Stone Ridge Spirits & Wine
One app we own outright, and we’re in the perfect spot for it. Customers browse our whole store at any hour, reserve a pickup in about four taps. What’s left is the plumbing — payment, accounts, a live register link.
Zone One
The Vision
WHY THIS
People love our store — our taste, the tasting bar, the feeling of being known.
We already do something else well: when someone wants a bottle we don’t stock, we get it — we special-order anything, all the time. What we lack is the always-open version of that yes: a regular can’t scroll our whole inventory and reserve in seconds. That’s what turns a customer into a regular for life.
So that’s what I’m building: one app and website of our own — our entire inventory, browsable any hour, reserved in seconds. Our customers are ready: nine in ten adults over 65 are online and most own a smartphone.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet (adults 65+: 90% online, 78% smartphone ownership); AARP 2025 Tech Trends Report (about 90–91% of adults 50+ own a smartphone). See the Sources section.
WHERE WE SIT
We sit in a rare spot most stores would trade for: the high-end crowd from the city drives right past our door every weekend.
Route 209 runs straight through downtown Stone Ridge. About ten minutes south sits Inness, the luxury resort in Accord, roughly six miles off. Mohonk Mountain House, above New Paltz, is about twenty minutes south — same belt, same guest, pulling well-off city weekenders to the Hudson Valley. Our competitors, the curated wine shops, sit up in Kingston, about twelve miles north — not on this corridor the way we are.
We’re the natural store for these weekenders. An app locks that in before anyone else claims it — our whole shelf in their pocket.
Sources: distance-cities.com (Stone Ridge–Accord ~6 mi via US-209; Stone Ridge–Kingston ~12 mi via US-209); Mohonk Mountain House official directions and Rome2Rio (~12–13 mi / ~20 min south of Stone Ridge, toward New Paltz); Wikipedia, U.S. Route 209 (runs through downtown Stone Ridge). See the Sources section.
THE APP
What I’m building beats anything our competitors have, because it’s ours — open it today: a demo is live at srsw-reserve.pages.dev.
The feel is the whole point. Reserve, pick up, order, or make an account in a few taps:
Browse everything
Our full inventory, searchable any hour.
Reserve and pick up
Set a bottle aside or order.
Ask anything
Questions, answered.
Stay connected
See what’s new and join our mailing list.
Sourcing catalog
A thousand-plus prestige bottles we don’t stock, on the same screen.
Own account
One tap and a customer is set up.
The app pulls in each sourcing-catalog bottle’s details and shows a starting price estimate — a computer estimate, not a live quote. We confirm the real price through our licensed New York wholesaler before the customer pays — never out of state ourselves.
Because the hard foundation gets built once, new features come quick and cheap on top — a gift bundle, an event signup — on our own schedule.
INSIDE THE STORE
Here’s what it looks like behind the counter: the app becomes a simple dashboard on our own computers, every order lands the moment a customer places it, with an email ping (still to build).
On the shelf
Already on our shelf.
To source
Bottles we bring in — the app did the legwork.
Ready
Sitting out back, ready for pickup.
Where it’s headed: it can mostly run itself
Once fully built out, we set our margin and the app handles almost the whole sale — pricing, the order, the heads-up to the customer.
The promise: nothing changes at the counter. Every order, in-stock or sourced, still rings through our register, and the 21-and-over ID check is in person at pickup. In-state delivery comes later — New York residences only, in a vehicle registered to the store or one with an SLA trucking permit.
Note on the morning cross-check: Lightning POS has a documented quirk where a sale doesn’t always subtract from stock, so a roughly ten-minute morning cross-check against the shelf stays the safety net even after the inventory feed is working. See the Sources section.
CONNECTING TO THE REGISTER
For the app to show what’s on our shelf, it needs that list — and it lives in one place: our Lightning POS register. The one practical job is getting our inventory into the app.
Here’s the line that should put you at ease: the app only ever reads our inventory — it never writes back into the register, changes a price, or touches a count. Three ways to get the list, strongest first:
Way one — the official live feed
Computer Perfect and already sells an add-on that streams a store’s shelf to the web in real time, one direction only. The open question: whether they’ll feed it into our app rather than a site they build — a fifteen-minute call plus whatever they charge — the cleanest long-term path.
Way two — a nightly pull we build
A small overnight job copies our catalog out of the feed the register already produces. It only reads, needs no one’s blessing, and takes a few days to build — the path that waits on no one.
Way three — a spreadsheet we keep ourselves
We keep our own list of what to show online, independent of Lightning POS — the fallback we can use on day one while the others come online.
We’re covered either way
We make the free call and build the nightly pull in parallel, the spreadsheet always there as a fallback — whichever lands first, our inventory flows in, never depending on a single door. One honest note: the demo’s bottle list is a one-time copy pulled from our public website back in May, not a live feed yet; making it refresh automatically is a build step in the timeline below.
