Jack Daniel's is what's wrong with the PLCB's "catalog"

I've been writing about this for years, and still the PLCB can't quite get the listings for their #1 selling whiskey correct. Just imagine the lack of effort they put into less important items! Or, more likely, probably nothing is considered important and they screw up everything equally.

I like writing about the PLCB's historic inability to get their inventory correct. If I ever need an illustrative example of how incompetent they are, I know I can rely on good old Jack. He never fails me.

And talk about non-responsive! After eight years of pointing out how incredibly stupid the PLCB is with just this one product, you would think they would tire of being beaten up and fix the situation. How many clerks, managers, directors and senior executives have passed through the PLCB in eight years?  All of them learning how to do things wrong, from the people before them who did it wrong, because that is how they learned it from generations of iron-assed bureaucrats, passed on like a broken piece of PLCB DNA.

I work for the PLCB!

Why do I bring this up? Because there are more Jack Daniel's mistakes.

This time we have one listing in the "bourbon" section. Hey, plenty of people argue that Jack can be considered a bourbon, so that isn't bad right off. Only the company doesn't think so, and labels it as "Tennessee whiskey." More importantly -- when you're searching for it -- all the other correct PLCB entries list it as "whiskey." There is the continuing error (going on a couple of years now) of one item listed as a "blended whiskey"  but Jack Daniel doesn't make a "blended whiskey." The confusion Jack Daniel's new rye creates in the PLCB is comical. One entry is correctly under "straight rye," and the other is not.

As they say, this ain't rocket surgery. The sad thing is, an error rate of almost 7% on just one brand family is pretty good when compared to how they've been doing...until you compare it to the inventory accuracy of all but the most poorly run of businesses. People would be fired for years of error rates that high; hell, they'd be shown the door for a few months of it. This is the poster child for "You had one job..."

But that is what you get when they don't have to care. Hang around, get seniority, get a 2% raise, salt away that pension, and wait for your 30.  Confucius said: "It matters not how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop" and it seems the PLCB has taken it to heart.  They certainly aren't moving very fast and they aren't stopping to fix the problem.

I suppose they may finally get this right, and I'll have to find another go to subject. I'll miss it, though. There are dozens of errors in the bourbon and rye categories, but nothing so consistent, so reliable, as how the PLCB manages to screw up JD.

Sounds like the PLCB to me.

Redacted for your benefit...

Just yesterday I wrote about how the PLCB finally managed to get down to one minor inventory mistake on their listings for Jack Daniel's. That was based on checking their "database" the week before. But I spoke too soon. Never ones to rest on their laurels or maintain high standards, the registraters and data enterers have corrected their excellence. This week's database iteration shows a 200% increase in bad JD data. Back to "PLCB normal."

We have been telling the PLCB — and showing them! — EXACTLY what some of the mistakes were for five years. We aren't trained specialists like they have at the PLCB, but we do know a thing or two about whiskey. Apparently we know about twice as much as the 40 year vet of the PLCB's Chief Executive Of Doing Things Wrong, Charlie Mooney. The buck doesn't stop with with Chuck so much as it kind of blows onto the floor and slips under a desk where you can't see it...problem solved!

But we did learn something from inside the Forbidden City at 910 Capital Street. Remember that 1792 Full Proof bourbon I wrote about yesterday? The one that both the online Product catalog and the "Fine Wine and Good Spirits" (the money they paid for that name, we should use the whole thing!) website didn't show?

It isn't missing because the PLCB doesn't have it in stock, OR that they don't have the information entered yet. One of our secret army of disgruntled and fed up clerks sent us a screenshot of the secret employee version of that same page. Check this out:

Well whaddya know, there is 1792 Full Proof, just like it used to be listed on the consumer site! You know, the one ordinary citizens have to use. I know the PLCB has products in inventory that are licensee only, things that they not only don't want you to buy, but make sure you aren't allowed to buy, because they know better about what you the consumer wants than you do. A lot of that stuff isn't available for general purchase mainly because if it were someone up in Potter County might actually want to "Special Liquor Order" it — you know, like the PLCB's supporters always say is so important, the right to access to special booze in Coudersport! — and they'd lose money on the deal. Of course they would, that's what they do.

