The tough part about being a retail whiskey buyer is that you’re part whiskey lover, but you’re also part businessperson.

Yes, I love whiskey and I want to share the love with all my customers, but there’s also the harsh reality of what it takes to secure allocated bottles these days.

Sometimes those two things don’t mesh.

As an example, in order to lock down a recent allocation of Blanton’s, we had to purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars of other spirits from the distributor, which will hopefully sell through as part of our regular daily business.

So while I’m stoked that I can now offer our best customers a bottle of Blanton’s, I’m also frustrated when customers reach out who only want to purchase Blanton’s and nothing else. Obviously, I understand how badly people want these bottles, but I’m also running a business.

In fact, because a good number of customers see me as a fellow whiskey lover rather than a whiskey business operator, they like to share their bourbon hunting stories with me.

Someone will write an email like:

“Hey David, snagged a bunch of your Eagle Rare Mission single barrel bottles from your Glendale location today, while I was driving around to various liquor stores. Check out the haul from today! (photo attached) By the way, do you have any Blanton’s?”

Wonderful.

We just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get rare inventory that went to some joker who has no intention of ever shopping at Mission regularly, other than as part of a weekly hoarding expedition to pull as many allocated bottles as possible into his stash. And now he wants Blanton’s on top of that?

Check around on social media and you’ll see this is a thing, akin to posting photos of your kill after a hunting trip.

What makes me laugh (out of both sadness and pathos) is when guys post photos of their receipts next to the bottle, so you can see how much they paid. Because the kill is even more impressive if you paid standard retail pricing!

But retail stores cannot operate by selling allocated bottles alone. And they can’t keep regular customers happy if the allocated bottles they get are not fairly distributed to their core customers; the ones who actually shop there for more than just allocated whiskies.

It’s gonna be interesting to see if Buffalo Trace hunters end up sending independent retailers the way of the buffalo. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?

-David Driscoll