It was always clear what Anheuser-Busch meant to St. Louis. Good jobs. Prosperity. A company this city could count on.
But last November, things became murky. Uncertainty surrounded A-B’s takeover. And a year’s time has left many ways to look at how the company has changed and what that change means to St. Louis.
One thing to look at is the numbers. They’ve been well-documented.
Like the 1,000 people who were laid off right before Christmas. And the $20,000 that wasn’t given to Gussie Busch’s old American Legion Post.
Another is the psychological cost — for Anheuser-Busch wasn’t your average St. Louis company.
Other global brands, such as McDonnell Douglas and TWA, have called this city home.
But the bond with A-B ran deeper, all the way back to the city’s German heritage. Budweiser was a name known around the world, and it brought St. Louis along for the ride, always ending its ubiquitous advertisements with the name of its hometown. The company spread donations all over town and took legendary care of its employees. The Busch family was like royalty.
And St. Louisans were loyal. They drank A-B products with pride. They took visiting relatives to tour the great brick brewery. And they stood in the eighth inning of every Cardinals game, clapping along to "Here Comes the King," a salute to the company that was a lot like their city — independent, prosperous and proud.
A year ago, that bond loosened. The connection between the city and the company shifted forever. The independent, prosperous Anheuser-Busch was gobbled up by a faceless Belgian-Brazilian behemoth: InBev. What kind of name is that?
And that provides a third, perhaps more important, way to look at the merger: what it says about St. Louis’ place in the global economy.
We’ve seen foreign interests acquire other local firms. But it never seemed such a big deal. And we’ve seen other iconic companies get bought — like McDonnell and TWA — but those were by other big American names.
No, the hostile takeover of a great local institution has given St. Louis a front-row seat on the nature of the new world economy, in all its uncertainty and all its potential. And St. Louis hasn’t always liked what it sees.
First came the takeover, which both the Busch family and Congress were helpless to stop. Then the new regime settled in, announced its layoffs and razed the executive suite where Busches used to rule. Costs were cut. Contracts changed. Many of the old ways of doing business were thrown out the window.
These were the opening gambits of "a hypercompetitive company" striving to become more so, said Jim Fisher, a marketing professor at St. Louis University, of remolding Anheuser-Busch to better compete on the world stage.
"What we’ve seen here up close is kind of a metaphor for globalism," he said. "It just sounds like a completely different world there now."
And that’s been a disturbing thing for the place that so relied on old, solid Anheuser-Busch.
In economic terms, the merger’s impact on St. Louis has been far less than that of auto plant closings or McDonnell’s shrinkage in the ’90s. Compared with the broader recession, InBev’s cuts have been a drop in the bucket, about 2 percent of the 47,000 jobs the region has lost in the last year.
But these were good jobs, at the world headquarters of a respected company. And their loss adds to that nagging fear that the global economy is leaving St. Louis behind low cost payday loans.
"The big stuff is moving to bigger cities," said Bob Lewis, president of local economic consulting firm Development Strategies. "You feel a little like we’re losing ground, or we’re becoming more of a second-tier city than we like to believe we are."
That’s a hard thing to quantify, but it can have very real economic consequences, especially when it comes to building a strong work force. A lot of talented people moved to St. Louis to work at A-B, or for the law firms and ad agencies it kept busy all over the city. Will they come to a branch office town? Will there be jobs for them?
We don’t know yet, Fisher said. But the answers will say a lot about what happens next for St. Louis’ economy.
"The key dimension here is human capital. It’s talent," he said. "The question is how well will St. Louis stand up as companies look for the best and the brightest?"
And that poses a fourth way of looking at what the purchase of Anheuser-Busch has meant for St. Louis: that, maybe, it’s not such a bad thing.
InBev bought A-B, after all, because it wanted Budweiser.
It wanted the Clydesdales and the beechwood aging process and that red-and-white label touting the King of Beers. "America in a bottle," InBev CEO Carlos Brito called the beer, and he pledged to use his company’s global reach to sell it in markets Anheuser-Busch had struggled to tap. If he succeeds, that will mean jobs for people who make and sell Budweiser and other A-B products, and some of those jobs will likely be here. Benefits will accrue to the birthplace of Bud.
And InBev anointed St. Louis as its headquarters for North America, the place where it now sells one-third of its beer. While it has beefed up operations in New York, it has also moved high-level executives here. It is placing a big bet on this continent, and the base of operations for that is Pestalozzi Street.
That gives some comfort to U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri. She was among those in Congress who rattled sabers against the deal last summer but now says it has mostly been "a success for St. Louis."
"They have made a very good effort," she said.
Indeed, St. Louis could do worse than to be the North American headquarters of a huge global company, notes Lewis. If St. Louis remains a key point on the company’s map, that helps plug the city back in to the very same fast-moving global economy that gobbled up A-B.
"That’s powerful. North America’s a big place," he said. "To the degree we can push that sort of thing, it says we’re part of the world."
Still there’s no denying that the solidity Anheuser-Busch represented in this town is gone.
Office buildings that used to hum with A-B staffers in Sunset Hills now sit empty. Suppliers and ad agencies have seen their revenue squeezed. Good jobs — the kind you build a career on — have disappeared.
And for those who lost them, it has been hard to find new ones, said Blair Forlaw, who runs a work force development program that has helped dozens of laid-off Anheuser IT workers. Most have landed just temporary contract work — another sign of this new global economy and the uncertainty that goes with it.
Jeremiah McWilliams of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
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