Bourbon-Gate: 2019
In the state of Michigan, we are governed by the Michigan Liquor Control Commission-better known by Michiganders as the MLCC. As with most government-run agencies, funds are low and expectations are high. Liquor store owners sit on their iPads waiting for allocated bottles of liquor, and in this case, bourbon to become available for purchase in the online database. Larger stores don’t need to refresh their feed every minute to ensure they received these bottles. Their distributor takes care of them due to the high purchase volume per year. The small store owners are where this article focuses. The MLCC has been manipulated by a couple of small stores before and it happened again at the end of September/ early October 2019. We will refer to this instance as Birthday Bourbon-gate.
As allocation season approached, I was eager to track down a few “bucket list” bourbons, one of which was Older Forester Birthday Bourbon. It was getting good reviews (mostly from the bloggers who were allocated samples to promote products prior to their release) and I didn’t have one at the time. Once I saw the first post in the state-wide bourbon group, I immediately noticed the store one particular member mentioned was one I shopped at regularly. Unfortunately, I was heading out of town before the post came in and I was at a disadvantage. I immediately contacted the owner and used my constant support to see if he would hold one of the bottles the store received until I was back from a quick weekend trip. He agreed and there was my first allocated bottle of the season. If only it was that easy for other bourbon lovers...
While I was ultimately able to get my hands on the bottle that was set aside for me, what I soon came to find out would jeopardize others’ chances of obtaining the bottle that was sitting in the back room with my name scratched onto a yellow sticky note. The email you can find below was sent out to all of the accounts in the state and ended up in my hands, although I am not sure it was meant to. To paraphrase, a certain store gamed the MLCC ordering system by watching/ refreshing the stock on the webpage, waiting for certain allocated stock to show up as ‘available’. Once that said store placed the initial order, they knew to call a certain phone number to add addition bottles on top of the online order, which can max out for certain products. This store ordered 10 cases of Old Forester Birthday Bourbon, which is a once a year limited release-in total that adds up to 60 bottles. You would assume this would get flagged by the database but to my amazement, this was not the first time in the past couple years this has happened. The first store to pull off a similar scam was back in 2016 when Russel’s Reserve 2001 was dropped. I’d expect the employees in the office would catch when this happens and wouldn’t fulfill the order but for some reason, this one slipped through the cracks. One store in the state got over half of the states allocation!
How would you expect the distributor, the state and the stores to make this up to customers who were expecting their bottle(s) that they have been receiving as a result of years-long brand loyalty? The first step was to ask for them back in order to redistribute to the correct stores who earned the allocation. When the distributor went to the store and asked for the bottles, the store owner denied the request and did not want sell any back to the state. They knew the gold mine they were sitting on and as my good buddy says “possession is 9/10ths of the law”. As news spread across various local Facebook groups, members decided to contact the store to see if they could get their hands on the loot. Let me ask you, if someone never supported your local business and came in asking for your best product at the best price you can legally provide, would you give it to them? Obviously they wouldn’t and didn’t. The store owner was rightfully not talking about his price for the bottle over the phone and was quoting $350 once you met face to face in the store. Do you blame him?
The three tier system is not perfect. We all know it and complain about it but do little to actually change it. When I first heard about Birthday Bourbongate, I become frustrated with the system and was perplexed as to how a store could pull this off after it was already done 3 years earlier. How did we not fix the error that was exploited years prior? How do we not learn from our mistakes? Ultimately, I feel terrible for the employee(s) that let this slip. The pressure put on the distributor because of this error was enormous. Stores spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on certain brands and hold stock in their back rooms that they might not even be able to sell in that calendar year to ensure they qualify by holiday season. For them to let down customers that keep them in business puts a strain on the relationships developed over time. I can’t blame the store owner, he did what he felt was best for his store. He has customers who support his store and I’m sure they received Birthday Bourbon at a fair price. The rest of us bourbon-hunting savages get the $350 secondary price tag. Unfortunately for the store, the state is clearly aware of what they did and the store will not receive any allocated products for a while.
Some feel it’s better to not only have a State Minimum but also a State Maximum. Stopping stores from charging secondary prices could reduce the greed from store owners but won’t stop who is granted access to certain bottles. Most are distributed to stores that sell the most product, so if you are a smaller store, how do you keep up? This error allows smaller stores to get bottles they typically can’t sell enough product to qualify for. Would it be fair for each store to have a chance at the allocated bottles and not just the stores that sell the most product? Other States such as Ohio and Utah believe they have solved for these issues by holding state wide lotteries for the right to purchase at the particular state’s minimum pricing. Others have taken the entire Barrel picking allotment for the state to be picked by their control board for each individual selection.
How about the small shop that has been buying private barrels for years before the bourbon-boom; should they be left behind? Some of these concerns are floating around the community and store owners are now trying to work with the state to fix the errors in the system. They are also trying to leverage relationships to continue to retain the amount of private barrels they receive per year and not be forgotten about entirely. If you ask any store the numbers have been going down but don’t get your hopes up-this doesn’t mean the three tier system is changing. That said, if you had a chance to change the system how would you change it? Would you?
Sincerely,
B-in-B
