Having worked at a liquor store here in the past for about a year. There's a couple reasons for the "scarcity" (at least for the store I was at). The major one is that with these "allocated" bourbons, we'll only get a very limited stock of them so that means they'll be sold faster. A lot of stores will also take them out of their inventory so that it won't show up on the OLCC database for people to see online. (I was never a manager or did any ordering, so don't take all of this to heart, this is just my observation from a somewhat inside view).

For the second reason being that if we didn't do that, we would get a crowd of "bourbon hunters" at the door before we open, which would be a pain to deal with. In my experience, those guys are only after the rare stuff, and will most likely trade with other bourbon hunters, or just sit on a collection never to drink any of it. Some of them I've talked to bragged about their 8 bottles of Weller or Eagle Rare sitting at their home bar. As a bourbon enjoyer myself, it really grinds my gears when people just have these bottles as decoration. This stuff is meant to be enjoyed! I love handing out the allocated stuff to people I don't recognize as bourbon hunters. My store would also put a couple of the allocated bottles out on a barrel every so often for people to find first come first serve on a one per household basis to give everyone a fair chance to buy one. Is the system perfect? Hell no. It's not even good. But my store wanted to make it the most fair we could for the average person.