I was ready today to have a blog post about the chaotic transition from RED two weeks ago to GREEN on Friday. It was going to be nice.
Well, no it wasn’t. None of this is nice, of course. But it was going to be familiar enough. And about business.
Then, one of the companies we pseudo-sponsor, ChikaraPRO Wrestling, became embroiled in the allegations of misconduct, and basically the whole roster has quit. Mike Quackenbush, the man who runs Chikara, has shuttered the promotion and temporarily and removed himself until further notice.
For the many, many people who aren’t fans: Professional wrestling (like journalism, the restaurant industry, etc.) has been having its own moment of social justice, with the #SpeakingOut movement calling out abusive and unfair behavior. The impact has been sweeping basically all levels, from WWE to the smallest promotions, over the past couple weeks. We were going to use their image and name, with permission, on our next batch of Beso Exotico, and we in the past partnered with a faction called The Colony, for obvious reasons.
I’d say we were stunned to find that this has hit Chikara, but I’m not sure anyone can be stunned by much, anymore, especially in niche spaces like wrestling. We are disheartened, and sad, and legitimately heartbroken for the wrestlers who are finding out about this. It makes it worse that one of the things many liked about Chikara was their (and Quack’s) truly progressive approach to a lot of the things in wrestling.
The Colony faction
In happier times
Let’s do the simple stuff first:
We will probably not be working with Chikara in the future. At the moment, I’m not sure anyone will. We hope the wrestlers and people whose passion and work we enjoyed find good nearby places to work, and we can continue to support them in the future.
There’s no real clarity on if Quack himself did anything wrong. At the very least, it seems like a lot of truly bad things happened under his watch. As a business owner, I have empathy for that responsibility and how fragile it can be. As a human being, I also understand everyone’s disgust and desire for answers. Either way, it’s not acceptable and it appears Quack knows it.
We’ll be redoing the labels for Beso, of course. We’re hoping to use the proceeds to support Dropkick Depression, a nonprofit dedicated to helping mental health in the wrestling community.
Okay, now the complicated stuff.
It’s difficult not to look at independent wrestling and see similarities to mead, and really craft beverage. There’s a reason niche spaces tend to work together, after all. Whether it’s small brands in cigars, wrestling, alcohol, punk music, games, ren faires, local theatre companies, whatever… we all have the shared experience of caring deeply about something most of the world doesn’t, and that can bring natural feelings of closeness and camaraderie. This feeling of a close-knit community is part of what attracts so many people to care about these things. Indeed, it’s what made me start writing about craft beer 15 years ago now.
Of course, close-knit communities all can develop a dark side. For one thing, when our shared passion group is small, we tend to ignore or tolerate in others around us faults we would not in someone else. Many, many groups have members they know have some pretty odious ideas or issues with rage against various groups, but we let them go, because… it’s already such a small community? We don’t want to judge? We’re sure that guy/girl is harmless? I’ve heard all of these; I’m not proud to say I’ve probably thought most of them at one point or another. This tolerance for bad seeds in our apples, combined with an ugly but all-too-common resentment at the outside world for thinking we’re weird, can manifest itself in cliquishness, hazing, and outright abuse. I can at least say I’ve never enjoyed or tolerated those behaviors, especially in my business, but I can understand why they arise.
With everything going on right now, there’s been a renewed impulse to figure out what we can do better as companies and industries. If you are unfamiliar with the basic demographics of the mead world… you’re probably not stunned to learn that there’s a lot of white men. It actually feels a lot like the early days of craft beer (which has gotten a little better, but still has a long ways to go), though probably we have more women-led meaderies than early beer did.
In an earlier post, I mentioned our corporate culture of disdain for platitudes, and how hard it is to take concrete action. Locally, our James Beard Award-winning restaurant Bolete announced that they’d be making donations to various organizations and supporting urban farming. Some breweries have tried to use can releases to raise awareness or money for causes they support. Other companies are already finding that it’s easier to make a social media post than to enact policies that go along with it.
On a systemic level, though, most people I respect agree that lasting change won’t come until people at the top of an org chart look different, whether that is the NFL or Starbucks or Founders Brewing. This raises a difficult question for small, family-owned businesses, because there’s no real way to do that, since the top of the org chart are the owners, whose jobs are usually the worst in the company, as far as compensation goes. There are about a dozen craft breweries in the valley, and all are owned by white men or white couples. In every single one of these companies, advancement for anyone - including an employee of color - is going to be limited by the very nature of the businesses.
A lot of jobs in craft beverage aren’t very good; in fact, being able to even take one is often a sign of privilege. Which does not, as you might imagine, make me (or anyone) feel that great about what we’re doing here.
Jobs with us are a mixed bag. On one hand, we don’t care much about education or history. If you’re a manager, the state runs a background check, so they might care about felonies, but we generally don’t even ask (unless you have a history of embezzlement; that we might ask about). On the other, a large number of our jobs do require you to have a car, or do a lot of manual labor. And of course, you have the customers, whose behavior is, granted, generally awesome, but the exceptions can be… a lot to deal with.
We do, I think, a good job of avoiding the general service industry incestuousness pitfalls. Our employees mostly aren’t from our industry; we’ve hired a corrections officer, a writer, an artist or two, a viking, some warehouse workers… you get the idea.
Real talk: Of the hiring decisions we have been able to make in our almost eight years, I think we’ve been pretty good on gender; we’ve had more female managers than male, and people of all sexual orientations.
I can remember exactly one person of color ever applying. We hired him. He was murdered a few months later at a party on New Year’s Eve.
Of course, he was likely not the only one who ever applied; we get dozens of applications and we use the same stupid filtering process that everyone does to get it down to a manageable number of interviews; we look for relevant experience and the ability to write a decent cover email, which of course allows room for unconscious bias. So we will be looking at ways to remove some of that in the future with our hiring process. But hourly jobs with no benefits and lots of uncertainty are often not that appealing, no matter how we adjust process.
It’s difficult to know how to help build the community I think our industry desperately needs when, as often as not, it feels like giving someone a job with us is inflicting hardship upon them.
So we do what most places do: We try to support causes we care about in the community; we try to support businesses and people that we feel good about; we sponsor what we can. And we all do it knowing it hasn’t been enough, and it’s not likely to suddenly be enough now.
So many things come down to money. If we had more, we could create better jobs and commit to better hiring; we could fund and support programs that interest new groups of people in this industry I love so much; I could lay myself off and hire someone else with a fresher perspective as CEO (and pay them something like a living wage). But, of course, we can’t, because starting a business is expensive, and growing it very expensive, and a global pandemic turns out to be unbelievably expensive.
Given all that, it feels totally empty to say that we know we need to do better. And yet, I know we do. Because I don’t want craft beer or mead to get to the point where so many people are damaged that a reckoning like the one that happened to Chikara is the only way to deal with it.
