Employees bid on Anchor Brewery | Hacker News Reader

Employees bid on Anchor Brewery

vinepair.com

181 pointsselimthegrim125 comments

Something that's overlooked both in the comments here and in the article itself is that one of the figures behind the unionisation effort at Anchor was a guy called Brace Belden. He's a pretty interesting and slightly controversial guy who shot to fame by joining Kurdish fighters in Syria, periodically posting little snippets about the war to Twitter under his handle @pisspiggranddad.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/brace-belden-pisspig...

He could easily have written a book on his time in Syria or leveraged that somehow to join Vice or some similar company (he's charismatic and funny, so he probably would've been good in front of the camera) but he opted not to do any of that, joined Anchor and helped organise a union.

Also does the TrueAnon podcast which is pretty good.

the stubborn leftist idealism in the face of a mass of evidence that communism can't work, at least as it is usually idealized, is a bit off-putting

If you don't like him then that's fair enough. But I've found him to be quite entertaining and at times intelligent and thoughtful, and I'm definitely not alone.

Not sure how that’s relevant here. Worker owner co ops and tank style communism are vastly different things

The guy is a communist (yeah I know "democratic socialist", same beer, differeng label), it's a fact, and no communist can be ignorant of the mass crimes communist governments committed and keep committing, and of gigantic failures they presided over. If he still chooses to march under that banner, that tells us something about him, and making conclusions based on that is appropriate.

That doesn't mean the business he's associated with will fail as a worker coop - maybe not, but it's still not entirely irrelevant.

Alright so "I don't like the left" - loud and clear. Thanks for your input.

History us not just an opinion, it's not subject to personal likes or dislikes. And the modern history offers plenty of support for my "not like".

An American volunteered to fight ISIS and helped fight for workers rights in a brewery. That's about as close to an American hero as you can possibly be. If you're not happy with that and want to cast all sorts of other aspersions on him then I don't know what to tell you. If you're looking for someone to debate some kind of "-ism" then I suggest you check out Twitter or Reddit.

> no communist can be ignorant of the mass crimes communist governments committed and keep committing

You fail to contrast with the even larger atrocities committed by non-communist governments.

I don't see how this is an argument. When we say we must condemn nazis for crimes against humanity - do you raise an objection that "non-nazis committed crimes too, and if we sum up all the crimes in history of humanity, they'd surely dwarf the nation crimes?" I don't think so. Pointing to somebody else having committed a crime is not a defense.

The real argumentation is the numbers. The claimant has to bring the data. So where's your data?

Mao's Great Leap Forward The Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields Stalin's gulags

Plenty of numbers if you know history.

Dictators should not be considered communists, especially not “democratic socialist”

Thank you for providing the obligatory "real communism has never been tried" remark. You service is appreciated.

It's becoming clear that you think "socialism" just means "the scary politics that foreign people have" and don't actually understand it, otherwise you'd know what GP meant by this remark. At the very least you should try to understand what you think you oppose, because it sounds like you heard your dad complaining about some non-right-wing party then took that as your own politics and ran with it.

It is a bit dangerous to make such statements towards people you don't know, as you may end up looking quite a clown. In this particular case, I was born in a socialist country, my family lived in a socialist country for generations, and some perished from it, in very unpleasant ways. Some were members of The Party, too, won't deny it. I am literally the "foreign people" you are white-knighting here. I was taught the theory of socialism in school (only a little), I wore Lenin on my chest (when I was a little kid who didn't know better), and I had experienced the practice of it on my own body and mind and environment. I stood in the lines. I lived through the shortages. It's what I was born into and witnessed, and what my family members - which witnessed much worse things than I did - told me, and what other people, from whose personal experience I learned, told all the world - but not everybody wanted to learn. I don't claim I know all, and with all reading that I did about political theory and practice, I can't claim I know everything about socialists/communists - probably not. But I certainly know enough to make some conclusions, and likely - I know much more about it than you do.

If I am a little better than you are at guessing, I'd venture a guess that some older people around where you live could tell you a bit about the practice of socialism too, if you asked them. But I won't expand too much at that. I'll just say when trying to accuse others in being narrow-minded, it's useful to keep a mirror around.