Our source didn't know why we couldn't see these "regular" and "luxury" items that are available for sale to the consumer, but he thought it was because the system was "broken,"  his word, not ours.

But we agree wholeheartedly. The system is broken, and not just the website: it's the entire agency and its reason for existence. From the preamble of The Almighty Liquor Code: "for the protection of the public welfare, health, peace and morals of the people of the Commonwealth and to prohibit forever the open saloon," or as Governor Pinchot put it, to "discourage the purchase of alcoholic beverages by making it as inconvenient and expensive as possible."

It is broken, it always has been broken, and always will be broken so long as there is a monolithic, monopolistic, and inevitably incompetent bureaucracy, run by people with no real industry experience, little to no oversight, doing any harebrained things that their crazed bosses come up with (wine kiosk, anyone?). This agency has no vision, no insight, no real knowledge of what consumers want, and does not want to hear anything about that from any well-meaning and industrious folks out in the individual stores. They only follow, like sheep, as real leaders in the booze business move forward with new ideas. How good can any police-enforced monopoly be, especially when they not only don't want entrepreneurial thinking, but have laws in place to prevent it!

When everything is broken, you can't fix it. You start over...and in Pennsylvania's case, you start over where you should have started in the first place: Privatize. No matter what the PLCBniks say about "well, if we were starting back in 1934, sure, this system isn't what we'd want, but now that we have it —"

Hey. Stop right there. This system isn't what we want. Let's go with that icy chunk of truth. Privatize now. Fix what's broken: everything.

The world as we know it is ending.

It only took 83 years, with five years of us pointing it out, but the PLCB has finally — at least for this month — listed Jack Daniel's correctly across their inventory. There is still one small mistake, but considering how bad it was for DECADES, this is pretty amazing.

Of course, the "adaptive" inventory lookup that the Chairman spoke about well over two years ago still doesn't work.  Don't put in "Jack Daniels" or "Jack Danials" or "Jack Danial's" and expect to find anything...but that's something for them to work on for the next 83 years, I guess. Nope, as of October 2018, the only questionable listing is for item 2419 (the "Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey Family of Brands Combo," a pack of five different airline bottles) which is listed under the category of "Whiskies." Like a catch-all category, except it's one that the PLCB doesn't have. You can't search it on their "Product Catalog," but it does come up on the splashy 'finewineandgoodspirits.com' page. Consistency, guys...

That doesn't mean they're off the hook. There are so many more inventory mistakes to be found, we'll be busy for years to come.

Here's something that made me delve into the PLCB inventory again. I was in New Jersey and bought a bottle of 1792 Full Proof (125 proof) Bourbon. I'm not a big fan of 1792 in general, but a high proof non-chill filtered bourbon isn't that common, even more so at under $50; so I took a chance. Well worth it...if you can find it. So, back to the the online PLCB Product Catalog.

That's never as easy as it sounds. Even the PLCB doesn't think too much of their system, because right in the instructions for using the keyword search, they say, "If too precise, the product may not be returned as expected." In other words, don't put in exactly what you want, put in something close...unless it's Jack Daniel's, because then you have to be exact with the spelling of Daniel's. Which is something the PLCB apparently couldn't do for eight decades. It's tough being a consumer in Pennsylvania.

So I put "1792" into the keyword search box, select "spirits" and hit Enter...no 1792 Full Proof shows up.

OK, I'm used to the PLCB not having most things I buy. But this is pretty mainstream stuff, so I was surprised that it wasn't listed. Well, maybe it just didn't make it through the "good ol' boy" selection process, since it was fairly new. After a month I check again - still nothing. The search page says it is updated daily so if it hits the system, it should show up right?

