Beer UPC Codes - Spend a little

Many chain stores require this for seasonal beers where you only have one out in the world at a time. They think of it as a single placement on the shelf since it is, therefore they want 1 barcode and therefore them all to be the same price. Therefore they have no idea how your individual seasonals are performing, though they can guess based on the month, but all they care about is your seasonal overall because to them it’s 1 beer.

Recently Walmart has pushed back on this and wants the opposite, so breweries have to either change, or not have a chance to get their seasonals into that particular chain. Others may follow and it could flip things some day.

This is behind a paywall but you can catch the beginning of it:

https://brewingindustryguide.com/breweries-face-tough-decisions-on-upcs/

 

It really is just kind of a clusterfuck overall. At the retail level, we either have one UPC/SKU tied to several seasonal beers for each brewery, which leads to customer confusion about which one we might actually have in store if they're browsing online, or multiple UPC/SKUs for each seasonal beer for each brewery, which is an absolute logistical nightmare to manage for everyone but the customer, who will know exactly which one we have.

I don't know how the intricacies at the distro level but it seems to me the current system we've got (one UPC/SKU for seasonals overall, broadly speaking) is the least problematic for the distributor and retailer.

I can only imagine how many pages my fucking order lists would be if every brewery got individual SKUs and descriptions for each one of their seasonals. Extrapolate that out to include every one of their one-offs and special releases too (because you know they'd ask) and it would take half an hour for the printer to print all that...

 

It doesn't matter to the brewery, they just do what the retailers want since it's their systems. The BIG challenge is when one major retailer wants it one way, but another wants it another. That's what's beginning to happen...

 

This is probably the reason I have been getting discounted seasonals from several stores. They'll put up a shelf tag with the name of the beer which doesn't even match what's on the label.

 

I almost never buy fruit-flavored beer or buy a single, but 15-20 years ago 21st Amendment's Watermelon Wheat came up in a conversation and, though I suspected it was as bad as it was (is?), I told the guy (maybe it was here?) I'd try one. I don't follow that technique often - I'll happily criticize a beer I have never consumed. I mean, c'mon... have you seen some of the !@#$ they put in beer?

Did a big beer shopping trip to a not-so-local retailer, maybe adding up to 2 or 3 cases + a single can of that beer. Got home, was checking the receipt and saw that by scanning the single can's bar code (the only barcode on a sixpack held together with those plastic rings, of course*) it rang up as the entire sixpack. WTF! (Making the purchase even worse that I'd expected!).

Even though it meant a 20 mile trip one-way, I determined I'd return it the following week. Oh, but how could I prove I'd only bought 1 can and not a sixpack? I supposed "Really? You think I'd buy a sixpack of a watermelon flavored beer? I belong to your discount membership thing - look at my past decade of beer purchases!" wouldn't be enough to convince them.

But it did:

And taught me a lesson (again) - Check your receipt before you pay or, at least, before you leave the store!

(* Addendum - Did they use rings back then? Or were they already using the cardboard boxes? Whatever- the receipt shows I got charged initially for the full sixpack.)

 

Total Wine is a big offender of this. I always have to check the small digital display on the credit card payment machine because they will ring up mix-a-six singles as full packs all the time.

 

Well this really throws a wrench into the idea of having a BA app have a barcode lookup for a beer!

 

Yes. They exist, and with a breweries that might have a several beers that exist under each one. They are sort of used as a kind of price point separator.