Equating workers sharing ownership of a business and oppressive communist governments that sent people to gulags is a bit ridiculous. “Your business must be owned by a single rich person or a bunch of shareholders who aren’t workers themselves, and if it’s not then you support starvation prisons”…? I’m not even talking about democratic socialism, I was just talking about worker co ops (although if you think places like Scandinavia are as bad as Soviet Russia then you should probably study both more)

I hope they succeed in taking it over, and I hope that they follow through on the idea of documenting the process as TV.

While making good TV will inevitably require editing to emphasise drama, I expect the editor won't have to look far.

I think the evolution of union employees from the point of "brewing beer" to the point of "running a profitable business" (complete with functions like sales, marketing, purchasing, quality control, and yes, labor management) will be both fascinating and informative. It would help other transitions to co-ops go a lot smoother.

I have no doubts it would be a success, but the process would be just as valuable as a learning tool.

Plus the TV would act as marketing (tick).

"I think the evolution of union employees from the point of "brewing beer" to the point of "running a profitable business" (complete with functions like sales, marketing, purchasing, quality control, and yes, labor management) will be both fascinating and informative."

Or an unmitigated disaster. That would also make good TV...

It's dramatically easier to run a business when you merely need to be sustainably profitable rather than wildly profitable.

So much of the business world is contaminated by MBA-think that must squeeze every single penny out of a going concern.

Not sure I agree with that, but you also have to consider the interest rate environment we are in, along with the potential for an economic slowdown.

To buy the brewery, they will more than likely be taking on a ton of debt at higher than normal interest rates...this would put them under a lot of pressure from the start...

How about they take on no debt because otherwise Sapporo is going to shut this down and simply take a big loss?

When did "market clearing price" quit being a thing? When did we forget that market forces also work downward?

This is like the "labor shortage"--there is no "labor shortage". There are simply companies unwilling to pay market rates.

The real problem here, however, is political, not economic. If a Sapporo exec signs off on ... say, a $10 million deal ... and suddenly Anchor Steam suddenly starts pulling good profits it will make some Sapporo executives look really bad. And that is really bad for your career.

"How about they take on no debt because otherwise Sapporo is going to shut this down and simply take a big loss?"

Yea, taking a big loss will help with their taxes.

But they could just give it away...

The debt will be with suppliers. Sapporo will either need to pay that, or Anchor will, if the business carries on. Otherwise suppliers will either choose to not supply, make every deal cash up front, increase prices to absorb past losses or a combination of all 3. This includes production suppliers, but also things like leases, rent etc.

By contrast, shuttering it completely, selling off the barrels, makes the balance of the debt just go away. The landlord gets to simply write off owed rent.

Obviously prior owners will often take on debt to keep the business afloat. That might be financed debt, or credit lines. Or just non payments (rent etc). Resurrecting the business is hard because those suppliers have to be made whole. That's usually the killer in saving a failing business.

Are breweries typically insanely profitable? My understanding is they are like a commodity/staples business with tight margins.

Certainly taking it private makes some aspects easier, but makes financing harder too.

> Are breweries typically insanely profitable? My understanding is they are like a commodity/staples business with tight margins.

I own a bit of a brewery and have learned a bit about the business in the past 7 years.

No, breweries are not insanely profitable. You might think that they are if you simply look at grain to glass and forget about everything in between.

Those in between parts are real estate/rent, equipment, chemicals, packaging costs (equipment, labor, consumables), employees, taproom expenses, marketing, and finally, the worst, distribution expenses.

It's been a fun ride and I'm glad I'm involved, but insanely profitable just isn't the case.

Absolutely correct. Also fractional owner of a local brewer for a decade or so. Defintely not insanely profitable. As stated above distribution costs/complications and associated laws are often overlooked. Merchants and bars are a finicky bunch. Taproom sales can fluctuate a lot.

To be honest, to me it sounds like there isn't even that much profit even if we just consider grain to glass. I'm totally uneducated about the subject but it seems like you need quite a lot of grain for beer, and beer is quite cheap... Larger brewers make sense but for smaller ones, either their beer is super expensive or I'm missing something!