Wait a minute...I head over to the FWAGS website to see what is there. Sure enough, the Full Proof is an "Online Exclusive." Now, the Online store is technically a store, and everything in it used to be shown in the Product Catalog because, well, you know, it lists "everything." So I randomly search for some things listed as "Online Exclusives" — McKenzie Rye Whiskey, Peerless Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey, Highland Park Full Volume, and a few others. None of them show up any more. That is helpful in a uniquely PLCB kinda way. Great way to sell product - don't let the consumer find it.  Must be that "control" they always talk about.

I know we don't do much wine here, but...if this is what they're screwing up with a few hundred whiskeys, can you imagine how they're screwing up thousands of wines? The mind boggles.

Hey, PA legislature — are you sure we can't do better?  Privatize.

Don't Let Them Fool You

The PLCB just put out their latest Retail Year In Review, patting themselves on the back — again — about how great the State Stores are doing! Yahoo! It's all here! Just don't look too closely at the numbers!

Because if you do look closely, peek under the gloss and sparkles, you can see just how crappy a job they are doing. Let's start with the record sales. Let's see: police controlled monopoly, citizens can't go anywhere else, rising prices, increased population... It would probably take a real marketing genius to have record sales under those conditions. And take a look at those record sales in the hottest market category - American Whiskey: the PLCB's growth there is less than the national average increase in sales. Not just a little less, it is about 30% less. Imagine how much more in taxes would be collected if Pennsylvania was able to match the strongest national trend in booze sales for just that one category.

The PLCB is over $1 BILLION in debt

Of course, our old friend Jack Daniel's isn't forgotten; after years of us saying that it isn't a bourbon, the PLCB in their normal bout of incompetency gets it half right. On page 32, table 19 of the report there is Jack Daniel's Gentleman Jack sitting in the number 10 spot for "bourbon." At least they didn't have JD #7 listed 3 times like they did last year (page 30, Table 19). It is hard to say if they left it out because it isn't bourbon or they just screwed the table up.

To prove they are keeping up with the "modern lifestyle," a whole one tenth of one percent (0.11%) of sales came from the Internet, which is really pathetic in this day and age for a retail company. Pathetic is the key word when talking about the PLCB's technology track record. Can you say "wine kiosk"?

Then there is the problem of saying things to make yourself look good, even when the numbers that you provide don't always match up with reality.  For most of us this is called lying, for the PLCB it's called "how we do business." Let's look at those "increased sales".  First we have the sales for 2015-2016 from the Retail Year In Review.  On page 4 it lists total sales of $2,303,405,801. On page 5 it lists sales by month and transaction; it doesn't total them up, but have no fear, I did it for you.

Notice that the total is about $23.5 million different. The PLCB doesn't say why, and apparently we don't deserve an explanation.

The next table is for the year 2016-17. Again, the monthly sales in total don't match the total listed by the PLCB on page 4 of the current Retail Year In Review ($2,443,725,791). Only this time, it is $76.5 million that has disappeared. Remember, as the owners of this mess this is our money, and I'd like to know where that $76.5 million is.

Here you'll see that the number of transactions was fairly flat, increasing only by 0.91%, while sales dollars went up 3.8%. What this tells us is that the citizens bought 1% more often, but it cost them 3.8% more each time, well above the inflation rate of 2.1%

Retail alcohol is one of the few major sales items where the individual product is elastic (in economic terms, this means that a small change in price can mean a large change in sales), because there are so many suitable substitutes. If your favorite vodka goes up, you can easily find another at a price you are more comfortable paying. The industry as a whole, though, is inelastic, meaning that people are going to pay for some form of the product no matter what the price changes to. The PLCB knows this (probably because they hired somebody to explain it to them), so they will increase prices and not have it affect overall sales that much, if at all. They are doing that right now, through the old variable pricing trick they foisted upon the public (and the gullible Legislature).

