December Falls Off a Cliff

Yes, some of it was timing and some of it was bad weather, but I am thinking we must concede that the general malaise in the economy has taken at least a partial toll on beer sales over the last four weeks of the year. Four week supermarket scans to December 28 provided by IRI show that beer sales were off 3.3%, and that's in an off-premise channel which is supposed to be fairing much better than on-premise. That means