Ad Age ran an opinion piece by Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland, an ad agency (with I believe no relationship to CJP’s own Wilson Cleveland), about InBev’s new bill paying practice. InBev, the beverage company that bought Anheuser-Busch, “has unilaterally and summarily announced that it is going to take up to 120 days to pay its bills.” This is in an effort to “stay lean.”
This almost seems like bullying and it could really hurt vendors – agencies or any other vendor relationship. Hopefully, other companies won’t consider this as an industry-wide best practice no matter how tough the times. Whichever way you slice it, vendors can not foot the bill for their clients when everyone has overhead business costs to pay to make sure the company can function properly.
As consumers, we can’t tell the electric company, the cable company, the mobile service provider and the bank that we’ve decided not to pay our bills for four months so our check books look fat. And, corporations shouldn’t be able to do that either. It’s just wrong. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.
