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I have no experience with this: are the contracts for bars and restaurants and other venues flexible enough to see sales drops in one month or less?
If the contracts are long term, you wouldn't see any drop in wholesale on AB's end until the contract is up, even if the consumers have stopped drinking it.
At bars/restaurants, a driver comes around once a week and restocks as necessary, entering the data on a handheld. So granular to weekly at the distributor level.
Most likely, sales data is sampled from a selection of retailers almost real-time and statisticified by paid analysts.
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Keeping in mind, I'm familiar with this second-hand due to family working for Miller at one point, which is a different company, but...
Local sales - to grocery stores, gas stations, and the like - are effectively handled by sales reps who manage them. Once stocked, the stock in question(IE, Beer) is basically one and done and can only be removed from the store in question by being sold.
So, thanks to this PR kerfuffle, you've got alot of beer that's basically sitting around in stores not doing anything that the stores in question can't get rid off and the sales reps can't replace with other things that would sell.
Plus, you've got local stores thinking to themselves 'Do I really want to deal with this?' when it comes time to see what's going to get prominence in their liquor area and who's going to get permission to do those stupid, big displays for when the game day comes along.
All these metrics are tracked by software. (And this was several years ago, keep in mind, who knows what they're doing now). If stores are under-performing, the head distribution offices know about it. Often times, what's stocked in choosen through a combination of the sales rep and what the local store manager allows. Which means this can get messed up and stores can under-perform very easily, because you've got stock sitting there no one wants to buy and you can't stock what's being sold more because you have limited shelf space you're allowed and this crap that won't move is just sitting there and you can't do anything with it...
I haven't talked to anyone in the business in a long time, but if I had to guess, there's alot of people that are very, very cranky right now.
So, to answer your question; Yes, I have a feeling they instantly saw a tank in sales and are quietly panicking, because the guys who've got skin in the game are probably screaming their heads off, from the sales reps to the distribution centers.
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