we can learn from the craft beer movement?
Or do we need to do a little more hands-on research 🍻?