What beer can teach you about comparison shopping

I’m almost always thinking numbers. Yes, even when shopping for beer.

Recently, I was choosing between the Red and Blue Chimay varieties. I have a slight preference for the Blue, but the Red was a couple dollars cheaper and figured I’d give it a try. But I wondered why it was cheaper. Then I noticed the Red’s alcohol content was two whole percentage points lower than Blue. It was here that I crunched the numbers to compare which beer was cheaper per ounce of alcohol. The more expensive Blue variety was slightly cheaper! (see spreadsheet below)

I later crunched some numbers on Anchor Steam and Coors Light just for fun. You can calculate how expensive alcohol is in your favorite beer by changing the highlighted cells (you can get a price from Binny’s and an ABV from BeerAdvocate (free membership required) or by doing a quick google search for “[favorite beer] abv”).

But there is a larger lesson beyond finding the cheapest beer: when dealing with important decisions, check your intuition against the numbers.

Consider the prices at this happy hour as another example. Normally, the more you buy, the cheaper things are on a per unit basis. But in this place, the larger pint size ($1.75) is almost a whole penny more expensive than a 10 oz. glass ($1) on a per ounce basis.

Do you have any stories of the prices you can’t figure out? Another unsolved puzzle to me is why the middle sub size at Quiznos is the “best value” instead of the large.