If you haven’t heard, the Kansas City Chiefs have made application to trademark their own brand of beer. Now when you get drunk on the Chiefs brand beer and you have an accident on the way home, you can blame it on Clark Hunt.
@Chiefs have apparently entered the beer market. On May 16 the organization filed a #trademark application for a brand of beer… KINGDOM BLONDE ALE.
The application was filed based on an "intent to use"… perhaps coming to Arrowhead this fall? pic.twitter.com/C4HA7n1BxX
— Josh Gerben (@JoshGerben) May 21, 2018
It’s Capitalism with a capital “C” because everyone wants a piece of the pie, even if that pie is is morally and ethically bankrupt. Many will want to argue that they already sell beer at the stadium just like they do in every other stadium in the US of A.
I do get the reasons people like beer. I used to live across the street from a history professor at UMKC and his invitation to our party ended in a hysterical presentation of historical proportions about how beer could be traced to the beginnings of each culture or civilization on the planet. Is that a good reason to drink it? Perhaps… history doesn’t lie. Is that a good reason to sell it? Only if you are only interested in making money and nothing else.
Back in 1986 I took one year off from teaching ostensibly to get my master’s degree by taking day-time courses. I found out after I took the job that graduate level courses in education are only offered during the evening so I finished out the year and moved onto another school district. During that year I took a job as a theater manager and one of my responsibilities was to order the carbonation as well as the syrups for Coke, Sprite, Root Beer and such. During that time I found out that Coke was the biggest seller because you could make 85 cents on the dollar for every sold Coke. It was less for other sodas but the point is… it’s just flavored liquid and instead of drinking water for free, people pay a lot of money for flavored water. Here, take a look at the already elevated price of Beer at Arrowhead:
This is from an article called, “Why Your Glass of Wine Costs So Much — Or Does It?”
- “Wine by the glass is typically marked up 300 percent.
- Markups on cocktails, however, are typically 500 percent, due mainly to higher labor costs per drink.
- Draft beer markups take the prize: They can exceed 600 percent.”
By marketing the Chiefs own brand of beer, they can get you coming and going. Owners of NFL teams are really just getting on the bandwagon. In the 1980s there were 80 breweries in the U.S. and in 2009 that number jumped to 1600. On one hand you can understand them wanting to get in on the action… on the other hand, alcoholism is at an all time high.
What I’d hate to see is owners abdicating their responsibility to support health in their communities. You see them taking up the cause of breast cancer awareness… while turning their backs on the ten percent (and rising) who have alcoholism. It hardly makes any sense.
My older brother was addicted to alcohol for 27 years of his life. Now, it no longer defines him as he’s been dry for 20+ years. However, I know how it can destroy a life and a family. Some fans may ask… “what does this have to do with football?” Exactly, what does alcohol have to do with football? Why sell it? Why become part of the problem instead of the solution?
The same… and perhaps even worse problem exists as owners are getting more and more blind to drawing healthy lines by asking if gambling could become apart of their sport. I realize a large part of our culture gambles and does so for entertainment, recreation and pleasure. People appear to have stopped asking, “What kind of world do we want our kids to grow up in?” That seems to be the furthest thing from their minds anymore.
Back in 1986 when, I managed a theater in NKC, the Missouri Lottery system had just started up… supposedly to benefit education. The first set of 500 tickets that they brought me (and this was true of every batch of 500 tickets) which was worth $500 dollars (at $1 per ticket) had exactly $63.50 worth of winners in it. I recall my first thought being… if I buy this whole pack of 500 tickets for $500 then I could make $63.50… which seemed so ridiculous to me that it sounded like taxes… so why pay out your hard earned money for a 12.7% chance to win anything at all? I guess the real reason people do it is to take a chance at becoming the next ka-zillionaire… no matter how low those odds are… maybe it gives the paupers… hope… of becoming a prince or princess (whatever the delusion may be). In the end… I thought… it just made more poor people out of the rest of us. Fewer haves… and many, many more have-nots. Also as a teacher of 39 years, I never saw one penny of that “Lottery” money helping out in any classroom that I’d ever been in. It certainly didn’t end up in any teacher’s paychecks and you wouldn’t believe how little I get on a teacher’s pension… after 39 years.
Every radio station in Kansas City that I listen to seems to be defending people who want to gamble, if they care to. As states toil with the idea that the US Supreme Courts has passed giving each state the right to set their own laws concerning sports betting, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has muddied the water by issuing a statement asking Congress for, “uniform standards for states that choose to legalize sports betting.” In other words, the NFL owners are talking about it… but don’t want to look like the bad-guys as they venture into the world of betting but, it’s coming. Otherwise, why send a franchise to Las Vegas? Of course, there’s only one Evil Empire… err, I mean franchise… that makes sense for such a move.
In the meantime, “Over 80 percent of American adults gamble on a yearly basis” and more alarming than that, “As many as 750,000 young people, ages 14 to 21 has a gambling addiction.”
In my mind, the newest form of bias and prejudice comes from people saying, “that’s their problem.” It’s not only a them vs. us challenge, but one that supports the idea that people to can, and do, live in a vacuum. I’ve seen this coming. Kids and adults everywhere are stuck in the reality of their own device, their “smart” phone. Not so smart after all.
I grew up learning songs like, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”… “No Man is an Island”… “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”… “Everybody Get Together”… “I am a Rock”… all which teach the simple lessons and blessings of “community” and “connection.” These are the lessons I learned, which I now see fading from our culture. These are also the principles upon which this site was built.
It’s just one man’s opinion. What do you all think about the Chiefs branding a beer label and the league exploring gambling?
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