I originally tried Bawls Guarana at a LAN party that I went to while I was in high school. I enjoyed it and, in college, began to keep a supply on hand. I consumed the last of my stockpile before moving out to California and, not knowing where a distributer might be found, gave up on it for a while. After settling in, however, I discovered that Target had begun to stock it in can form and so picked up an approximately 2 can per week habit again. While picking up various things at Target over the weekend, I found that they seem to have stopped stocking it or perhaps had reorganized it to some hidden corner of the store (away from the rest of their energy drink supply).

As such, I began looking for an alternate supply route. This led me to the Bawls website where I found that Amazon now stocks Bawls in 24 packs. They were somewhat more expensive than what I'd been paying at Target, but looking closely showed me two things:

1. I could have Amazon set up an automated shipment of 1 case per month to my apartment. This is slightly higher than the rate at which I generally consume it, but has the benefit of being highly unlikely to run out.

2. Amazon discounts items in automated shipments like this quite heavily. The base price for a 24 pack at Amazon runs $55. They take 15% off of that when doing automated shipments and give free shipping (though it would qualify for super-saver anyway).

Doing the math puts the Amazon supply at $1.9475 / can and the Target supply at $1.7975 / can. This gives a 15 cent per can price increase, but a much lower liklihood of running out. Also, Amazon's "subscription" program seems less onerous than most: they provide a web-based console where you can skip a month's shipment, request the shipment now, or even cancel the subscription entirely with minimal fuss.

So, we'll see how this works out for now. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't offer Bawls in the classic bottles that were so awesome...

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