I don't drink alcohol so to be fair my knowledge is mostly coming from friends getting trashed on cheap Pabst Blue ribbon lol.

Yes, you're right. It's also easier to run a business where payroll is the last supplier, and if there's no cash we all just get short paid, instead of the case where employees are paid first.

And I get the MBA effect especially as we see that segment in the business news all the time.

But most businesses aren't big. Most don't have so MBA. Most don't make wild profits. Most are happy if they make it through the month, build up sufficient reserves, grow production over time and so on.

Profit is not just "extra money for owners", its also the part that provides income security in tough times, that buys new machines, that covers over the slow seasons, that secures cheaper supply lines and a million other things.

It creates resilience against the ever changing nature of the world. A business that runs at break-even are one tiny event away from closing their doors.

Squeezing every penny is not always about wild profits. Sometimes it's just keeping the lights on.

> But most businesses aren't big.

Careful there. While it may be true that there are more than 10 tech companies (MAANG x2) that doesn't actually reveal a lot about the skew of the landscape, as 'most' in this case means by absolute number and not weight.

Beer is no different. There's better than a 9/10 chance that microbrew you're holding is owned by one of two companies - Miller Coors or AB Inbev (and of the two it's far more likely to be Inbev). At least, this was the case a few years ago when I was still paying attention.

If you were to count by market share or even heads employed, I think you might find that "most business" is goliaths, not davids, and in this story, david loses.

Perhaps if we had kept antitrust solid it wouldn't be so hard to keep the lights on.

There are certainly market segments (like say cars) which have consolidated to the point where there are a handful of players, and they're all big.

Not yet mention that "big" has a different definition everywhere - I'm going to suggest an arbitrary limit of > 500 employees.

Again, it depends where upu live but if you look gard you'll see most businesses are small. Corner stores. Factories. Plumbers, electricians, car repair, and so on. Franchises.

There are not just "more than 10" tech companies, there are tens of thousands of them. I have 3000 tech customers and they are 99% small (by this definition) and I operate in a market so niche it would make you eyes water.

The vast majority of businesses are tiny. They are not on any stock exchange. They have < 10 employees. You will never read about any of them anywhere.

Beer brewing is very consolidated, but even there micro-breweries are gaining traction. Chances are though that if you bought your beer in a national chain its not a micro brewery.

> Profit is not just "extra money for owners", its also the part that provides income security in tough times, that buys new machines, that covers over the slow seasons, that secures cheaper supply lines and a million other things.

This seems like an old-fashioned view on the nature of business. It may have been true 50 or 60 years ago (at least) but I think it's the exception rather than the rule today. Cutting loose your employees is what provides income security in tough times (for the employees not cut loose). Loans buy new machines. If you have a couple slow seasons you'll simply be bought by some private equity firm, loaded up with debt, then driven into the dirt along with any pension obligations etc., the firm may have had.

I see your viewpoint posted a lot. There's certainly a cynicism that comes from following the news, or seeing listed-company-news as applying to all companies.

Your view is likely biased towards the US though - most countries don't have a PE industry. Also most businesses aren't attractive to PE in the first place.

You need to look past the headlines, past the news. As you drive consider each building you pass. That mom-and-pop store. That corner franchise. That Indian take-aways.

Most businesses aren't Apple or Google. Those are the exceptions, and despite their vast numbers they are a drop in the bucket of the n billion people employed world-wide.

Yes it's an old fashioned view on the nature of business. But it's also the reality for millions of small businesses today.

Late stage capitalism is eating the heart of the US yes, but fortunately it hasn't spread to most places yet. And even in the US good businesses do well, if you care to see them.

My view is biased toward to the US because that's where I live, yes, but also I think as the epicenter of global capitalism it sets the pace for the other, lesser, capitalisms around the world.

You're right that, by the numbers, there are a lot more small companies than large companies. But it's the large companies that steer our political and economic institutions. And, in many or most cases those smaller companies will have to compete with the larger ones, and certainly rely on at least some of them for their operations.

While the MBA-think might be too focused on profit maximization, on the other side of that coin there’s a flawed, perhaps romantic notion that a business with more modest ambitious always has the right and/or ability to survive. In reality, all businesses are a part of a constantly evolving environment that isn’t always kind to stagnation and inefficiency.

