Is Anyone Else Noticing a Red Bull Shortage in Montana?
I can handle a world without toilet paper, I can NOT handle a world without Red Bull. Are you having a hard time finding it at your regular stops? Yeah, me too.
A couple of weekends ago we met up with a bunch of family in the Big Fork/Swan Lake area and I had forgotten to bring Red Bull, I was distracted with packing up all of the baby needs, if you've had a newborn, you get it. I thought I'd just grab a few when we got there, but that didn't happen. There was no sugar free Red Bull in Ferndale, so anytime a family member would go there, they would return with a regular Red Bull, which was fine, but as the week progressed, there was no RB there, or in Big Fork, as you can see in the sad photo above.
On the way home we stopped in Ronan, all they had was the little 8 ouncers. Then I kind of forgot about it until I was at Walgreens yesterday and their energy drink cooler looked like the one in the pic above. So I started getting paranoid and went to Walmart, where they not only have 4 packs of 12 ounce Sugar Free Red Bull, but it's a bargain at $8.87, better get some while you can.
I reached out to our local RB distributor, Summit Beverage, to ask long time Blaze listener Anthony Pike if I was hoarding prematurely, here's what he said.
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we've all been faced with [multiple companies] packaging issues. Such as an aluminum can shortages, cardboard packaging, shipping issues, shortage of long haul drivers as well demand being up. Red Bull has always been the leading energy drink in the area, and in the last year and a half, demand has doubled in sales in some markets. I know we are getting fully reloaded this week between today (Monday) and Wednesday on our 'out of stocks'. We service about 26,000 square miles in western Montana, so hopefully other distributors will be getting product back in, as well. Red Bull sales are at the highest level they have ever been.
So there you have it, we're not imaging it, but Summit is definitely working on serving their customers who run on Red Bull. Good luck!