eBay and Beer Sales

Exactly! Very simple to understand this, for some reason it evades people.

 

If I were a collector of beer bottles, I would find unopened bottles to be significantly more desirable than an empty one.
Are there any numismatists here? Any philatelists? Any of you ever been a collector of anything?
Is a uncirculated coin worth more than a circulated one, an unused and unhinged stamp worth more than a used one, and an unused or unopened item worth more than a used or opened item?

Many one-time and annual beer releases are distributed in bottles that bare exclusive labels; artists, often local to the respective brewery, commissioned to design artwork exclusively for a single release.

There is more to the artistry of craft beer than the beer.

http://americancraftbeer.com/item/the-art-of-the-craft-beer-label.html
www.pourcurator.com

 

So since we're all aware of that, you had and have nothing to add to the discussion is what I'm understanding.

 

No, and honestly, $10 750's of saisons seems PRETTY REASONABLE TO ME

 

I would like to meet the 14 year old who is stocking up on Whales off ebay for their 21st birthday bash.

 

What you'd call my momma?

 

Hi, I'm Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC. Why don't you have a seat...

 

Lets say forget all the free market shit forget brewer himself, forget the corporate aspect of everything. Profit, supply and demand all that shit. I have regular customers at the store I work at, and some of them even have rather common or "shitty" taste in beer as I'm sure so many would say. On multiple occurrences several of them some with "better" taste than others, have come up to me and say hey I occasionally enjoy something hoppy and wanted to check this Hopslam beer out. It was on your facebook, or a neighbor/friend/co-worker told me about it, I have to look him in the face and say sorry your a normal person with a job kids bills/debt what have you, in order to try Hopslam you have to have none of those things take of work for a day and follow hop and wine trucks around the state to try and get 10 cases of Hopslam so you can show all your buddy's and "Cellar it". Fuck that shit. That same person is still going to come in several times a week and buy BMC, Diagio, or what ever the fuck after I tell him that, and Im going to sell out of 20 cases of Hopslam in two hours, twice! regardless of wether he gets any. So what reason do I have to be upset? That man brings me business every week some people daily and I have to tell him that not only is he not getting any but he's not getting any because people who have NEVER shopped at my store drove from the next state over with a car full of people to get as many of what ever limited release in order to meet our bottle limit. On top of that for even smaller releases like CBS Im taking a hundred phone calls a day asking: whats your bottle limit? do you hold? do you have any left? from the same people who never shop here. I want the guy who stops in because he's staying somewhere in town randomly to get a bottle of CBS or Frangelic or Ruination 10th I want my regular to get one Im especially happy to see BMC regulars get one. Some of the people just come in and don't even browse the store!?!?! (If you love beer so much have a look around) they just walk up to the counter and ask for or even DEMAND a bottle from one of us. No please, No thank you. No small talk or have a nice day. Just give me my bottle and I'm out. (These people are called ass holes, sphincters if you will?) and because of them I have to tell my regular to fuck off when in reality its the other guy who should be fucking off. Its really that simple. People turning beer into an elitist hobby for no fucking reason is stupid and selfish.

 

That would just make you the hoarder.
Haha I kid, I kid.

 

I'm not sure how far you intend for the baseball card analogy to go (maybe just the first paragraph), but I find it a faulty analogy, since there is no way to consume a baseball card.

 

Said I wasn't gonna post again, hope this will end it.

To those arguing free market: I'm right there with you. I'm a libertarian. A free market would be one I could order any beer I wanted directly from any brewery, pay the freight , and be done. A free market would be when a brewery could ship any beer to any state.

The entirety of all arguments here-myself included- is how to manipulate a market that is anything but free so it can properly suit your personal needs.

I am selfish. True, I like the idea of a community, and in fact my selfishness is for this community. It is an attempt to manipulate the selling of beer so that it most benefits me/us. Who is me/us? The community I speak of is the one that really enjoys trying different beers, really enjoys sharing different beers, really can't afford to pay 200.00 a bottle on ebay, really wants the winds of inevitable change to blow in as slowly as possible so we can enjoy these things in the way we have enjoyed them for as long as possible. ebay was/is the tornado at the center of those winds.

Don't care about morality, don't care if the locals get theirs.

Don't care in what useless ways the economic savants here want to paint a picture of free trade to explain others/rationalize themselves. Using that argument is like trying to decide the right way to paint a rainbow and only have two colors to use.

