Tag: up-selling

Part 1.  ‘Twas Not Always So’:  The Brief Golden Age of Helpful Wine  Advice

For the people who are the subject and object of this blog — ordinary, non-affluent wine drinkers who drink modestly-priced wines, mostly with affordably-priced, home-cooked meals — it can be daunting, intimidating, and, all too often, impossible to get effective advice or assistance in selecting wines from the confusing array that confronts them; even at the supermarkets where most of them now do their wine buying.

It was not always so.  With great variation by region, by degree of urbanization and affluence, and by local ethnic composition, lower-end wine consumers had a better chance then than now of getting informed help and advice in the period between the 1970s beginnings of the U.S. wine boom and the spread of up-sized and often very up-scaled supermarkets, one-stop multi-service chains, and big-box buying clubs.

That brief period coincided with the spread and growth of U.S. wine  drinking out beyond ethnic enclaves and down the broadening levels of the socio-economic pyramid.  It was also the period when a significant segment of wine buying was done at dedicated, non-elite, local wine shops, and at liquor stores, pharmacies, and other shops with large [for the time] wine selections. Consumers who lived in metro areas, might also have had access to very large wine-warehouse stores [like Sam’s in Chicago, to cite one example] that put significant energy into great lower-priced, bulk-imported deals alongside huge inventories and pre-orders of high-end collectors’ wines.

Development of Helpful, Knowledgeable Staffs

At the better-run versions of these wine shops, lower-end shoppers with little wine knowledge stood a far greater chance than they do today of finding a salesperson with enough wine knowledge to offer honest advice and information. The good shops developed staffs with ever-increasing capacities to be genuinely helpful, especially to those who lacked much background and knowledge of wine but were trying to learn and who sought to incorporate wine into their meals, relaxation, and socializing.  The good retailers developed helpful salespeople by:

• • • Allowing and/or encouraging them to join in-house samples-tasting sessions and to attend at least some of the numerous trade tastings offered by distributors, importers, and some producers throughout the year; and then — to keep these from being understood as mere party events — to follow up with discussions of what they had tasted

• • • Encouraging and providing materials for them to read about and learn the good in wines at all price points

• • • Providing guidelines and training in respectfully determining and accepting customers’ spending levels rather than cattle-prodding them to push customers to higher-priced wines. [Those all-too-common directives to up-sell anyone trusting enough to seek advice proved to be virtuoso examples of short-sightedness, functioning, as if by design, to drive off precisely the kinds of customers who, were they were to gain trust in a retailer, would be the most likely to remain long-term, loyal customers and staunch word-of-mouth advocates. Instead, they were the first to flee to the supermarkets to buy their wines, where — if they were unlikely to find informed advice if any at all — they were, at least, even less likely to be browbeaten, sneered at, or up-sold.]

• • • Setting and enforcing firm standards prohibiting intimidation, dismissiveness, ironic commentary [uttered or performed], and all the other behaviors by which the slightly- or somewhat-informed will always seek to convey self-aggrandizing distance and disdain from ordinary, ‘little’ [perhaps even deplorable] non-experts

• • • Encouraging and, if possible, facilitating — this was largely before most small retailers had web pages — customer feedback and call-in advice requests

Of course, not all retailers of that era did all these things, but the better ones did at least some of them;  and, in retrospect, we may well view the brief, two- or three-decade period when these types of wine retailers constituted an important market segment as something of a Golden Age of Helpful Wine Advice for uninitiated and non-affluent wine buyers.

The Demise of the Small, Well-Staffed Wine Shop

Some of the older wine warehouse stores with both value-priced and elite selections still survive, but many [most?] of the small, local shops and the well-stocked and well-run wine-and-liquor stores have succumbed to the new realities of how wine is retailed. For our purposes, their passing has strongly affected — for the unquestionable worse —how ordinary people get advice and help in selecting and learning about wine.

The small shops have mostly been driven out of business by the up-sized and up-scaled supermarkets cited above. These corporate monsters offer lower prices via economies of scale as well as one-trip convenience. They have had the same effect on the better wine-and-liquor stores, but many of these have stayed in business by transforming themselves into all-purpose party/convenience stores with shoddy, highly promoted wine selections. They also cut costs by doing service as distributors’ dumping grounds for off-vintages; mishandled wines; wines past their peak; and fashion-of-the-moment — soon to be flash-in-the-pan — wines; and for unmoved cases of mass-produced, highly-promoted, cliché [but not necessarily value-priced] wines that serve as sales-continuity anchors for many distributorships, but that need to be moved out as new vintages promise to swell inventories.

Coming in Part 2…..

[In Part 2 of this topic, I’ll begin a discussion of the realities of getting wine advice within, or outside of, the principal loci of non-elite wine retailing today:  supermarkets, big-box buying clubs, and restaurants.  As always, I will do so from the perspective of the non-affluent, non-expert buyer of lower-end and modestly priced wines intended to be drunk, not stored or aged.]

Peter di Lorenzi