Businesses aren’t insulated from exterior forces like competitors. If you aren’t squeezing for pennies and your competitors are, they’re going to be offering your same solution at a better price.

Any small business owner will tell you its always a fight to survive, much less grow. There's no right to survive and most don't.

But they survive by focusing on more they just profit. They survive by understanding long-term value over short-term profit. They embed into a community. They treat employees well, they treat customers well, they care about environment (inside and outside), fairness and do on.

The stereotypical "MBA" gets a hard time because they only care about short-term profit. This quarter results. They sell the soul of the business and all they get is money. They refusecs refund, but lose a customer forever.

Of course this is a caricature, and most MBAs - certainly the good ones - know where to press, but at the same time understand that the business needs balance. That being around next year is more important than this months targets.

I've worked at a lot of large tech companies.

At one the sales in our division fell and we were losing money so there were layoffs, more people left, and eventually they shut the division down. That wasn't fun but people understood.

At another we had increasing sales, were profitable, but they laid off people, and then sold our division. The reason was that our return on investment was 11% while other divisions were 25% or even 40%. We made something much more specialized but lower volume and harder to sell. It was frustrating knowing that the company is making money but it's not enough money for them to care about.

They cared, but nobody could find a way to get from 11% to 25% and the overall market might have been shrinking.

IMO it was the right decision. Does it make sense for a company to continue keeping folks who fail to meet an objective of getting from 11 to 20-25%? Is it fair if other departments are able to pull off similar feats and one department isn't?

Seems like layoffs were probably restructuring to keep best of the talent and a last ditch effort to try to get the talent to make it possible. When that failed the company realized the best way to achieve that was to exit the division and double down on the ones that could.

The situation was far more complex.

We sold semiconductor IP blocks. There might be a product that sold for $500K and they might sell 50 licenses a quarter for $25M. For our product our direct competitors sold it for around $4M

But at the end of the quarter the division that we were lumped in with would be short of their target by $2M. Then the VP of sales would go through the list of customers we were currently negotiating with and instead of selling for $4M would offer a big discount at half price in order to hit the quarterly revenue target.

This went on for 3 years and then they say you need to increase your ROI numbers. Our plan was to not give huge discounts and sell at the same price as our competitors but we got sabotaged by that VP of sales every quarter.

After we were at other companies our former customers told us that it was widespread industry knowledge that you could just wait until the last day of the quarter to get huge discounts from us.

> IMO it was the right decision. Does it make sense for a company to continue keeping folks who fail to meet an objective of getting from 11 to 20-25%? Is it fair if other departments are able to pull off similar feats and one department isn't?

Yes, because your most heavily optimized cash cows are also your least resilient when the market shifts.

A long-term business needs to have a mix of optimized growing cash flow products, legacy cash flow products that are declining, and new cash flow products that don't quite meet the bar yet. Otherwise, as soon as your cash cow gets hit, your business is dead.

I don’t think anyone is expecting a 10x return from a brewery.

Sure, they could fail. Turns out running a business is hard, and carving out a niche against behemoths in the brewing industry can't be easy.

But novelty, especially if there's free marketing etc, will help to make it a success.

I have always liked the idea of co-op business, but I've also been apprehensive about the viability of genuine co-ops where multiple (competing?) sections have to work together to forge a path forward.

What do we do when we have multiple possible actions on the table, but no concensus? Do we fo nothing?

I think more examples of (hopefully successful) transitions will help in more of this model being (successfully) adopted.

But sure, crash and burn would make for great TV.

I think it makes sense to appoint a CEO who can be dismissed or have their policies dismissed by a simple majority vote and who can be nominated and voted on by anyone during an election. That would help resolve disputes where different sections of the company can’t come to an agreement or similar. As a check on their power, they report to the shareholders and can be voted out at any time and unpopular policies can be voted out without ejecting the CEO so the shareholders still have full power over the company but they don’t need to vote on every single day to day action and there is someone to do a coin flip or arbitrate if there’s a disagreement.

With that said if your company is large enough this is necessary it may be too large to be a co op

The John Lewis Partnership is a workers cooperative and in 2022 had revenues of 10.84 billion GBP.

