online only availablilty

[pohldogg]

Wondering if others are experiencing something similar. All spring I’ve been frustrated over wlp670, each week since it was moved to year round I’ve asked my local shop to order it. He’d pull up the order site and it would never be listed as available, I’d then go home and see it in stock at Northern Brewer and a few other large online shops. He recently called the distributer to see if it was actually available and was only able to get 1 vial.

I appreciate everything NB and the other larger guys do for homebrewing, but gobbling up and controlling supply (and manufacturers/distributers letting them) just seems like a very walmart or amazon thing to do. It would be hard for me to hate on the way AB pushes around craft brewers if the big online HBS start pushing around the locals. Hopefully this is a one off problem for one strange yeast, but with the way certain hops and yeast are in high demand I can see this getting worse.

Someone tell me I’m just paranoid.

 

[Hammy71]

Your not just paranoid. But, if you were a distributer....would your priority be the guy who needs a vial for one customer maybe 3 times a year? Or the company that goes through hundreds of vials a month/week? I agree it sucks, but you can't argue with the motives.

 

[outside92129]

call up white labs and order and/or complain. They're a medium sized biz and sorta knows what's it's like. The folks there have been very helpful (of course i can just pop into their offices : )