Merchants of woe
Now that summer is well and truly with us, we can hopefully look forward to a very welcome, busy trading period. This is the time when we licensees pull out all the stops to achieve as much throughput as is humanly possible. But it is incredibly hard work, which probably accounts for the number of e-mails I have received on the subject of wine merchants/deliveries/inconvenience and a host of other considerations that conspire to make things more difficult than they already are. The one factor that is common to all the e-mails I get is that, while all wine merchants express a burning desire to secure our trade, they are less forthcoming when it comes down to meeting the needs that are peculiar to the licensed trade, preferring instead, for us to fall into line with them. Cart before the horse or what? What we really want before placing an order:
An end to poor delivery service designed for the convenience of everyone except the licensee. The ideal de-livery service would include delivering at a time of day that is convenient to us and takes into account that we work until late at night, at weekends and on bank holidays.
Helpful and trustworthy delivery staff.
An end to unrealistic minimum orders in terms of both delivery and discount.
Prompt, no quibble facilities for the return and reimbursement of faulty bottles.
An end to wine-trade snobbery wine merchants may prefer to deal with hotels and restaurants, but the sale of wine in pubs is big business now.
An end to poor continuity of supply. What we would like in addition:
An imaginative portfolio of attractive and palatable wines from around the world.
Brochures that are couched in language that assists us to make a choice rather than wine-trade jargon.
A personalised labelling service for house wines.
A quick and versatile wine-list service.
Sale or return facilities.
Regular promotions.
Quality point-of-sale material.
Availability of reasonably-priced, quality accessories such as ISO tasting glasses and corkscrews etc. Reality, however, is something quite different. The equation goes something like this add together "what we want" and "what we would like" and the result is a whole formation of pigs flying past. But it has to be said that the first wine merchant to get its act together, and meet licensees' needs in full, will make a fortune. In the meantime, licensees must continue to make do with the sources available. Cash & Carry outlets are a favourite in that many open seven days a week including bank holidays. Some offer an extensive choice of wines at reasonable prices. The downsides are that you have to collect the wines and that the staff have little or no knowledge of the wines that are stocked. That leaves us with independent wine merchants and larger or corporate wine merchants. The independents are usually highly skilled and knowledgeable, but can be dodgy on deliveries at crucial times and many impose a minimum case order before they will deliver free of charge. Larger or corporate wine merchants are also highly skilled and knowledgeable. They also provide a huge choice that has been selected by experts and offer, in theory at least, an unbeatable range of customer services. The downside is that their size makes them unwieldy at times and deliveries can be a problem over those crucial bank holidays.