What size do you think is "too large to be a co-op"?

That’s pretty neat, I didn’t realize there were any that large.

Also Mondragon, with 12 Billion Eur revenue, and ~82,000 employees

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Its not the first time this has been done though. Left Hand Brewing is an employee own brewery that has been around awhile.

https://lefthandbrewing.com/our-story/about-us

They have sales people now, surely they wouldn't fire them.

They already have the thing that is the hardest to obtain and it takes a long time to do so - the brand.

Great documentary indeed.

I posted this company as reply to another comment. But if your interest, Left Hand Brewing has been employee owned for 26 years I believe?

https://lefthandbrewing.com/our-story/about-us

No, it's only been (majority) employee owned since 2015 [0].

[0] https://www.brewbound.com/news/left-hand-brewing-announces-e...

Gotcha. The about page doesn't give as much details as I would like and from how some of the pages it is worded, its sounded like it has been employee owned for a lot longer, based on their website.

Even employee owned companies can do misleading marketing. :)

It's also no guarantee of anything - New Belgium did a similar employee stock program in 2013, but they still sold to Lion in 2019, and now they're doing weird stuff like making 18 bajillion variants of Voodoo Ranger and rebranding Fat Tire.

You may be thinking of Great Lakes Brewing

I’ve followed this a bit. One take I’ve heard is that one reason Sapporo is shuttering the brewery instead of selling it is that the Union agreements make it difficult to sell. It can’t be cheap having a brewery in prime SF.

It would certainly be interesting if they ended up buying it.

I lived for 10 years blocks from the brewery and fondly remember the musty smell it gave off during certain days of brewing. I hope someone is able to keep it alive and a co-op may be the most tenable long term solution.

A lot of Sapporo's acquisitions over the past few decades seem to indicate they prioritize strategic supply chain access over anything else. And that makes sense. It's easier to buy an established brewery with established supply chains and market access in a foreign country and use that as a boardwalk into the market rather than trying to figure it out from scratch. And Sapporo has clearly done well.

But I can't see what they're getting out of owning a brewery in San Francisco in this day and age. Globally, beer consumption is way down. They're already supplying most of their addressable American market with beer they produce in and export from Canada. It makes sense to me that they'd want to cut their losses here.

And as decent as Anchor has been, it's a wildly saturated market out there. Unless SF makes a U-turn recovery in the next year or two I can't really see how this ends well for Anchor.

Out of curiosity, who drinks Sapporo? I've occasionally seen it at sushi houses of course, like Maneki in Seattle, but that's not going to be the volume that drives buying out regional breweries. Is there a big west coast immigrant Japanese community that drinks it habitually in mass market quantity like the American market drinks domestics? None of my east Asian American friends really drink to speak of, at least not where I can see.

Sapporo owns Sleeman Brewing in Canada which owns PBR and Old Milwaukee in the States.

v common in canada, fresh bc it's made locally and often a cheaper menu option than other similar options. it's not popular w the japanese friends i know at least.

We used to buy it because it came in a huge can which you could bring into places. It is widely available in San Francisco at least.

I mean, they might have tried Bud and expected Americans to appreciate _any_ better product? Can't blame them I guess.

What’s your source for beer consumption being way down? Apart from the pandemic, growth looks strong: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1232738/beer-revenue-by-s...

You linked a revenue forecast.

> In terms of domestic sales, about 64.2 billion U.S. dollars were registered in off-premise retail sales. Only 43.8 billion dollars in on-premise sales were recorded in 2021. While this is an increase from the large decline in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still below pre-pandemic levels.

> Craft rebounded in 2021 and saw its largest share of the beer market ever even though dollar sales of craft beer remained below their peak. This indicates that although Americans are drinking less beer overall, they are more often opting for craft brews.

https://www.statista.com/topics/1654/beer-industry-in-the-un...

I just looked this up now, but it's been a recurring topic to read reports about since the start of the pandemic.

Uh? What are people drinking instead?

Hard seltzers (bleh) seem to be one thing that's increased considerably in popularity.

I tried those and I was unimpressed. It's like a watered down, sugary, fizzling cocktail.

