Virginia ABC adopts more randomized system for rare liquor sales
A liquor store in downtown Richmond. (Ned Oliver/Virginia Mercury)
After a series of problems figuring out how to fairly distribute a limited number of highly desired bottles of liquor, the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority announced Tuesday that it will implement a more randomized system to determine when and where rare products appear on store shelves.
The changes will leave customers more reliant on blind luck to discover sought-after products at ABC stores across the state. Customers will also be restricted to buying one limited availability bottle per day.
The liquor authority said it will “no longer” notify customers when those products will be available. Inventory data for limited availability products won’t be accessible on ABC’s website, and store workers won’t be allowed to give information over the phone about whether they’ve been authorized to sell limited availability products at their location.
“We know that customers in all regions of the commonwealth want an equal opportunity to get these highly sought-after spirits,” ABC said in an announcement about the change. “By selling products at random locations, dates and times, we limit possibilities for individuals or groups to abuse the system.”
The changes come two years after a scandal in which an ABC employee and an associate were caught selling bourbon collectors inside info on where ABC was sending hard-to-find bottles. Both men pleaded guilty to computer trespassing, but avoided active jail time for their felony convictions on that charge.
Bourbon enthusiasts were also outraged last year after experiencing what they felt were clear statistical anomalies in the way ABC was conducting random lotteries for rare bottles. At the time, ABC officials said a “breakdown in Excel sorting” caused some lottery entrants to win multiple bottles despite steep mathematical odds of that happening in a truly random system.
ABC officials said they will still conduct online lotteries for the rarest bottles like Pappy Van Winkle, and will send out text message notifications for some limited availability releases “as appropriate.”
The authority said it decided not to release limited availability products on a particular day because, in the past, some buyers would camp outside stores to get the first shot at buying them.
ABC won’t put rare bottles on shelves immediately after they arrive at stores, the authority said, because that would allow customers to “follow the delivery trucks to each store and purchase bottles along the truck’s route.”
ABC said it can’t impose a statewide one-bottle limit on customers purchasing rare products because the authority only scans buyers’ identification cards for age verification and doesn’t collect data on how much liquor individual customers are buying.
