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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

On the speed front, I concur. Back in 1998, when I was on summer break from university, I worked in a wines and spirits bottling plant. One day the labelling machine started applying wonkey labels to the wine bottles and a couple of hundred had gone through before the guy running the machine had noticed.

They weren't wildly misaligned, but far enough from true that we had to wash them off and run them through the line again. Took a couple of us most of an afternoon to sort it out.

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At what point is it just more economical to sell them at a reduced price to restaurants (where the customer might not see the label)? I'm sure the guys (you) peeling the labels are probably the lowest paid in the factory but a few staff doing the work for the whole afternoon adds up.

Just speculation, but might there be regulations regarding the labeling of alcoholic beverages for sale that prevent accepting crooked labels or even price reductions?

It's called quality control.

Boom

At $10/hr for 2-3 people, assuming they could clear up 30 bottles an hour you're only talking $1/bottle. I don't think that small of a discount on a bottle of wine would encourage a restaurant to buy a veblen good that didn't look perfect.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

This is totally an n of 1 type story, but perhaps relevant nonetheless.

I worked at a bar during university during a time where the popular beer sale would be "28 bottles for the price of 24". The bar owner would send me and a few guys in a truck to a beer store in another town to buy as many cases as the truck could handle. This was illegal as we would sell it at the licensed bar (all liquor was supposed to be purchased with the license, for which the sale wasn't applicable too). So the owner was willing to risk legal action for 4 free beers (x50 cases or whatever).

The point is... restaurant owners sometimes go to great lengths to save a few dollars.

I did some work with a drinks can manufacturer, who were looking to improve the speed of detection of printing errors. The lines are so fast that detecting a print error even a few seconds earlier saves thousands of wasted cans.

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