SLOP4230: Retail Alcohol Economics

Twelve weekly lectures, one continuous argument about what a shelf price is made of.

Over twelve weeks, we advance a singular, unbroken argument: a retail price is a composite of four calculable vectors: baseline production cost, category-specific federal taxation, retail margin, and spatial shelf-position value. Every module is dedicated to measuring and exploiting these specific terms.

The Twelve-Week Progression

• Phase I: The Chemical Baseline (Weeks 1–3): We establish the absolute price floor of industrial fermentation and quantify the logistical margin efficiencies of alchol distribution.
• Phase II: Regulatory Exploitation (Weeks 4–6): We map federal taxation mechanics, pitting the Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) loophole directly against the punitive volumetric excises applied to distilled spirits.
• Phase III: Spatial & Algorithmic Optimization (Weeks 7–10): We move to the retail floor, mapping the spatial obfuscation of suburban liquor outlets before deploying automated scrapers to mathematically maximize the ABV-to-dollar index across live datasets.
• Phase IV: Synthesis & Ethics (Weeks 11–12): We confront the public health externalities of hyper-efficient alcohol procurement before scaling your optimization algorithms to macro-event logistics.

Pedagogy: Lectures, Labs, and Decks Theory without practice is mere speculation. Each weekly module consists of a core lecture, a linked presentation deck, and an Applied Computational Lab. In these labs, you will compute the week’s specific vector by hand using a real-world SKU you have selected. An economic term you have not calculated yourself is a term you cannot defend in your final assessment.

Course Literature Every week draws upon two distinct tiers of literature. The core reading gave the baseline for the week’s lecture. The mandatory reading consists of linked, published papers, tax guidelines, and health-economics reports. You are expected to read and extract the empirical data from these external sources to ground your analysis in reality.