If you haven’t heard about the Bud Light controversy, then you probably don’t drink Bud Light. Maybe a good thing? In case you’re out of the loop, Bud Light put Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender, on their label to basically try to get more people to drink their beer. As with any business, their main goal was to get their brand out to a wider audience. What happened instead was a huge backlash from conservative America yelling “go woke, go broke” as they boycotted Bud Light because…well, obvious reasons.

Did it work? Depends on who you ask. Ask the people who joined the boycott and they will tell you that Bud Light sales have steeply declined thanks to them not buying a case of Bud Light every week. Or maybe they did buy it, just to show other people how cool it would be to shoot at the cans. Regardless, Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing is stepping down and data shows that Bud Light sales have truly taken a dip across the country. So the boycott worked right?

Sales of Bud Light have declined month after month since this happened. You know what else has seen a decline in sales? Pretty much everything else. Seems like everybody just simply forgot about inflation rates making huge headlines just a couple of months ago… when everybody was complaining about how all of a sudden, their grocery bill seemed to double overnight. So, when things cost more, people tend to focus on spending their money on the little things, like food and rent. You know what they’re not spending money on? Clothes, electronics, drugs and alcohol, etc. If you take a look at any report on retail sales, you will see it’s declined across the board as people try to figure out how to navigate the current economic climate.

So the answer is yes, the boycott worked. It worked during a time that allowed it to work. A time when people would prefer to buy food rather than alcohol, or switch to a cheaper alternative if given the opportunity. It worked because beer sales have already been on a decline due to a variety of other reasons, like the introduction of craft beers and alcoholic seltzers, and the legalization of weed in several states. Seriously, in a country where you can walk into a grocery store and choose a hundred different things to drink, why would Bud Light be your choice of beverage?