I mean, what did you expect from a product category that was basically born of the question "how can we use modern food science to create a product that appeals to vodka-soda drinkers, but falls under the tax regime of a beer?"

Also they already own Stone Brewing also in California. Seems like Anchor’s brewing capacity and existing supply chains does not benefit them much in addition to what Stone already provides.

> It can’t be cheap having a brewery in prime SF.

Real estate prices make things stupid expensive in SF, but this business has been around, owning the same property, for close to a century before real estate prices became insane in SF.

I'm more thinking of HR then the real estate.

Brewers in SF are going to need to get paid a lot more then folks in Colorado or the South.

I love their beer and look forward to the Christmas Ale Magnum bottles every year.

I hope the employees are able to buy it and run it for many years to come. Big beer has been buying up and killing way too many breweries.

I bought a few stickers this guy made while Dead and Company were in town playing their last concert ever.

It was a sticker done in the style of the traditional Anchor Brewing logo, but said Dead and Company instead of Anchor brewing.

At the bottom, it says "made in San Francisco until 2023".

The end of two SF icons, but it seems that both may carry on.

Here's hoping.

It's weird how many times I've seen this rough story - business starts, runs fine for years, gets bought by some large conglomerate, gets shuttered as unprofitable, gets re-bought by the employees, and runs fine again. One begins to wonder if there's maybe something gone awry in the modern model of business.

What’s wrong with infinite growth? The only people that tell you it is unsustainable are those 8th grade math nerds.

I agree with you, it seems like we are living in an era with global growth accelerators but no one to tell people it is impossible to keep increasing profits forever regardless of how many markets you can be a leader for.

how can there be infinite growth with limited resources?

maybe i'm one of those 8th grade math nerds.

Disruption, synergy, blue ocean thinking, vertical integration, blockchain, leveraged buyouts, stock buybacks, tax advantages, bunkers

a lot of limitedness currently is artificially generated. such as restaurants/groceries/farmers constantly binning unimaginable amounts of food

A large amount is finite. Less of a large amount is also finite but does not make the initial large amount infinite retroactively.

"Everything changes but nothing is lost."

There are unlimited resources.

vast quantities of bullshit

Growth is not a measure of physical resource consumption, it’s a measure of the value of goods and services produced. If you can find a way to make something more valuable out of less raw materials, you can increase growth while decreasing consumption. One example is that computer chips that do the same computation with less silicon and energy are worth more. There might be a limit to this, but it’s not obvious. A bunch of countries already managed to increase economic growth while decreasing CO2 emissions. Maybe in 100 years humanity’s main preoccupation will be competing to tell each other more fashionable jokes while recycling the same physical materials, with economic growth continuing uninterrupted all the while.

I don't see how your logic works with a brewery. Would it be a good thing a brewery makes exclusive rare beer that costs infinite dollars a bottle? Or sell an infinitely small drop of beer?

If people could afford that, it's not the beer creating the value.

Value depends on another system and it is relative. So value of something can go up while the world is burning. I think that's what is meant by infinite growth doesn't work. It could work for something, but not everything always.

Economic growth is not purely extractive of natural resources. If a new invention of better performing clippers allows me to cut twice the hair as a barber, I've doubled my economic value without any change in resources.

Human ingenuity has not yet found its bound.

A handful of sand on the beach becomes silicon transistors becomes AI models becomes miracle drug.

Your kind of thought process will seem amusing and quaint in the future and I don’t think it’s just 8th grade math nerd thinking. The math says we have existed in a very unique century historically with regard to economic growth.

https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/

Even maintaining current economic growth would mean a 10x by 2100, which is absurd in a world expected to stop population growth by then.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...

Me to. Agreed.

The bigger the company the further away from the employees and customers the leadership gets, and therefore the less guilty they feel about squeezing every penny out of them.

There is a great book, small giants, about companies that choose to go against this trend and be great instead of large.

Anchor Brewing is one of the companies mentioned in the book

No way! I had forgotten!!

There may be a correlation but you can make the argument that the cause runs the other way. You imply that the acquisition causes the failure - but another read would be that failing businesses are put up for sale (insiders see the failure first) and the acquirer is left with the shutdown.

