Keep in mind: for all intents and purposes, once you hit 25 you've chosen every brand you'll ever choose. This is one reason why advertising focuses heavily on teenagers and young adults; it's easier to hack a presidential election than it is to get your mom to switch dish detergent. Macrobrews are kinda fucked in this regard because those goddamn whippersnappers tend to buy a sixer of something expensive and semi-local, but only every now and then: my roommate will buy six Blue Moons about three times a year while my dad will buy a half-rack of Coors Light once or twice a week. So they're marketing to a rarified stratum: people under 25 who are deciding on "their regular beer" that they can get most places. The Most Interesting Man came out in 2006 so everybody they could (legally) influence back then is between the ages of 35 and 40. Time to do something new because they know that even if they kill off The Most Interesting Man, you aren't going to switch to Corona at this late date. You started drinking Dos Equis to set yourself apart from those choads. The owners of the macro brews give no fucks, of course. 70% of beer sales in the US are controlled by one fucking company.
As your chart shows, the beer thing only matters at the surface level. Walk in to any major grocery store in the US and all of their 'micro-brews' are owned by AB inBev or Miller. Finding actual local micro-brew that a multi-national doesn't profit from requires going out of your way to find it.
I didn't realize that was the reason I can't buy fucking beer anymore. My go-to beers: - Amstel: Heineken. - Dos Equis: Heineken. - Kirin: Mitsu-fuckin-bishi, y'all - Sapporo: Sapporo. - Sam Adams: Jim Fucking Koch - Weinhard's: Fuckin' AB Inbev since 1999 which is why it tastes like swill now - Negra Modelo: Grupo Modelo Last I checked I can find three of those beers at any given time. One of them is Weinhard's. In LA I drink exclusively Baltika 7 because fuckin' a if you're gonna drink swill, drink $1.50 for a 20oz bottle swill. Which, shit, at least is Carlsberg.
Had to badge this comment. Sorry KB. But this may be the single most important thing anyone under 40 needs to grok NOW. This one paragraph is so so so so important to understand. It underpins everything in our lives. Every product. Every market. Every consumer. Every human being on the planet.
Are you talking about identity solidification? You're somewhere around 40, right? How do you feel about changing your tastes?
I'll be 50 in a few months. The key thing about KB's comment is that, somewhere around 40 years old, the entire system we live in becomes transparent. All the intertwining links are visible, and you can see how all these seemingly different things are actually interconnected... and wired to take advantage of how the human mind works. To jack people into doing/believing/consuming things according to their own presets and mental chemistry. So "identity solidification" is a good way to define it. But in the end, tastes don't actually change. And you find, more and more, that your hard-wired beliefs and preferences are purely the result of being manipulated early in your life. In the end, nothing is real. Even the stuff you like.
Those are dark colors you're painting with. The way you say it, there's always an entity with an agency that involves making one into something they'd find useful, and nothing you think you are is you, per se. When I met my first girlfriend, I started wondering why I came to like certain features about her. She was much shorter than me (I'm a big fella), and it seems natural that I'd find that appealing: big man protecting petite woman, isn't that one of the basics of classic masculinity? She had big hips, too, and when she walked on her high heels, they'd swing wide like a metronome. Well, that part's no mystery either. Then I started wondering about her wealth of straw-color curly hair. I've never met anyone who had that kind of hair composition, and if I did, I don't remember. So I started wondering: did I like her hair because I was predestined to, or did I like her hair because of her? You start liking certain things when they're attached to someone you like, even if you didn't appreciate them before. I still have no answer for it. Then I met this gal, and I knew redheads were my thing. I'm not to compare experience with you. I'm well-aware what a difference even a few years can make once you're past 20. I would, however, like to notice that perhaps, your darker picture only relates to state- and business-oriented affairs. "[N]othing is real" seems like an exaggeration to me. We're all affected by things we encounter. Bad things leave scars, good things leave butterflies in one's stomach upon remembering. But then, there's the genetic component that's inescapable to our personality. In other words, you're very much real because your DNA tells you so. Just because you can be influenced don't mean you can be reduced to the sum of your influences. EDIT: I just realized how antagonistic this comment sounds. "UR RONG IM RITE FU". That was not the intent. What I wanted to say is: I disagree with you based on my experience, and I think that not everything is as programmed and manipulated in a human being as you suggest.