So now that you have real numbers in front of you, you have to ask where the PLCB came up with an "average statewide increase of 6.10%", when the numbers they give us don't match? What numbers are we supposed to believe Table 4 or Table 5? And why should be believe anything the PLCB tells us, given their history of anti-consumer behavior, their predisposition to screwing us? Why aren't they capable of making the sales numbers match on their own damn report? As far as that goes, why, in this age of almost instant information access does it take them six months to put this report out? Find another $2 billion business that takes that long...go ahead, I'll wait.

Face it, the PLCB does NOTHING for the citizens except cost them more in the long run. Remember: they are a BILLION dollars in debt and it isn't getting any smaller.

Privatize.

Pay no attention to the man behind the flexible pricing...

Back in October of last year, PLCB Chairman Tim Holden (a political appointee, with no major business experience)  put out this piece of propaganda, trying to fool us into believing that the PLCB's new "Flexible Pricing" was good for them. (We've been telling you for years it's a bad deal for consumers, but the Legislature handed it to the PLCB.)

Holden gets off to a bad start by using an example of Pennsylvania's "top selling Bourbon," Jack Daniel's. It isn't Pennsylvania's top selling Bourbon...it's Tennessee Whiskey, says so right on the label. A small strike, but the kind of product ignorance that's typical at the PLCB.

But it's what he has to say about Jack that's interesting. "In February 2016, Virginia’s price per bottle from the supplier of this product was $12.14, while Pennsylvania’s was $14.46. The retail shelf price on June 1 in both states was the same: $24.99." This just shows that the PLCB was too incompetent or lazy to negotiate better pricing for 82 years, and despite what they might claim about their new flexible pricing powers, there was nothing in the liquor code that prevented them from doing deals on pricing.

Now he gets to the flexible pricing shim-sham. "If Pennsylvania had been able to obtain Virginia’s lower price – $2.32 less per bottle – we would have achieved an additional $2.1 million in profit on that one product, based on the volume of sales in Pennsylvania. Or we could have reduced the retail price, or even a combination of the two." (emphasis added...for emphasis)

And here it is, nine months later...and Pennsylvania's #1 selling "Bourbon" hasn't changed price at all. They are keeping every penny of every negotiated price to the top ten selling wine and liquor brands, all but one: Nikolai vodka pints (the alcoholic's favorite), which have gone down 30 cents. Hey, thanks. Really appreciate it, PLCB.

It's all too clear: the PLCB (owned by YOU, they say) is screwing the citizens on a daily basis, over-charging on numerous items, especially their lottery items. A prime example is the 60% average price increase they charged for this year's Van Winkle releases, and the extra $570 they charged for the 3 bottle 'package' and the extra $860 for the 5 bottle 'package' on top of that. Or maybe the extra $100 they charged for the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection? Make no mistake, you as a consumer come in last in the PLCB's quest for survival. The Chairman even admits it "As we’ve said all along, prices will increase for some items, when the supplier and PLCB agree that the market can bear the increase."

"Charge what the market will bear" is a cornerstone principle of the free market, especially on "luxury items" like booze. You can see it in the beer market, for example, where craft beer prices continue to rise mainly because customers continue to pay them (so far). But those prices are kept in check by the knowledge that another retailer may sell for less and get the sale.

As a police-enforced monopoly, though, the PLCB can raise prices and the market - meaning you and me - has no other choice: we can't go to another retailer (or another state...), we have to bear it. Bet you didn't know that it was fine for a government agency to gouge you. Imagine if the Turnpike Commission had "flexible tolling." When did things change so that the government would treat you fairly and justly IF they made enough money from you?

So how will you know if the PLCB is cheating you?  You won't, because they don't have to tell you their secret pricing decisions. While they don't have any problem outing Virginia, the PLCB no longer lists the price they paid for their products. The official PLCB excuse is:

"Act 39 of 2016, which became effective in August 2016, granted the PLCB authority to negotiate product acquisition costs with suppliers for the most popular wines and spirits carried in Fine Wine & Good Spirits stores. The goal of these negotiations is twofold: to maximize revenue the PLCB generates for the commonwealth and to offer consumers fair and competitive prices. Subsequently, the PLCB removed product cost and retail price information from Board agendas and minutes in the interest of optimizing supplier negotiations. Additionally, now that the PLCB can act more like a traditional retailer with regard to pricing, it is not in our financial interest to give other alcohol retailers advance notice of our prices and sales."