Sources: Computer Perfect / Lightning Online POS product pages (one-way, store→web e-commerce feed; 25+ years serving liquor retail; no public open API). See the Sources section.
HOW WE TAKE PAYMENT
The part that sounds complicated and isn’t: we don’t build the card payment — we plug in a standard payment company, so real card numbers never touch our systems.
In the demo, the Venmo, Cash App and Zelle buttons are placeholders only and come out before launch. No money moves through a peer-to-peer app: those give no protection and can freeze a balance with our cash inside. In their place goes a normal card processor with a merchant account approved for alcohol.
It also fixes a quiet cost: our card fee today is one of the store’s biggest costs, and moving the online handling (and eventually in-store) to a leaner, alcohol-friendly processor, plus New York’s pricing rule below, shrinks it.
Lowest fee — Helcim
Charges the bank’s real cost plus a small margin, no monthly fee — the cheapest honest pricing, and it allows low-risk alcohol. The margin is volume-tiered, not flat, shrinking as we sell more. (Worth a quick confirm for online alcohol first, since it screens applicants.)
Simplest — Square
The most familiar name, allows alcohol. Online it’s 2.9% + 30¢ on a paid plan, otherwise 3.3% + 30¢ — a touch higher than Stripe, but the easiest to run.
The standard — Stripe
What a huge share of online stores run on; allows alcohol after a normal review. Online it’s 2.9% + 30¢ with no monthly fee.
Apple Pay and Google Pay come free — and the ID check doesn’t change
Whichever processor we pick, the checkout automatically offers card, Apple Pay and Google Pay — no extra setup or fee. And the “are you 21?” tap is only a deterrent; the real check is a person looking at a real ID at pickup.
The real money move: a cash price and a card price
New York lets us post two prices — a cash price and a slightly higher card price — so the card-paying customer covers the card fee instead of us, capped at our actual card cost and shown plainly. Done right, it’s the single biggest lever, taking our card cost from roughly five percent toward half that.
Sources: Square, Stripe and Adyen alcohol / restricted-business policies (alcohol permitted with extra review); Helcim Acceptable Use Policy (low-risk alcohol permitted; interchange-plus, volume-tiered margin, no monthly fee); NY General Business Law §518 (cash/card two-tier pricing, effective Feb 11, 2024); NY SLA Wine/Liquor Store Quick Reference (in-person ID at pickup). Full citations and a payment-method risk table are in the companion report, Online Store, Payments & Our Own App (reports/SRSW_Online_Store_Payments_and_App.html). General information; figures illustrative. squareup.com/help · stripe.com/legal · legal.helcim.com · nysenate.gov · sla.ny.gov
WE OWN IT
It’s our website, on our address — no middleman takes a cut, sets the rules, or pulls the rug.
The cautionary tale is real: in 2021, Uber paid $1.1 billion for Drizly, the biggest alcohol-delivery app in North America, then folded it into Uber Eats and switched it off at the end of March 2024 — about half a billion dollars of online alcohol sales gone with it.
Drizly never owned a delivery van; for thousands of liquor stores it simply was their online store, and when Uber pulled the plug they lost their ordering, sales, and years of customer data overnight. That’s renting versus owning: rent and you’re one corporate decision from going dark; own and you keep your customers. Reserve is built the owned way. SRSW’s own site, app, and customer list — no landlord, no platform that can switch us off, no cut skimmed off every order.
And who we’re really up against isn’t the national apps — it’s the shops around us. As of spring 2026, several nearby (Bluebird in Accord, Kingston Wine Co, Woodstock Wine & Liquor) already take orders online, and at least one routes its through DoorDash or Uber Eats — renting its front door. We don’t sell online at all yet; Reserve lets us pass them, owning ours.
Sources: CNN, CBS News, and beveragedaily.com on the Uber–Drizly acquisition ($1.1B, 2021), the shutdown at the end of March 2024, and the loss of roughly half a billion dollars in online alcohol sales; SRSW competitor landscape file (local shops and their use of DoorDash / Uber Eats). See the Sources section.
Zone Two
The Timeline
THE TIMELINE
The honest path from today — Saturday, May 30 — to a quiet launch taking real orders from ten or fifteen people we hand-pick. Good news first: the app itself is built. What’s left is the wiring.
The seven steps’ hands-on building is only about two to two-and-a-half weeks. One step is out of our hands — the bank approving our alcohol merchant account, which runs in the background while I build. That approval is why the honest finish line is roughly four to six weeks.
Read it left to right as time, today (Sat May 30) at the far left. Each bar’s length is how long that step takes; bars stacked in the same weeks are happening at the same time. The bar marked “long pole” is the one we wait on the bank for — it sets the real launch date.
