Mark - on the last episode you talked about the declines in the secondary market and the downturn in luxury spending on alcohol. I'm inclined to side with you as I know my personal spending on whiskey has more than halved in the past year, but today I just saw with my own eyes something that belies this state. A big local chain store here had their annual big whiskey drop this morning. Tons of allocated and hard to get items. It's become a Christmas ritual around here. Unfortunately it has grown so large that it is now to the point of being ridiculous. The drop location and date was announced the day before Christmas Eve. It would be held on the Saturday after Christmas. By Christmas morning people had already pitched tents and even rolled full RVs in the parking lot. By Friday morning there were more than 250 people in line and by Friday night that number doubled. They stopped giving out numbers to people once they reached 400 and I don't think they made it half way through the line. 2 hours after the store opened, only 250 people had made it into the store, at least that's according to one of the local bourbon club members who posted their status as #260 and about to enter the store. I only checked the scene out of morbid curiosity as I refuse to spend 4 days camping out in a parking lot for the chance to buy a bottle of bourbon. I'm not sure what this says about the secondary market as who know how many of these people were flippers, but there sure were a whole lot of people with a lot of disposable income willing to endure all sorts of hardship just to get some allocated whiskey. And some of the setups were large scale and elaborate. Really makes one wonder at times why people do this.

Posted by RichardD at 2024-12-29 06:24:10 UTC