Just a little over a year ago, former Trade Minister Rachmat Goebel made life very inconvenient for everybody in Indonesia who like to occasionally crack open a cold beer at the end of a long day by banning the sale of beer at convenience stores across the country.
But that’s not so much a concern anymore as, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can now get beer delivered directly to our door by our friendly neighborhood Go-Jeks.
Previously, Go-Jek did not have any option to allow you to purchase beer through their Go-Mart section, but the new feature appears to have been added with the most recent update to the app.
Strangely we learned about this new Go-Jek feature not from the company itself but indirectly through a tweet from @ngabdul
It appears as if Go-Jek has strategically placed these advertisement about the new beer delivery feature on bottles of Bintang, but, as far as we could tell, they have made no mention of it on their Facebook or Twitter pages.
However, we might have missed them as we were too excited about trying out the beer feature for ourselves. Here’s how it works:
Open up your Go-Jek application and select Go-Mart.
From the Go-Mart menu of shops, scroll down until you find the option innocently marked “Drink Corner”
Select “Drink Corner” and you’ll be told to confirm that you’re over 21 and that the driver will check your ID when he delivers your beer.
Once inside, you’ll be given one category to choose from: beer. Obviously, choose that one.
The only beer on offer is Bintang and Heineken and you’ll need to buy in 4 or 6 can packages.
Once you choose your beer, you’re brought to the usual checkout screen. Interestingly, it appears as if the system simply chooses the nearest venue to buy beer from your location and automatically selects that as the place for your driver to pick it up. In our case, it was the Papaya Supermarket in Citywalk Sudirman.
After you fill in everything and complete your order it’s just a matter of waiting for your refreshing beers to arrive!
If you find this exciting, you should also be aware that you can use Go-Mart to buy bottles of spirits from Red & White and Bottle Republic, though they can be pretty pricey.
We suspect that Go-Jek is not advertising this new feature too much for fear of a possibly backlash from the usual suspects like FPI and its ilk. It’s a fear that some on Twitter seem to share:
“Be careful, after this Go-Jek will be demonstrated against :)”
Which is probably a real concern. And while we don’t want to do anything that could get this fantastic feature taken away from us, at the same time, we felt a duty to our audiences to let you know about this potentially life-changing feature.
So if you happen to have any crazy uptight conservative friends who might be in the FPI, please don’t share this story with them. Cool? Thanks.
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