BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) - — As supply chain issues continue to soar across the country, shelves across several Western New York liquor stores aren’t stocked enough.
According to the manager at Butler’s Wine & Spirits, Madeline Butler, the store itches for more liquor beverages.
“We’re totally out-of-box items such as Bacardi,” Butler explains. “We got very low on that. That’s obviously a huge seller.”
Madeline’s family business has been running for almost 76 years. This week, the third generation says that there have been three trucks coming to drop off some orders.
“Things can come in at any time, and they really don’t show you. They just show up,” she says. “So we really don’t have an answer to our customers when they ask when this will come in.”
Butler says she would get calls from customers asking for a specific item and claim other stores won’t have what they’re looking for. “The reason that they give us is that there’s a glass shortage,” she expresses.
The department chair operations strategy of the University at Buffalo, Natalie Simpson, explains the limited glass supplies.
“So they were the early disruptions in COVID of plants shutting down over in Asia. But lately, it has been the same old problem of the glass bottles,” Simpson says. “ It has to be shipped over here, and they’re stuck in the port, and that is holding up the bottling.”
Butler says liquor brands have been using an alternative.
“We’ve seen brands switch to plastic over the last couple of months,” Butler says. “They’re kind of changing up the production a little bit to kind of get ahead of the curb.”
Meanwhile, Butler says facing the shortage won’t necessarily hurt her family’s business.
“This store never goes empty if we run out of something there’s a lot of times where we can replace it with something else,” she says.
