Ohio Division of Liquor Control reportedly looking into Hopslam fiasco
The post to online message board Reddit got more than 100 comments. People started peppering the Facebook wall of Savor Growl, a Clintonville beer and wine shop that opened last year. Someone created a fake Savor Growl Twitter account (“Retailing unethically, one hard-to-find beer at a time”). Others contacted Bell’s and Ohio’s Division of Liquor Control, which is investigating whether any laws were broken.
More >> The Columbus Dispatch.
Breweries: Bell's Brewery
Beers: Bell's Hopslam
Milking the numbers, deceptive inventory practices, and outright lying to give large chain stores a huge advantage in Hopslam allocation: Standard operating procedure, no one raises an eyebrow.
One retailer does what is standard practice in every other retail model in the country: Everyone loses their minds. Hang him!
If you believe allocation numbers are based solely on Bell’s sales, you are being naive. It is barely concealed cronyism.
Even if your small, private store *could* sell more Two Hearted Ale than any particular chain store, the distributors regularly ensure that the chain stores get first crack at any available product. So the big dudes will have coolers full of fresh beer while your invoice comes in out of stock – EVEN IF you intended to order more product than them. It’s used as a scheme to reward stores who sell more mainline products like Jack Daniels, Bacardi, etc. We are pawns in their big-money game.
But then, what else is new?
Yes Ryan, chain stores do get first dibs on items like this for a couple of reasons.
1. They have probably supported the Bells brand and get a crack at special stuff
2. Stellar performance selling their products at competitive prices w/o Price Gouging
3. Moves through all of their products quickly with little to no date issues.
As a brewery, you want the freshest product possible for your consumers, and you don’t want it to expire because you just lose money on it. So they have a choice, give small stores that don’t support the brand as much as bigger stores and risk potentially buying back out of date product, or put it in a store that you know will sell it, and sell it quickly, and will not have any date issues at all. I don’t want to assume anything, but if you were the owner of Bells, you would use the same strategy too.