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The Scotch Malt Whisky Society recently put a 10-minute cart timer on their website, and I'm perfectly fine with that. For those who don't know SMWS, they're b
by KozmoNau7 5y ago
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society recently put a 10-minute cart timer on their website, and I'm perfectly fine with that.
For those who don't know SMWS, they're basically an independent bottler under the guise of a club. Everything they bottle is cask strength, non-chill filtered and natural color, which is how I think all whisky should be.
You pay a yearly membership fee, which gives you access to regular tastings and other events, as well as access to buy bottles. Their sort of trademark thing is that they don't officially tell you which distilleries the bottles come from, so bottles are marked with a numerical code for the distillery and one for the specific cask. That means they can sometimes get casks from distilleries that are not too keen on having their name on independent bottlings, but the official reason given is that SMWS wants people to taste any given bottle free of preconceived ideas of what a whisky from any certain distillery "should" taste like. Of course, there are readily available lists mapping codes to distilleries all over the web, but the official pretense is kept up.
Coming back to the shopping cart, the 10 minute timer is there because they may only have 5 or 10 bottles of a given whisky, so adding it to your cart reserves one bottle for you, until you complete the order or the timer runs out. For limited-stock merchandise, I think that's a sensible way to ensure you don't get an annoying surprise right as you're trying to pay, and to ensure that people can't just reserve a bottle forever and never actually buy it.
- vneur 5y agoIt would be great if hacker news could find a way to filter out advertisements... seems like they are getting more and more common?
- dang 5y agoWhat evidence do you have for saying that? The commenter's history looks normal and the comment was relevant. Plenty of HN users go on about their enthusiasms. That's a good thing, as long as they don't do it excessively, which this user isn't. HN's guidelines ask people not to post insinuations about this kind of thing. Internet users are massively too quick to read it into other users' posts, and it poisons the threads when they cross into accusing others. Of course, if you're seeing actual evidence of abuse, that's different, and you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. Someone simply having different opinions or tastes than you is not evidence of abuse, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- oh_sigh 5y agoHow is this an ad, rather than someone just providing an anecdote that is relevant to the conversation? OP surely is a bad advertiser if that is their company, considering they've been posting on hn for 4 years and this is the first time they've mentioned it. 2.25 years ago they said generally that whisky was an interest of theirs on a comment. That's it though.
- KozmoNau7 5y agoI veered into an explanation, because I wanted to provide context for why there is a limited supply and why I consider cart timers to be fair and good practice in such a situation, unlike when they are used as a pressure tactic. As another posted stated, if I were trying to advertise, I'm obviously not very good at it, my only connection with SMWS is that I'm a member and that I probably spend way too much money on whisky :-)