Stay In Your Place

I never met an OG who never did shit wrong. –Eazy-E

As I alluded to a while back, there's been a full scale effort in the Bay Area as of late to unseat some of the stalwart retailers with lost-liter pricing and costs that clearly reflect negative revenue just to get a few heads into the door and grab some attention. As I mentioned in the posts about Lagavulin and Laphroaig, we can do that too—it's just that we've got the clout to actually do it without losing money. 

You see—when you run that kind of stupid pricing, you can only afford to do it for so long until the losses add up and no longer outweigh the benefits. Unless you do it with tact and planning, of course, with which you can maintain that price for as long as necessary. You know how you do that? By working constructively with suppliers rather than by making their lives miserable by consistently and purposefully ruining their market value. There's a reason every person in the booze business hates this type of stuff and reacts accordingly when people like us take a stand. 

As expected, the levee broke under the weight of lost profit and as of today I see that prices are back up to more reasonable levels. But, to teach someone a lesson, I'm not going to raise ours—at least not yet. It's like having a contest when you're a kid to see who can hold their breath underwater longer. I've got another five minutes in me, at least, and I'm going to rub it in. Lagavulin 16 will stay at $55 and Laphroaig 10 at $32 until I'm done proving my point.

Once again, to paraphrase the late, great Eazy-E: learn a lesson from David D: stay in your place and don't step to real muthafucking Gs. 

-David Driscoll