Bourbon County 2017

In all honesty that a decision and answer that I couldn't give you. I could try and get back to you though.
I'm starting to think I should've just continued lurking in the background

 

I wouldn't blame you. I'm sure we all appreciate you trying to educate us on how binnys works and add to the overall discussion but don't get yourself in any trouble!!

 

Today's brewhouse bottles:
’16 ORIGINAL
’16 BARLEYWINE
’16 COFFEE
’17 COFFEE
’17 NORTHWOODS

 

I think for the most part what you're doing is appreciated, or at least I hope it is. We all know the entire process at Binny's is way bigger than any one person. As a consumer and a customer it's frustrating seeing company after company never making a decision. The bigger a company gets the more moving pieces their are and I think most of us would just like to see either a "yeah we'll do this" or "no we can't do it" rather than a being discussed constantly. Regardless the insight you provide here has been excellent and you do open yourself up to a lot by posting here.

 

I think your time estimations are a bit off. The requirements gathering alone will take more than a few hours.

 

Ha I stopped in there after work tonight. They also said they'll be tapping 17 Reserve, Northwoods and regular. Keep an eye on their website.

 

Binny's has recently started crediting accounts for discounts on beer, which they historically never did. I have been a Binny's card holder for 7-8 yrs...So now they send me multiple emails every week, mostly for items I have no interest in.
Why can't they get their algorithms squared away and send me email for Bourbon County, BTAC, and Pappy, which basically is all I need from them. They sponsor the Blackhawk's, why can't they get this right?

 

For anyone non-butthurt by Binny's, there are still about 5 cases of regular on the floor at the Algonquin location as of a few hours ago.

 

I certainly appreciate you coming on here to tell us what discussions are happening and how some decisions are (or are not) made. Hopefully you're posting at work and not on your personal time!

I'm pretty lucky. At Champaign Binny's I get treated really well and often benefit from the "regular customer" flexibility you give beer managers. The staff in the beer department there are really good folks and I treat them in kind. And yes, I realize that I totally benefit from my local Binny's being probably one of the smaller accounts in the company. Less foot traffic, smaller staff, etc. contribute to me being a familiar face (proud, not proud). I'll only add that I wouldn't get upset if they did away with this informal method. I would certainly miss out on more. Which is fine. Maybe my kids can go to a better college one day. I'd mostly be concerned with ensuring some tool doesn't keep cleaning out the shelf of limited/rare beer for trading/flipping. Like the douche who bought a whole case of Northwoods at freaking Target then posted on Twitter or some other social media I don't get involved in "Top shelfies" or something like that. We need less of that behavior reinforced IMO.

This thread seems to trend towards this topic (i.e. how Binny's handles limited releases and regular customers) every year about this time. It also usually signals the beginning of the end and an imminent lock down

EDIT - damn I use a lot if parentheses. WTF.

 

Not really, everything is SKU'd into the system and each store has inventory on what they received and with their rewards program if it's being tracked properly they can tell whose buying what in each store. Any decent programmer can make the necessary changes to a database for rewards and automatic notification. In fact I'd be willing to bet they run on a point of sale system that already has the ability for all of that on the back end. As long as the data is good everything else is just programming. All that really holds this back or really anything with any big company is somebody actually making a decision. It's much easier to sit and kick things for hours on end in meetings and claim you're discussing it then actually making a yes or no decision. As long as it's being discussed constantly in meetings the higher ups can say "they're working on it". We all work for companies and have seen this happen day in and day out. I'm part of these meetings regularly and it's very frustrating for somebody in my position.

 

In practice, this amounts to little more than a 'regular' being the person who hooks up the beer guy/gal with out of market beer or being one of their friends. Short of a rewards system, it's difficult to find a fair approach imo.

I've seen some stores which put out a bottle at a time on the shelf for the limited releases which I think is a pretty good idea. A customer still might need to time their visit well but this approach is better than having to know the secret handshake to find out if the beer is even at the store.

 

At the risk of feeding the beast here, I kinda want to take a shot at this...

1) keep it simple, a dollar spent on beer = 1point. Money spent on everything other than beer doesn't matter for beer related release priority, binnys has other rewards for wine/liquor so don't mess with that. Macro/micro whatever. $1 on beer = 1 point.