But a traditional retailer has competition, not a police enforced monopoly! I'd like to know what other alcohol retailers are they talking about. Do you really think that Mondavi doesn't know what Gallo is charging, or Buffalo Trace doesn't know what Beam wholesales their bourbon for? If the PLCB knows what Virginia is paying, don't you think the distillers have a pretty good idea of what their competition is doing? I know that competition is a foreign idea to those at the top of the PLCB, but that is what keeps prices down for everything else you buy, not allowing some entity to charge whatever they want and then MAKE you pay for it.

Being the Chairman of the PLCB is the bizarro version of being Harry Truman, without the ethics or personal responsibility. "The buck passes here," is that right, Tim? Nothing is ever their fault no matter how idiotic (wine kiosks), misogynistic (date rape ads), anti-PA  business (Tableleaf et al), anti-consumer (any monopoly is anti-consumer) or just plain stupid (whatever happened to the PLCB Savor magazine, and the drink recipes that need things the PLCB doesn't sell?) Any Chairman claiming any responsibility for any of those things?  Didn't think so, and Mr. Holden is certainly not going to be the first.  

Stop being fooled.  The PLCB does not exist for the benefit of the citizens, it exists for the benefit of the PLCB. Anything to keep the pigs at the trough is what they are for and anything that resembles real business with real competition is what they are against. Starting at the top with the Chairman..

Tracking the Trackers

Real business knows that tracking inventory is important, but the PLCB doesn't.

The faster, better, easier Product Search Page online inventory was recently down for almost four days.

FOUR DAYS! 

What kind of business has their inventory unavailable for four days?  A poorly run and managed one. They could use the excuse that their "other" inventory page (the "Fine Wine and Good Spirits!" page) was available. But look here: if they can't even get the category numbers to jibe on the same page, why should you trust that inventory?

I was looking at Cognac on the Product Search Page when it went down, so I had to use the "Fine Wine and Good Spirits!" website instead, which led me to this page. You'll note that the full number of items at the top is shown as 214; but the total of the available items shown at the left...is 189. Huh?

In the real world of my business, the total items available should match the total in inventory. Listing products you don't have or can't get serves no real purpose except to inflate your numbers when you lie to the citizens (or the Legislature...again) about how many products are available. Something that both the UFCW and the PLCB are prone to do, and we've told you that for years.

Not being able to match numbers on a single page begs the question of where these inventory numbers came from, and why don't they match across online product searches. Take a look what happened when I tried the same search on the Product Search Page once it came back up:

This total, 174, doesn't match 189 or 214, so which is it, PLCB? What random number is closest to what you actually have? I'd bet that none of them are correct, given the history of incompetence at the agency. For over five years they haven't been able to get Jack Daniel's (spelled "Jack Daniel's", see the label to the left!) listed correctly. They have Jack listed in both Whiskey, Bourbon (Straight) and Whiskey (Blended) and use a few different spellings. If they can screw up their #1 seller that much imagine how badly they screw up the rest.You can find your own examples if you think I'm cherry picking. I mean, I am, but believe me, I could pick the whole damn tree for you.

While inventory numbers are important, so is knowing what you are selling. If you look at the above picture again, you'll see it says COGNAC (IMPORTED). Guess what, PLCB: it's all (IMPORTED), because Cognac can only be made in Cognac, France! There is no such thing as COGNAC (DOMESTIC). Ya dopes.

It's just another example of the poor quality customer service that inevitably comes from a monopoly, because they know they don't have to do anything better, since the consumer can't go anywhere else. A real business depends on current, correct and factual information being provided to the customer, because they know they wouldn't be in business if they ran things like the PLCB does.

End the fiasco of fake business and PLCB incompetence - PRIVATIZE.