Owner go-ahead + six decisions
Gene and Jamie say yes and answer the six business questions everything waits on: our markup on sourced bottles, how Reserve money is booked, Devin’s small pay-when-it-earns share, the damaged-bottle rule, the pickup-hold window, and when a deposit is taken.
Gene & Jamieone sit-down~$0
You can check: a one-page sheet with all six questions answered and initialed by both owners.
Card processor + alcohol merchant account
Set up a standard card processor (the kind every online store uses) with a merchant account approved for selling alcohol, so real cards work and money lands in the SRSW bank account. The demo’s Venmo / Cash App / Zelle buttons come out and the card processor goes in. The bank vets alcohol sellers carefully, so the underwriting wait — not the wiring — is what takes weeks. This is the one step that sets the calendar, and it runs in the background while I build.
bank account, EIN, SLA #owner ID$0 setup; ~2.9% + 30¢ per sale
You can check: a $1 test charge runs on a real credit card and the dollar actually shows up in the SRSW bank account.
Live inventory feed from the register (read-only)
Build the overnight, one-way feed so the website list matches the shelf. Reserve only reads from Lightning POS — never writes back, never changes a price or a count. Includes a free call to Computer Perfect; a spreadsheet export is the guaranteed fallback.
existing Lightning/BoxSalt feedfree Computer Perfect call~$0 to build
You can check: a bottle that sells out in the store no longer shows in-stock online by the next morning (with a ~10-minute morning cross-check as the safety net).
Real accounts + back-office order screen
Replace the demo’s fake login with real, secure sign-ups, build the password-protected order screen Gene checks each morning, and mirror every order, quote, and signup to a Google Sheet plus an email ping.
free-tier databaseGoogle Sheetemail for pings~$0 on free tiers
You can check: a test signup and a test quote both appear on the order screen and in the Google Sheet, and an email lands in Gene’s inbox.
Launch-set photos + tasting notes
Make the ~50–100 bottles we’ll actually push to the first regulars look sharp — a real photo and a real tasting note on each. A quiet launch only needs the launch set polished.
Gene/Jamie tasting notesiPhone photos~$0
You can check: every bottle in the launch email shows a real photo and a real tasting note — no gray placeholders.
End-to-end dress rehearsal (everything real)
One full real order through every real system at once: sign up, request a quote, set it on the order screen, pay with a real card, watch the inventory update, hand the bottle over the counter with the in-person ID check. Nothing faked. This is where the long pole gets proven before any customer touches it.
merchant account approvedlive card processorlive inventory feed~$0 (small refunded charge)
You can check: one order goes from a phone tap to a bottle handed over with money in the bank — nothing staged.
Quiet launch to 10–15 regulars
Go live. A personal invite to ten to fifteen hand-picked regulars, sent in small waves of five, with Devin’s phone on for fast first replies. Pickup is the clean launch path; delivery stays a later add-on.
invite list of 10–15Devin’s phone on~$0
You can check: a real customer who isn’t Devin or Gene completes a real, paid order through the site.
Tuning week 1 — watch + fix
Lighter week. Watch the first real orders, smooth any rough edges, confirm the morning routine is easy. Small fixes only — no new features.
first-buyer feedbacka few $/mo + card fees
You can check: the morning glance at the order screen takes about five minutes and nothing is stuck.
Tuning week 2 — decide what’s next
Even lighter. Look at how the first group used it (did at least 1 in 5 buy?), write the short runbook so a second person can cover the basics, and decide together whether to widen the invite list or add the next bottles.
first-group resultsa few $/mo + card fees
You can check: a one-page runbook exists and the owners agree on whether to invite more people.
LIVE — quiet launch, Tuesday June 30, 2026 (about four-and-a-half weeks from today)
“Operational” means the site is taking real, paid orders from ten to fifteen hand-picked regulars, proven in a full dress rehearsal first. The simplest proof: one real regular who isn’t Devin or Gene completes a paid order start to finish. The date sits later than the coding only because it waits on the bank’s merchant-account approval, and the running cost stays tiny with no big up-front bill.
What it actually costs
The software is genuinely near-free: $0 hosting at our traffic, about $11 a year for a custom web address, and a dollar or two a month for the chat helper. So the software runs for under $100 a year, plus the small card-processing cut once we’re taking payment. The roughly $200 a month in tools is something Devin already pays for himself — his workbench, never a bill to the store.
Sources: Cloudflare Pages pricing (free tier at small-store traffic); standard card-processor published rates (~2.9% + 30¢), e.g. Stripe / Square, both of which work with NY liquor retailers; domain registrar pricing (~$11/yr). Figures are illustrative research estimates, not quotes. See the Sources section.
Zone Three
The Close
THE MOMENT
The whole case: this used to cost a fortune and take a year — today it’s a few weeks and almost no money, a rare window that closes the moment a competitor steps through.
