eBay and Beer Sales

Cite the law!

 

Someone, please explain Ann - never on eBay - yet worth $400 of beer here.

 

Ah, a lawyer... well Law Dawg... law don't go 'round here see....

What state, and what license do you have and I will get you that law.

Here is NYS:
(Sections 94, 105.8, 105.9 and 116 - ABC Law, and Rule 10 of the Rules of the State Liquor Authority [9 NYCRR 67])

Also KEWL GUY... you need a license from the state liquir authority... to even start to talk about LEGALITY

 

Yep, I'm good.

Also, these laws aren't enforced. Much like States with laws that say "if you are female, you must drive more than 25' away from any other vehicle".

 

YOU WIN!

 

Bud sells on ebay all the time. You just have to age it.

 

KEWL DAWG!

 

I'm not a lawyer... I don't pretend to be... but I'm pretty sure that even selectively and sporadically enforced laws are still laws.

Even though ICE doesn't inspect every shipping container coming into the country, I'm pretty sure human trafficking through the ports is still a no-no.

 

That's a pretty perverse description of a free market. Is it the libertarian utopia of a free market? No, I guess. But they can sell the beer at their brewery and in any state they bother to get a license to sell in (with a couple of exceptions) at any price they want.

The fundamental problem is that brewers are not listening to what the market is telling them. Their beers are far more valuable than what they currently charge. As long as that discrepancy is so vast people will scramble to acquire as much as they can, because the beer is still so relatively inexpensive compared to its actual value. They seem pretty determined to force egalitarianism down the beer public's throat (and a good number of beer geeks who couldn't afford all the beers they want if they were priced more appropriately agree).

But as long as people stick their head in the sand and say damn the demand we'll charge as much for this as if we had ten times that amount to sell then someone else will be encouraged to exploit that discrepancy.

So there are two choices: raise prices and increase supply until a more proper equilibrium is reached, or continue to inact half measures and deal with the fallout: gray markets and the inability to get the beer into the hands of all the people who feel one way or the other that they were entitled to it (due to geographic proximity and/or interest combined with capacity to afford said bottle).

I say this with no great relish as we move towards a world where there exists a wide swath of beers I can't afford, but if that doesn't become the case then brewers are doing it wrong in a Quixotic effort to please everyone.

 

absolutely nothing about living in a (perceived) free market society excuses you from the obligation to be respectful of others or to act ethically. this seems to be one of the central things people these days don't understand.

notably, this attitude being widespread in other people probably hurts you, personally, in so many ways that you couldn't keep track of them all even if you quit your job and went to school solely to study all the ways. yet, the attitude helps people with lots of wealth inordinately. getting people like you to adopt the attitude yourself is the greatest scam in history.

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i know ebay isn't very important in the grand scheme of things, but small scale exhibitions of one's values reveal the large scale ones. your first thought when someone does something shady should not be "well, that's the market, nothing we robots can do about it."

 

Okay what about the liquor sales? There are lots of overpriced bottles of Pappy on there.

 

this would only be true in a world without free will. the market isn't some kind of deity, and people are not forced by it (or anything else) to sell beer, even if someone will buy it. whether or not one can make a profit is not the only factor that motivates action.

notice, that while you may think this is coming from a place of egalitarian idealism or something, slow down and realize that what i'm saying is true. like, obvious, look over at the person sitting next to you true. it just is not the case that if you sell someone an apple for $1 and tell them someone down the street will buy it from them for $2 that they are forced by physics to run down the street and sell the apple.

posts like yours ignore this simple fact, and i wonder what the motivation for doing so is...

 

That's precisely why they should be exploited. If I could buy a car worth 30k for 20k I'd be an idiot not to but it. Heck, I'd be an idiot not to buy three and sell two and get a free car and make money on top.

You could then yell at me for exploiting poor Ford and all the people who lost out on the great deal they were offering, but I acted perfectly rationally.

And in this analogy Ford doesn't take to the Internet or after market to complain about what I've done, they raise the price on their car.

Beer industry is hampered not by gray market traders and sellers but by the insistence that their most special beers don't have great value because they are desired by far more people than will ever be able to try them. It's not enough to make MOST of their beer affordable and available, it ALL must be affordable to almost every customer. If they decide to pervert the market, then let them deal with the fallout: customers who still aren't satisfied with the effort to make the beer accessible because THEY didn't get any and others hoarding it and selling/trading it.

We can get mighty upset at those gray market sellers if we'd like but the truth is they acted rationally: they saw something selling for far less than what it was worth and did what they could to exploit that inefficiency.

Remove the incentive and you remove the problem. Fighting this "problem" by going after the distribution channel is doing nothing to address the underlying issue.

 

You're substituting words and motivations that are inaccurate to pervert the meaning of what I said.

Speaking from an economics perspective there is a market inefficiency: there is beer worth X but the brewer is only charging Y.

This creates an incentive for people to exploit that gap.

I did not say you HAVE to do this, but it is perfectly rational to notice this incentive and act on it. If brewers choose to ignore economic realities, then they are inadvertently continuing to provide a much greater incentive for a gray market than any of their subsequent efforts to impede it will provide in counter.

 

Pliny > Heady. Sorry wrong argument...

eBay > Craigslist

 

I'm currently reading a book by Harvard Professor Michael Sandal entitled "Justice: What's the right thing to do." It could offer some correctives to many of the "assumptions" I'm reading here on "free market societies" and the debate over fairness and equality in the marketplace. A good read imo, and useful for more than just BA forums! I'm assuming of course that we care about being educated.

 

Yeah, at least when I buy my $500 wAle on eBay I don't get ***** when I go to pick it up!

 

if you choose to ignore the wishes of brewers and the communities they serve, what are you doing?

edit: notice, i am trying to highlight that your talk of the market ignores personal responsibility. i don't know if you don't understand this or don't want to accept this, but it's true.

 

The problem with Craigslist is the sellers have to set their prices beforehand. People these days are way too lazy to engage in over the phone/email/text based auctions when they had eBay so readily available.