2) 50% of any beer should go to the shelves limit 1 if it's deemed "rare". This is to balance the odds for those that don't have shit tons of money to spend on beer every week but still obviously deserve a chance to grab something they'd really like to try.

3) points are assigned to any "rare" beer that a beer manager would normally hide in back and you need to "spend" your points for access to that beer if you want it. Points should be prohibitively high at first. BA prarie paradise = 50 points or something silly like that, if I haven't spent $50 on other beer to accumulate those points then I don't have access to those reserved bottles or maybe I'd rather save my points for BA Darkness when it comes out. How long they stay reserved is up to the beer manager but I'd make it short like 2-3 days or something and then they just go on the shelves like the rest of the beer. The one exception to me is BCBS which Binnys has a whole different release setup for, no need to mess with that IMO but whatever.

4) in terms of what beers you do this on, frankly I think beer managers know and it doesn't need to be perfectly in sync between all stores but there should be a baseline (like same point values for any beer in any store or +\- 20% or something). Yes money spent at any binnys gets you rewards to use at any binnys. No reason it all has to happen at the same store in my opinion, that would just complicate things and reduce traffic across stores, particularly downtown.

5) keep it transparent. Post reserve beers and points needed at any store and the day that the reserve is being removed (invest in something digital please!). Creates buzz at different stores, drives repeat traffic if I want a chance at a bottle but don't have the points, etc. The downside is this all obviously takes a ton of time/coordination/money but enough giant beer nerds work at binnys that they would probably enjoy figuring this out and be relieved to play less games with customers over rare beer releases and have a system to point to instead.

Thoughts?

 

Anyone try the bourbon county schnapps yet? Grabbed a bottle tonight and can’t find any reviews online.

 

For the record, I've always appreciated the people who work at Binny's; I'd like a better loyalty system, but that falls under the "improvements" category, not the "burn them with fire" one.

Back on topic...where is my mythical second drop of Prop?!?

 

Mine does this. I like this approach. Depending on what it is, they'll typically put a handful out and restock semi-regularly, save some in back for regulars who work "9-5," and eventually put it all out if around for a bit. Albeit not perfect, it spreads the wealth in some capacity.

 

I am right there with you on meeting bloat, but it also is a necessary evil (unless we are talking about Target, what a joke. Meetings to talk about meetings).

While it may seem like a simple change, there is a lot that has to go into it. You need to come up with the actual rewards program, just look at the discussion here, it is going to take time. It also will need sign off from above, which may mean it needs revision. From there, you would need to build out the requirements for what it would take to accomplish, for example database scheme updates just to mention one. Then there needs to be a plan for the change; development, testing, qa and moving to prod. Then on allocating resources for all the work required. Don't forget documentation, support hand off and possibly training for the end users.

Based on past experiences, this isn't even close to just a couple hours of effort, even if you could get it fast tracked by clearing a lot of the red tape.

What you get when you skip the discussions and planning is someone reimagine all computers and servers in the company with Windows 7. Ok that maybe a bit extreme (a colleague of mine actually did that... whoops), but this isn't just a matter of a good programmer hammering it out in a few hours or a simple yes or no answer. This is a business decision that IT would be pulled in to execute just their part of the greater plan.

 

There are some second drops of bcs variants being tweeted in Minnesota fwiw.

 

LOL at providing programming tips and implementing system wide production changes like it's some kind of startup project.

A quality results based system will require more thought, programming, testing, and deployment. By the way, any good system requires operations, who is going to staff and support issues and questions?

I am not making a judgement on easy/difficult, what I am saying is that it should be methodical with a proper plan. Your statement about decisions dismisses the complexities and impacts to the business.

 

This thread. I take a day off checking the forums and...wow.

Big thanks to @willowbrookbinny for sharing thoughts. I'm with @SeanBond in that I'd see this beer points thing as an improvement, not something that is severely lacking. There seem to be a lot of variables that are hard to really get the "right" answer to with that system, though. I've actually never had any issues with feeling like I lied to or wasn't getting stuff because I wasn't "regular" enough. I go to different Binny's (Lakeview, Lincoln Park and Grand...which means my purchases tend to be spread around a decent amount instead of being focused on just one store), and have always felt pretty comfortable talking to the beer guys/gals there. I can certainly tell there are times where they aren't exactly happy to be answering my questions, but I get that I'm yet another person asking about some super limited beer and I can only imagine how frustrating that must get.

 

No one's tried the Schnapps yet?