On a road trip last summer, I stopped into a small liquor store in Illinois along Interstate 57. I’m always looking for something new or different – or allocated! The man working at the counter was the store owner, and we ended up having a great chat about bourbon (shocker). He told me that he had been begging his distributor to provide him with some allocated products, and the distributor in turn gave him a single bottle of Buffalo Trace. He wasn’t thrilled about the situation he found himself in or the scant nothing he had received from his distributor. He opined that he had to move so much Fireball and other cheap products to get much of anything to be able to offer his customers and he was truly frustrated by the dynamics of the market these days.
Fast forward a year or so, and as I walked into a small store a number of weeks back, in a rare turn of events I noticed a handful of allocated bottles proudly out on display behind the cash register with price tags that suggested these bottles were for sale at very reasonable – dare I say retail - pricing! I did a double take, because that’s a rare bird, pinched myself, and sure enough I was vividly awake and those were the ACTUAL prices for those bottles. I walked up to the counter and said that I’d be interested in buying two of the bottles and to my surprise I was told that they weren’t available for sale. I was in a store that sales alcohol, they were on the shelf, had a price tag and yet they weren’t for sale? That doesn’t make sense, why would they tease me like that?!? I was told that they were tied to the stores loyalty program and asked if I’d like to sign up to then accumulate the appropriate number of points to be able to buy one at the listed price. I buy a buttload of alcohol having a garage bar where I am constantly hosting parties or just the average end of the day beverage – only on days that end in “y” of course. Sure, I thought, I’d sign up – but how does the program work? As the p’s and q’s of the program were being explained to me, I quickly realized that to buy one of these bottles (granted, at retail pricing) I’d essentially have to spend several thousand dollars in this store. I get it...loyalty and the like, but I buy from all over and this place wasn't cheap on the pricing.
This loyalty paradigm was essentially the same as the store owner in Illinois had – buy lots and lots of products you don’t necessarily need to get access to a bottle. I don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to have the opportunity to buy a Stagg 24C…I can just spend the $159 the Bourbon Blue Book® says it’s going for on average right now and buy it off the secondary market showing up to my front door mere days later.
The secondary market for bourbon gets a bad rap, and it really shouldn’t. It’s essentially the Autotrader equivalent to bourbon - if that's even still a thing these days. A marketplace where products are priced based on their rarity, collector interest, and desirability. The prices on the secondary market are in fact often much better than what I see at many retail stores, otherwise known as “Bourbon Museums,” given their outlandish valuations – expecting that someone with deep enough pockets and no access to secondary bottles or understanding of the real market value will eventually buy it. Pssh.
At some point in folks’ bourbon journey, retail stores simply don’t offer a lot. The time, energy, and effort that goes into driving around hunting for bourbon and trying to build relationships or sitting in a line for hours or even overnight in the hopes you might find your way into a bottle more exciting than Blanton’s just doesn’t feel worth it. Don’t’ get me wrong; my love for and enjoyment of bourbon has not faded, but how I value my time has changed.
In the case of the Stagg I just mentioned, they retail for around $70 let’s say, and then you’re going to pay tax on top of that…which puts us at $80. It’s roughly $160 to my door on the secondary – so the mark up is really about $60 plus the shipping. Sure, in this case you’re essentially paying double what the bottle goes for, but if it’s a bottle you’re really looking to get a hold of isn’t the small outlay of cash worth not having to go hunt it down when you’re likely to a) not find it anyways out in the wild, and b) if you do find it probably end up paying at least that much if not more in a retail setting?
In a world where there never seems to be enough time in the day, buying bourbon on the secondary market just makes sense – sometimes. I still very much enjoy meeting up with locals to trade a bottle here and there or the excitement of stumbling across something I wasn’t expecting when out shopping, but when push comes to shove, be it lack of time, the lack of patience, or simply the lack of desire to put in the sweat equity of trying to shake out a bottle through the traditional methods, the secondary market offers an easy outlet for acquiring that exciting bottle that I’d probably never see in a thousand trips to various liquor stores. What’s even better is opening it up and sharing it with whoever happens to have found their way by my garage bar speakeasy.
Data matters and having up-to-date and reliable information to make informed decisions about buying, selling or trading coveted bottles of brownwater is critical. The secondary market doesn’t stand still and neither do we in cataloguing and providing the web’s most accurate, reliable and up-to-date pricing around. As new bottles hit the market, their pricing changes daily…finding a ceiling, and eventually a floor. The market shifts up and down, commensurate with the economy – with the bourbon secondary market down just over eleven percent over the past fourteen months. If you’re looking for a resource that’s based on real data, grounded in actual verified sales on the secondary market, is updated regularly, and has values for over 6,000 bottles and growing at your fingertips, you need to look no further than the Bourboneur App for iOS and Android. The app does require a paid subscription, only $3 per month or $25 a year, which easily pays for itself!
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