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Ole Miss officials wanted to take its time to get beer sales right.
Believe it or not, they waited until the Texas A&M game and pretty much executed the new beer sales plan with relatively few glitches. The university reported approximately 15,400 beers were sold on Saturday netting around $130,000, so potentially we’re looking at a $1M revenue stream for seven home games if those sales trends hold true.
The biggest glitch, however, I’m sure you stood in a pretty long line at some point, because I did a couple times. The lines did seem to get longer as the game went on, and maybe that’s because people ran out of whatever they bootlegged in or because of the direction of the game (see: not great).
The only issue with these lines is that most of the beer lines were not for other general concessions items like hot dogs and popcorn. So if you wanted food and beer, you may have stood in a line twice, or you stood in a long beer line and then walked up and got food pretty quickly.
More importantly, there was a lack of some of the more popular beers like Bud Light, Michelob Ultra, and Corona, but we asked Kyle Campbell with Ole Miss communications for a breakdown of what sold best last week against Texas A&M.
- Coors Light can – 5,348
- Miller Lite can – 3,106
- Blue Moon can – 2,406
- Henry’s Spiked Seltzer can – 1,201
- Landshark can – 982
- Budweiser can – 961
- Suzy B can – 337
- Draft Beer – 1,062
The draft beer option was not available throughout the entire stadium, so it will be a little bit of a weird stat thrown in there. All hail the Silver Bullet though, congrats.
There’s a few things the staff at Red Cup saw that could maybe help beer sales in the future though, but please comment with more below.
For me, I think the guys and gals pouring the beers need to have a can opener tools to expedite the process a little bit. I know the beer stand I frequented were complaining of sore fingers by the third quarter and seemed to be moving much slower than earlier in the game. Or maybe look at some aluminum screw top options for the future for the most popular beers so far - Miller Lite and Coors Light.
Since Ole Miss now knows its two most popular options, they could have someone pouring those leading up to the end of quarters and at halftime to more quickly hand them off to people ordering two of them. Granted, it takes 10 seconds to pour a beer, so maybe this wouldn’t be a huge time saver but it adds up per customer.
They got to get some menus that aren’t just taped beside the register, so people can figure out what they want before they get up there.
There needed to be a little more signage pointing to where the beer stations were, I know I saw a few folks having to get re-routed from the traditional concession locations when they asked for beer.
When it’s all said and done though, we’ve got cold beer to enjoy during football games now, and there will always be growing pains with any new implementation especially one that is this big. Kudos to Ole Miss for actually following through and getting this done though it was imperfect, it was a big step in the right direction for game day entertainment.