And this isn’t one good idea — it’s a foundation we keep building on: browsing and special-ordering now, then gift bundles, private tastings and events people book themselves. Because we own it, nobody can charge us more next year to keep it — and the first to move gets the head start.
The smart first move: put it straight into the hands of our highest-end customers, who buy the rare and expensive bottles. Turn their phone call into a tap a few times, and we become the only place they source from.
A rough number: if even five of those first fifteen regulars special-order one extra bottle a month at our normal margin, that’s a few thousand dollars a year — same register, almost no added cost, and every sale is one a competitor didn’t get.
It’s all designed around the New York rules — licensed wholesaler, ID in person at pickup, New York only — and we’ll confirm the final setup with the State Liquor Authority before we go live.
I’ll be straight, the way I have the whole way. The one thing missing is the front door — and it has never been this cheap or fast to build. Let’s build it.
ANSWERS TO EVERYTHING
The questions you’d be right to ask, answered straight, including the parts that aren’t free or instant — naming them makes the rest believable.
“Business is fine. Why bother?”
It doesn’t fix anything that works — it adds the one thing we can’t do today: let a regular reserve a bottle at ten at night. The real risk is a competitor building it first and owning that habit with the same weekender crowd.
“Is it legal?”
Yes — it rests on New York’s own published rules: a store like ours can take orders over the internet for pickup here or delivery to a New York home. We source every bottle through a licensed New York wholesaler, never out of state, and check ID in person.
“What does it cost us? What’s the catch?”
The software is near-free, on tools Devin already pays for himself. He earns only a small share of what Reserve brings in — paid only when it earns, nothing if it doesn’t — and that share stays inside New York’s third-party rules, likely a small percentage or flat fee.
“This sounds too good — and the app already works, so it’s done?”
What’s built is a polished demo you can open today. But two things aren’t finished: real card payment and the live inventory feed are still to wire up. So “almost free” is the software, not the launch work — it’s not yet taking real money.
“Who runs it, and what if Devin leaves?”
The only new habit for the store is a five-minute morning glance at one order screen — and the ring-up is the same register staff already know, so nobody’s confused. The store owns it outright — website, customer list, data, and code are all SRSW’s, not Devin’s — built on standard tools another developer could pick up, and we’ll put a written runbook and backup maintainer in place before launch. That reduces the key-person risk — it doesn’t erase it, which is why we put it in writing.
“What if an order is wrong, sold out, or returned?”
Every order rings through our register by hand before anything leaves, so a wrong order gets caught at the counter, and override can hold or cancel it. For reservations and special orders no card is charged until pickup; for an in-stock item that’s gone, the overnight feed plus the morning cross-check catches it before the customer drives over. New York’s return rule is specific, and the app follows it: alcohol comes back only if defective, by replacement or store credit, not cash.
“Why build our own instead of Shopify, Square, or DoorDash?”
Ready-made stores are fine for a basic shelf, but alcohol sales, the deep sourcing catalog, and the in-person-pickup ID flow are the parts they handle clumsily — and you pay monthly forever for a storefront you don’t own. DoorDash and Drizly are worse: they take a cut and can pull the rug (Uber bought Drizly for $1.1 billion and shut it in 2024). Ours fits how SRSW works, costs almost nothing, and is fully ours.
“We already special-order. Why an app?”
It removes the friction, turning a phone call into a few taps — same legal path, same register, just always open.
“Our customers are older — will they use it?”
The data says yes: 78 percent of people over 65 own a smartphone (about 90 percent of adults 50+ own one), and nine in ten over 65 are online. We start with the high-end regulars most likely to use it.
“Is our data safe?”
Safer than renting from a marketplace: a standard card processor handles all card numbers, so real card data never touches our systems. The cautionary tale is Drizly: the FTC came down on them in 2022 after a breach exposed about 2.5 million people, partly for hoarding data they didn’t need. We build lean from day one.
“Could it put our license at risk?”
Protecting the license is the whole design. The two real risks with any alcohol app are an outsider effectively running the business or taking too big a cut, and an underage or out-of-state sale. We address both: ID in person at pickup, New York only, every sale through our own register, and Devin’s pay structured to stay inside New York’s third-party rules — a small percentage or flat fee, well under the state’s control thresholds.
Sources: NY SLA Wine/Liquor Store Quick Reference; NY SLA Advisory #2021-23 (third-party compensation); NY SLA frequent-violations guidance; FTC action against Drizly (Oct 2022, breach affecting 2.5M people); CNN on the Drizly shutdown; Pew Research Mobile Fact Sheet; AARP 2025 Tech Trends; Stripe PCI / card-data guidance; NY return-policy law. See the Sources section.
SOURCES
Every external or factual claim in this plan traces to a real source, grouped by subject. The New York points draw on the state’s own published rules.