I want mine/ours, I want things as they were/are for as long as possible, and eventually I want a truly free market where I can go to a website of any brewery and order beer, and in which the laws preventing free trade become eased enough to encourage the amount of production needed to satisfy our demand at a reasonable price. Thanks.

 

If ebay "was/is" the tornado at the center of those winds, then it becomes important to understand the factors that created the tornado. It wasn't ebay. Ebay didn't create the storm of demand that attracted the sellers. Tornados don't create themselves, they are created by other forces.

What created the demand? It was sites like this and their tickers and collectors and traders who created the storm fronts that produced the tornado that was/is ebay. Take another example, Westvleteren 12 will never again be a beer almost nobody has ever heard of except a few folks in Belgium who used to be able to quietly use one phone, make one phone call and reserve beer for pick up. That changed when the internet storm fronts created demand. It is because of the internet and sites like BA and RB, etc. When Westvlteren 12 popped to the top of the charts on RB/BA the storm and demand were created. Trading, ticking, collecting, ebay, BA, RB all fed off the same forces of easy interconnectivity and exchange.

 

You are correct, the tornado feeds off many things. My point is it starts with the lack of free trade, this is the general weather condition in which these factors create what they do. Here, let me use this analogy. In this country we are free to sell our own books, and ship them anywhere. Imagine this:

I wish my book could be cheaper, and that people weren't reselling copies on ebay for $250.00. Unfortunately, by law I am required not to distribute my book myself, and have to sell my book to a publishing house, and the publishing house is required to sell it to a distributor, and the distributor is limited to how it can deal with the book, and only specialized, licensed, taxed, and regulated stores may accept delivery from a distributor. I wish my book was available in all states, but many states make a book with 300 pages illegal to sell, many states require only certain stores on certain days can sell the book (sometimes even govt. controlled/owned stores), other states won't appove the title of the book, other states require labeling different from other states, other states require the charging of money to cover recycling costs of the paper,other states want to tax my book sales unfairly, and some states even try to make reading my books illegal. One state even requires readers to purchase a case of books, even if the customer only wants one. Maybe these laws will change, and someday we can all, cheaply and easily, buy books at any store, even directly from me.

 

well that is simply a states rights thing. I doubt that these states want to give up that power they fought the AHA bill to the death and lost. While the 3 tier system is stupid to us NOW, at the time it made sense. right? maybe, maybe not?

 

Craft beer isn't just a consumable. The market (us here on BA and RB, ebay, Craigslist, etc.) has determined that it has collectible value. The rarer bottles are worth more on the secondary market in both trade value and dollar value. I think you could say that brewery-only releases are like insert cards in packs of baseball cards. Not really seeing how you find it a faulty analogy.

 

Collectability stems from its consumability. The collectability argument for eBay is nothing more than exploiting a loophole to circumvent the rules. I can't believe too many of you can make this argument with a straight face, we all know it is BS.

If you want to talk about collectible beer items, lets talk breweriana, lets talk vintage cans from breweries that have not existed for years. Those are collected, there are events and conventions just like baseball cards, stamps and coins. I am sorry but people do not collect CBS, Black Tuesday, Darkness in the same way. Unless you are talking antique breweriana, the only reason beer is collectible, valued more than its listed price, is because people are willing to pay more to consume it.

 

oh fudge. i guess this means i'll have to actually drink the beers i've accumulated? going forward i might also have to be a little bit more accepting & satisfied with the abysmal plethora of locally available craft? oh the horror.

personally, i'm not bothered by the development. while i've only window shopped mostly to day dream about what absurd prices i might be able to rake in if that were my thing, i've never participated in any EB auction for any product.

 

Of course the value is in its consumption. I don't think the source of desirability is the point. I watched the baseball card explosion first hand when I was young, and saw the whole thing with every new toy that came out (Beanie Babies, Furbys, whatever) from afar, and what has happened here reminds me of that. I never said it was a perfect analogy, but I think it's the closest thing we have.

Finally, I think the cellars of BA's with 1000+ bottles and 12 each of Black Tuesday, CBS, and other whales would say something a little different in terms of collectibility. Hoarding is just another name for collecting in this community, in my opinion.

 

Sneaky underrated upshot of this decision - people can now easily search for breweriana without wading through thousands of bottles. As someone who likes to poke around for breweriana, it's going to be really nice to just type in "Cantillon" and quickly see what I want without scrolling through pages and pages of bottles.