The idea of an employee buyback leading to success (we'll see!) would, of course, lend credence to your causal theory.

On top of that, employees are more likely to be in denial and will chase the sunk cost for years.

This is a very good point, there are multiple ways to look at this. One of the bigger (and harder) questions to answer in the run-up to a DD is whether or not the reason for the seller to sell is the stated one.

tho you talk about it like an alien event / debate contest, mismanaged takeovers that end the company are common enough, incl from japan acquisitions and in that industry

What are some examples of employee purchased businesses?

Publix and Arthur Flour are the two that come to mind immediately but IIRC several regional grocers went that way in the 90s and oughts. Hostess almost did before the Bimbo offer came through. Not sure if there's something about foods that makes it work better there.

Speaking of failed San Francisco institutions. Hostess bought Parisian bakery shortly before going under. In terms of "legacy" sourdough bakeries I think we're down to Boudin and Bordenave at this point.

Edit: I should probably point out that was around when low carb diets started gaining popularity. Not a great time to be any sort of bakery really.

Astor Wines and Spirits in NYC is a great example on a somewhat smaller scale. Founding family sold the business to the employees (about 75 of them) under an Employee Stock Ownership Plan.

Replogle Globes followed this exact trajectory. Four employees bought the company when the conglomerate was planning to liquidate the company.

This pulp mill in BC, Canada was purchased by a mix of employees and other investors in 2008. I'm not sure the initial mix, but the website says 25% employee owned currently:

- http://www.harmacpacific.com/employees.php

- https://forestryfriendly.ca/harmac-pacific-pulp-mill-local-s...

A large conglomerate will have to show a return on their investment, a bunch of people owning their place of employment get their salaries and are happy, even if the business runs close to 0.

but the customers still get their beer and the workers still earn a living. sounds like dead weight was cut.

Yes, that's one way of looking at it. But the business will have a harder time to weather bad things happening that would require a larger capital investment.

Plenty of businesses should just stay small. This fascination with scale and growth is super unhealthy. But continuing a business that already exists is easier than starting one from scratch and building up reserves just in case something that you really need for your primary process breaks takes time. So time will tell whether it really was dead weight.

> have a harder time to weather bad things happening that would require a larger capital investment.

The opposite. Co-ops are more resilient to downturns

  It's weird how many times I've seen this rough story

That's not at all what the story was. Anchor has been in rough financial shape for a while. That's why Sapporo bought them. Anchor almost went under in '65 and in '10, and in '17.

All the "local employee-owned" marketing may make locals more inclined to buy inferior overpriced product as opposed to another brand owned by foreign corp.

I suspect the strategy is to downgrade the product on the sly and then run down the brand. There is money to be extracted when people are still paying for quality they do not receive. Endgame: bankruptcy. Middle game: PROFIT!

They should open a website where I can reserve my first $500 worth of employee-owned beer. Shut up and take my money!

Doesn't make sense. You'd be paying the wrong party.

You know you've really screwed up when the employees themselves are like "we can do this without you, we'll put our money where our mouth is"

Seems unlikely that a business would willingly prop up a co-op, a union, and direct competition all in one.

That would be awesome. One can only hope Sapporo takes them up on it.

I live next to Anchor Brewery. I hope it shuts down and becomes a mall.

Who was there first?

they were there first.

strange decision to move there then, ey?

Not really. Close to work, okay walkable amenities. It could even be better.

Another mall is the last thing that SF needs. Anchor needs to stay, and a co-op would be quite fitting. Why the hate?

No hate, would like more walkable utility around my house. We could probably pack a lot more stores and services in the two blocks Anchor occupies.

Why?

I think it takes up 2 blocks that could probably fit 10-20 businesses that could provide more utility, goods, and services than 1 brewing company.

Have you ever had a beer before? Or are you friends with someone who has had a beer before? Beer doesn’t just fall out of the sky, so it must be made somewhere.

Do you care about climate change? If so, then you should care about liquids being shipped as short of a distance as possible.

Edit: Also, the brewery moved to the neighborhood approximately 100 years before you did. Why did you choose to move to the area if you didn’t want to be next to them when there was no indication that they would be leaving anytime soon?

NBIMBY

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