Say what’s on
the shelf.

Three of the four are things you can read off a shelf edge in five seconds, which is the point. A caption is not a piece of writing; it is a label for a picture, and the shops that post consistently are the ones that stopped treating it as an essay.

The names and the prices are invented, so put your own in. Keep the length, and keep the habit of never saying how anything tastes.

Six hashtags: two for the category, two for the town, two for the shop.

Thirty tags on a neighbourhood shop’s post is a signal that nobody is reading it, and the biggest tags in a category are exactly the ones where a single-location shop is invisible. Six specific ones do more than thirty broad ones, and they are the same six most weeks — which means you write them once and stop thinking about it.

Every post also carries a responsibility line. Keep it short and keep it on every post, not just the ones that feel promotional. What Meta’s policies actually require of an alcohol retailer, and what age-gating does and does not do, is set out on the alcohol social media rules page.

The same two rules, enforced by a rule table rather than by the model that wrote the sentence. A caption is generated, then checked against the facts the shop actually has — the name read off your own photograph, the price you entered, the shelf you put it on, the date it arrived. A sentence carrying anything else does not ship, and that check is the same seam the picture goes through. It is not a matter of prompting the model nicely; the model does not get the last word.

Which is the whole difference between this and asking a chatbot for a caption: a chatbot will follow those rules too, if you give them to it, every time you ask. The photograph half of the job is here.