Drinks world thrilled by new global logistics lottery

Lottery
Pix: Robert Couse-Baker, PxHere; Den Doktoor, Pixabay

From Melbourne to Manhattan, people all over the drinks world are working themselves into a fever of excitement over the new ‘logistics lottery’, which launched last week.

Six-figure prize-money

Companies play by marking the products they’d like to receive on a so-called ‘order form’.

The form then gets ripped into a thousand pieces and blown through a wind tunnel before being reassembled by a team of six year olds to work out which products, if any, the person making the order will actually take delivery of in the next six months.

Those lucky enough to get their full order in something approaching a halfway reasonable time frame will receive a £1m cash prize or three cases of Burgundy, whichever is higher.

Exciting unpredictability

‘We’re super excited by this initiative,’ said lottery organiser Lon Godz. ‘In the old days, people used to just tell producers what they wanted and then they’d receive it a couple of weeks later.

‘How boring is that?’

The global logistics lottery, he said, was ‘bringing an exciting unpredictability to the whole ordering process’.

The prize money is being funded by liquidating the assets of businesses all round the world that are going bust due to having most of their stock stuck in a Covid-riddled container port 5,000 miles away.

Happy winner

Early feedback from the trade has been mixed.

One of the early winners, Henry Impecunious, of Skint Wine Merchants in Manchester was delighted to take delivery of a shipment of Californian wines, which won him £500.

‘It was amazing,’ he told Fake Booze. ‘I didn’t just get half of what I ordered, but the bottles arrived in not much more time than it would have taken me to load them on a rowing boat and paddle them back from Los Angeles myself.’

Twelve Monkeys

However, German importer Heinz Beinz was less enthusiastic.

‘I’ve got six deliveries stuck in the Pacific, two sitting in a warehouse in Cape Town and one that’s cooking on the dockside in Shanghai,’ he said.

‘You’ve got as much chance of winning this thing as a group of monkeys with typewriters have of knocking out an issue of Wine Expectorator.

‘And yes, you can probably put your own gag in here…’

Playing the odds

The Logistics Lottery’s Lon Godz, however, said that people had to be in it to win it.

‘The odds of scooping a traditional lottery are about one in fifty million,’ said Godz. ‘But the chances of you currently getting a delivery where you want it, when you want it are nowhere near that.

‘They’re far worse…’ 

Click here to read about how everyone is excited about having more stuff lost by DHL’.

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