BoozApp is a new smartphone app that aims to offer its users a look at the whole picture of a specific bottle of liquor's pricing, from its SRP to what shoppers consider "fair." You'd be forgiven for thinking an app that distinguishes between suggested retail pricing and a good deal was built for those hunting down sough-after bottles bottles – sadly, that's just the market we're living in.
The app's founders, Scott Manning and Rich Morrow, built it with whiskey – the spirit category most subject to drastic differences between a retail price and bottle value – in mind. The two compiled a database with the prices of more than 20,000 individual bottles of booze to create its SRP price, while the app's "fair" price will be guided by users. At launch, these prices will be based on internet sleuthing and resources like Bourbon Brown Book, but once a user searches a specific bottle, they're given the opportunity to mark the listed "fair" price as high, just right or low. Their answer will feed into an algorithm and incrementally adjust the bottle's price until consensus reigns.
The app, which is in private invite phase now, arrives as the whiskey world reckons with dramatic price disparities across regions, states and in many cases retailers across the street from one another. Some pin the problem to the secondary whiskey market, which started as black market for buying and selling rare whiskey but has since subsumed more standard expressions, quickly inflating the prices of said bottles. In turn, drinkers have leaned on social networks and Instagram accounts to get an idea of how much a specific bottle should cost. BoozApp aims to provide a more official, democratic means of learning what is and isn't a good deal.
You can submit your email now for a shot at getting access to the app's databases early.
