The intoxicating power of "placement arbitrage"

Editor’s note: I will be in Indianapolis covering the 2025 Craft Brewers Conference next week. If you’ll be there and want to meet up, get in touch and we’ll try to make it happen!—Dave.

I hammer on a good deal about BeatBox and BuzzBallz. The wine-based ready-to-drink brands have many lessons to offer the beverage-alcohol business, mostly along the lines of “DO FLAVOR” and “DON’T OVERTHINK.” No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American drinking public, after all.

There’s another lesson contained within these case-moving, category-blurring molar rattlers that I write about less often but frankly find more compelling. They’re wildly successful examples of what I like to call “placement arbitrage,” an under-discussed but wildly influential force that occasionally reshapes the beverage-alcohol markets in these United States—and makes the brands that manage to harness it a shitload of money in the process.

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