If MM et al were communicating better at the time, and were fully open for orders, why would people have given brewuk their business instead?
I don't know anyone who did. But I know at least three people who were regular BUK customers who have never used BUK since, due to how BUK handled (or didnt) their orders during covid....taking weeks to not deliver something, then taking weeks further, to respond to email requests for refunds.
No one said MM were fully open.....they just managed their ordering process better than perhaps anyone else, so were able to maintain a largely efficient process and got orders out to customers within reasonable time scales. Certainly once they got their process working properly there wasn't a day that they didnt "open" for business.....just that once X kg of malt had been ordered then they stopped orders being placed. This helped manage stocks and ensured that there was stock left for others.
I dont think it helped that there were suddenly a vast number of folks suddenly stuck at home all day (furloughed or just spending more time at home due to not travelling to work) who suddenly took up brewing for the first time, putting additional load on the supply chain. Some retailers managed the additional load better than others.
BUK might have been fully open....but they might as well have been shut given the difficulties in accessing their website and the delays (in the order of weeks in some instances) taken to deliver orders.
One indication of the damage done to their business was the level of activity in the BUK forums, which, whilst not as busy as say here, was plenty busy enough in 2019 and early 2020, but dropped off a cliff post covid and didnt even bounce. The forum literally died overnight in the summer of 2020.
I liked BUK as a supplier and personally I still used them after covid (no more or less frequently than I did before), and any loss of a competitor is a loss of choice to us the consumer, which is only a bad thing, and I'm sorry to see it go...if indeed it has gone.
