Week 8: By now, you're watching Lover's Beer more closely than any other product you sell. The suspense is palpable: every time a customer buys a six-pack of that quiet beer, you notice it. People seem to be talking about the beer. Eagerly, you wait for the trucker to roll in the sixteen cases you expect. But he brings only five. "What do you mean, five?" you say. "Gee, I don't know anything about it," the deliveryman tells you. "I guess they're backlogged. You'll get them in a couple of weeks." A couple of weeks!?! By the time you call your backlogged customers, you'll be sold out before you can sell a single new case. You'll be without a bottle of Lover's on your shelf all week. What will this do to your reputation? You place an order for twenty-four more cases—twice as much as you had planned to order. What is that wholesaler doing to me, you wonder? Doesn't he know what a ravenous market we have down here? What's going through his mind, anyway? THE WHOLESALER As the manager of a wholesale distributing firm, beer is your life. You spend your days at a steel desk in a small warehouse stacked high with beer of every conceivable brand: Miller, Bud, Coors, Rolling Rock, a passel of imported beers—and, of course, regional beers such as Lover's Beer. The region you serve includes one large city, several smaller satellite cities, a web of suburbs, and some outlying rural areas. You're not the only beer wholesaler here, but you're very well established. For several small brands, including Lover's Beer, you are the only distributor in this area. Mostly, you communicate with the brewery through the same method which retailers use to reach you. You scribble numbers onto a form which you hand your driver each week. Four weeks later, on average, the beer arrives to fill that order. Instead of ordering by the case, however, you order by the gross. Each gross is about enough to fill a small truck, so you think of them as truckloads. Just as your typical retailer orders about four cases of Lover's Beer from you, week after week after week, so you order four truckloads from the brewery, week after week after week. That's enough to give you a typical accumulation of twelve truckloads' worth in inventory at any given time. By Week 8, you had become almost as frustrated and angry as your retailers. Lover's Beer had always been a reliably steady brand. But a few weeks ago—in Week 4, actually—those orders had abruptly started rising sharply. The next week, orders from retailers had risen still further. By Week 8, most stores were ordering three or four times their regular amount of beer. At first, you had easily filled the extra orders from your inventory in the warehouse. And you had been prescient; noting that there was a trend, you had immediately raised the amount of Lover's Beer you ordered from the brewery. In Week 6, after seeing an article in Beer Distribution News about the rock video, you had raised your brewery order still further, to a dramatic twenty truckloads per week. That was five times as much 17. září 2004
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