When is a half price wine not a half price wine?
Thursday, November 26th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
At Classic Wine Direct we’re pretty upfront about what we do – we can’t compete with supermarkets on price so we offer wines from off the beaten track instead. wines are more flavoursome and interesting. it can be difficult for wine drinkers to know the true value of wine.
wine deals by supermarkets are often rip-offs as confirmed by Pernod Ricard.
The fact that a leading player in the wine business had admitted that consumers were being conned caused many a raised eyebrow.
half price deals are not in fact deals at all according to Spiret. Put simply, a bottle reduced from £7.99 to £3.99 is often worth only £3.99 in the first place.
Retailers use a policy called “marking up, only to mark down” where they put a product on sale at a high price in a select number of regional outlets for a long enough time to ensure they can legally claim the product was being sold at that price before then offering it nationwide at a lower ” was/now” price. wine customers will believe they are getting a bargain price. Confused? the general idea is.
the majority of the wine market is obsessed with the £3.99 price bracket.99 price point and this affects the way that retailers are selling us wine and the way that some suppliers are now producing their wines.
Spiret thinks consumers know they are getting misled and they get use to it. this leads to the wine trade not havng any money.
Spiret’s gives us an inside view of the true tricks in which wine is sold by the big retailers. the retailers view the customers are lazy.
In many ways Spiret was simply highlighting the types of marketing practices that are in play in many industries and it would be unfair to single out the wine trade as unique in using such tactics.
Given that supermarkets represent two thirds of wine sales in the UK, these practices also have a direct effect on the public perception of the value of wine.
if the normal drinker believes that they are getting a £7.00 bottle.wine values range from £3.99.99 bottle then it follows that it will be much harder for the independent wine retailer to sell something whose real value is (and always was) £7.99.
There is, of course, no end in sight to this type of price fraud – the subjectivity of a wine’s value leaves this particular sector open to all sorts of underhand practices.
However, if the political mood continues to be against discount selling for alcohol, it will be interesting to see how the big retailers find a real price for wines they have knowingly mis-sold for the last 10 years.
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