Someone asked me the other day: why are more and more wine and whiskey retailers advertising pre-orders rather than in-stock items?

Simple answer: they’ve located new products to sell, they just don’t have them yet.

If there’s one thing people continue to spend money on in the COVID era, it’s booze. There’s nothing like a little retail therapy escapism to help get you through the day (and a little whiskey to get you through the night). E-commerce for wine and spirits has showed no signs of slowing down either. Since I started at Mission a year ago, our online sales have more than doubled. Granted, I’ve played a role in that, but it’s further proof that the demand exists.

Yet, if you read the news about Zillow this week, how they’ve had to stop buying houses due to a lack of manpower, it creates a clearer picture for the future of all e-commerce with the current supply chain issues. It turns out you can’t keep flipping houses if you start running out of remodeling supplies and manual labor, just like you can’t keep shipping bottles of alcohol without dock workers, truck drivers, and people to pack the boxes.

Despite our desire for limitless growth, there are indeed limits to the potential scale of e-commerce. Even if you have the capital to purchase more goods, and the connections to source new products, it’s all moot if there’s no one available to facilitate the supply chain.

And guess what? More and more people have decided they’re tired of being a cog in that machine. Talk to any retailer in the booze business and they’ll tell you the same thing: open positions are going unfilled, while longtime employees are walking out. Where will they go? Who knows? But if there’s one thing I’ve realized myself during the last two years, it’s that life is short and you have to make the most of what time you have left. In my humble opinion, we’re at the beginning of a budding blue color revolt, wrapped inside an existential crisis that—coupled with climate change—is going to define the upcoming decades.

Despite the shortage of workers, business owners and marketers continue to have tunnel vision. They don’t want to slow down, especially when the market continues to show signs of growth, so they continue to sell, even when they don’t have the product on hand or the means to take possession of it.

So, in short, start getting used to pre-orders and longer wait times for new products.

-David Driscoll