What does it do? Well, a lot, but the main feature is that it helps you find beers faster than looking at a menu. Take me for instance, at Metropolis last night. I searched for beers at that location, sorted by brewery, and in seconds I saw every Sierra Nevada beer they had on tap and in bottles. The Southern Hemisphere Harvest Ale was delicious. I had two. If I had asked the app to find me only beers from that same brewery that I have not yet had on my Brewniversity list, it would have told me that there were none. But if I changed the search criteria to search by style and not by brewery, it would have come up with several. If I had asked it to search simply by beers that I have not had that were available at that location, no style or brewery criteria at all, it would have found a bunch.
But that's not all. You can find all of our special beer events, add them to your calendar, tweet about them, or do that Facebook. You can read about different beer styles, find Taco Mac locations, see images and info on beers that you are interested in...OK, I am going to stop listing everything that it does. Download it and start playing around. It's a phone app; it isn't complicated. If you don't have a smart phone yet, then I immediately know three things about you. One: You are part of 40% of the U.S. population that doesn't have a smart phone. No shame in that. I was a little late to the party too. Two: You have been considering getting one, if only to shut everyone else up that won't stop talking about their damn phone. Three: Sometime in the near future you are going to be in a Taco Mac, you are going to see and hear people happily using the app, and want to slap them silly. Because when they are not looking at, or talking on it, they are talking about their phone. I feel you there. But I also know that deep inside you wish you were navigating the Taco Mac beer selection electronically, effortlessly gliding from one outstanding beer to the next. So if you are one of those people in the 40% of the population, I have one small piece of advice for you: T-Mobile has a pretty aggressive deal going on right now for smart phones. I know because I just got my dad one for his birthday last week. Yeah, he's 68 and he has one of the baddest ass phones you can get. What are you working with over there, a flip phone? Nice. But seriously, you want the app, no matter what kind of phone you have. Do what you need to do to get it.
One more very interesting thing about the app--and then I will shut up about it, but this is important--is where it pulls the inventory data from now. Our old web-based system pulled the data from the buttons each store has in their computer to ring up your beers. Based on the vast amount of beers we carry, sometimes there are extra buttons in the computer for one reason or another, and that made the data inaccurate. Now the app is pulling the data from the current beer menu in the store. Big improvement, right? But wait...there's more. It filters the data through the store's daily insert, the thing that says, "Just In" and "Gone". It picks up the beers that are just in, and drops out the ones that are gone. Brilliant! Now the only inaccuracies would be a beer that runs out literally that day. Hooray, and I expect to see the kind of unbridled craziness in the streets that usually accompanies a Super Bowl win or V-E Day. Beer Drinkers Gone Wild Volume 1. All the hairy, sweaty beer bellies you can handle. Only $19.95. Act now.
And if all of that was not an adequate enticement, you can view this video to see the handsome model we paid a ton of money to record a little bit of footage about the new app. I don't know what it is about that guy, but he is one sexy man. Enjoy.
