Chocolate Rain sighting $49.99

Thats actually an insanely good price!!!!

 

$40 but Reserve/hoaders members get 15% and 20% respectively.

 

My local bottle shop sells all the reserve bottles too. Usually for about double what the Bruery price is after the discount. They had Grey Monday for $50 when they came out, those went fast. The other bottles just sit there and slowly sell. Same shop still has 5 bottles of DDG left for $98 each, started with 12.

 

it's at least $15 more than you'd pay if you find an RS/HS member that doesn't want their entire allocation...

 

And you can join the Preservation Society for $58.50 this quarter and get Chocolate Rain + two other beers.

 

When you take shipping into account that's really not that bad...

 

Except it's a store in San Diego, which means anyone shopping there can probably make it to the Bruery reasonably easily. You can make a valid argument for the cost of gas vs. cost of shipping depending on how much you order from the Bruery and how often you go, but the argument of saving on shipping falls pretty flat when the brewery in question is less than 100 miles from the retailer.

 

Do you honestly not value your time at all?

I mean, shipping is only like $2-3/bottle. Driving to the Bruery from SD is 45 min to an hour. Standard mileage is ~$.50/mile, so $60 if you're leaving from Oceanside. Say you have an awesome hybrid car and your mileage is only $.30/mile, you're still at $36. So if you drive up for anything less than a case and a half you're losing money before counting your time.

Now, there's an argument that the scenic (cough) drive up to check out a Bruery, maybe with your awesome SO DD so there's no risk of a DUI, is worth it. But if we're talking strictly economics, it's certainly not that much of a markup.

 

Haha not a bad price at all. I would call this gauging or perhaps guaging or even gouding, but not gouging.

 

Did you miss this part of my post:

That aside, I do value my time, that's actually one of the primary reasons I joined the RS in year 1 and have continued to renew. I end up going to the Bruery 5 or 6 times per year in connection with other trips - concerts in Orange County/LA, visiting family in LA, etc. I realize that not everyone has reasons to go up there, which is why I said there's an argument to be made for the value of shipping.

However, there are two points to be made here:
1) If you take CR at a $40 MSRP, that would be $10 to save shipping on one bottle. If you really just want a bottle of CR for the sake of ticking it and don't want to buy any other Bruery beers, then yes, it's worthwhile.
2) If you argue that markup is worthwhile to save on shipping, you're opening a Pandora's box of discussion on how retailers should be pricing limited beers, relative to their distance from a brewery. Freddie at Bev4Less gets absolutely shit on for gouging people on beers not available at retail...why doesn't this same argument apply to him? A can of Heady Topper for $10 is a good deal when you consider shipping, isn't it?

I already granted that the Bruery's shipping model has value, but allowing that to affect how retailers price in-state limited releases gets into territory that most BAs have bitched about time and time again.

 

No, in fact I made my argument explicitly using the second half of that sentence that you conveniently left off:

I don't think it's Pandora's box, I think that it's pretty straightforward when you take into account distance and volume. FedEx and UPS have a pretty solid business built around that very concept.

The store is being illegal by reselling it, same as reselling HT. The surprise is that whilst being illegal, they're also not getting that big of a markup on their sale. While I think that the outrage over reselling illegally is ridiculous, I do think that there's a pretty strong correlation between the flagrancy with which a store does it and how sketchy their overall business is.

 

I don't disagree that conceptually it makes sense - my point is that most beer pricing doesn't follow that model, and people will be in for a surprise, and likely disappointment, if it takes hold. It's roughly the same argument that breweries should be charging more for their limited releases, in that it makes perfect business sense, but it's just not how beer pricing has functioned up to this point. If you don't view that as a Pandora's box, then that's fine, but I think that implicitly telling retailers that more markup is okay has quite a few unintended consequences down the road.

Krisp paid, at most, $36.72 including tax (that's if they're RS...if they're HS, it's $34.56). That's 36 - 45% markup, depending on their membership tier...whether or not that's a big markup is in the eye of the beholder, but I don't believe it's a cut and dried argument. Krisp does have a far better reputation than Freddie, but things like this tread a fine line. Freddie didn't start out selling Heady Topper for $10 - $12. He started out by tacking a few extra dollars on to beers like Firestone Anniversary and seeing what the market would bear. Not that Krisp is necessarily heading in that direction, but everyone will draw the line in different spots as to what represents inappropriate behavior by a retailer.

The entire discussion is academic, since they will no doubt sell all of their bottles at $49.99, and it probably won't take long to do so. I just think it's interesting to observe the reactions to these types of prices on limited beers and what the consequences may or may not be.

 

I don't want to get into this too deeply, but figured I should point out that it's actually $36.72 + transportation costs + membership fee. It's fine to leave those out (although debatable on the membership part) when it comes to trading, but for a business you need to look at all costs.

Edit: I guess my point is I'm surprised the price is as low as it is. Really as a business it's a borderline 'goodwill' act IMHO, given the risk involved (the whole illegal bit), plus the hassle to get the beer (for probably less than $10 profit).

 

Fair point, although doesn't that implicitly justify price gouging on other limited beers? Whether it's having to order a bunch of product you don't particularly want from Shelton Bros to get Cantillon allocations, or spending time hounding your distributor to get things like Abyss or Parabola (and probably having to order more product than you'd like on other SKUs), there's inherently more effort and expense to get those bottles. Hell, a lot of people had sticker shock with Abyss being $18 - $20 this year, so it's clear that there's sensitivity to pricing above MSRP (albeit a selective sensitivity).

I think calling it goodwill is stretching it, but I definitely see the line of reasoning and can understand it. Chocolate Rain is an interesting one since it's made in reasonably large quantity (I'd estimate well over 1000 cases, math below*), but isn't available for purchase without buying something else, be it RS/HS or a quarterly PS membership. I'm not sure there's another beer made in such large quantity that's only bundled with other beers, which makes it difficult to peg an "acceptable" markup on the grey market.

* If we assume 1500 RS members and 400 HS members (reasonable guesses based on past discussions of the clubs, numbers could even be higher):
HS = 2 included * 400 + 8 available to buy * 400 = 4000
RS = 2 included * 1500 + 4 available to buy * 1500 = 9000

Some people won't max out their allocations, but they always ensure they have leftovers for the archives, plus the PS is getting it this quarter. Only the Bruery knows actual bottle counts, but 12k - 15k seems plausible.

 

$50 for CR is BS!!! You get 2 CR, for FREE with the membership. Those guys, man. They should be passing that savings on to the customers.

 

This post is a perfect example of Poe's Law.

 

Membership is $300 and u get ~9 beers for 'free' at $33/bottle if you want to look at it that way...

 

Looking at it your way, I guess the Reserve Society Growler/Cooler is actually free.