So I've seen about six bottles of C922 total, But the store easily had 80 of their ECBP store pick. I get that the selection process and shipping and bottling does end up costing more, but I would expect that the bottles that are truly rare would still be higher priced. I'm not talking a lot here... C922 I think it was $75 and the store pic was $90.Overall there are a lot more bottles of the standard offering like C922, so I'm assuming there's an economy of scale. The private barrel is them getting one barrel on their own, so the selection process/label/shipping is likely more labor intensive and there's probably a premium on being able to have a private selection, so the bottle costs more for them to buy. BUT they're getting everything that comes out of that barrel so they get more bottles to sell, they're not competing with 1000 other liquor stores, like they are for the standard releases. That'd be my guess.
NJ seemed to always be about month behind in distribution this year, so hopefully more are on the way.
Regarding NJ being a little delayed, you're definitely right about that. NYC started receiving Stagg and Pappy, but my local store manager told me that it's not going to show up until probably end of December or first week of January here.