I don’t shop at Total, but did a few quick searches out of curiosity - the .97 is clearly not ALWAYS a “good deal” (I searched champagne - Piper Heidsieck Sublime at $83.97 for example is $22 less at wine.com. Likewise Veuve Brut Rose at $67.97 can be found lots of places for $58- $62.) And I get why Veuve would be a “no further discounts” kind of label. Similar for Dom, 2013 at $244.97. Solid price, but Woodland and Sommpicks have it for $200.
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Maybe I’m reading it wrong or you kind of both right. Could be that they don’t have any margin left for discount but as David pointed out, and maybe most importantly, it doesn’t mean that it’s a good prices necessarily (if I got it right):
That is one way they use that pricing scheme. But the use of that pricing scheme does not mean it’s a low margin item. It’s just one way they use it. That pricing scheme simply means no further discounts apply. I don’t know how much clearer I can make it.
By the way, I stopped by the local shop today to check the limited time specials and additional discounts doing in fact apply on those.
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Another way they use it is for items that as far as I can tell, they really don’t want to sell. They just want to have on the shelf to bring people in. Veuve is a perfect example of that. They know they have to carry it because lots of people come in and ask for it. They put a good but not great price on it but don’t allow additional discounts. What they want is their sales people to sell them on an alternative higher margin product
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Have you seen their costs on these items?
I was a part timer. I went through the training before I started and it’s reinforced daily.
I just put wine on shelves and sold it. Outside of management I don’t think the rank and file workers have access to that kind of information.
As I have been a Mister Wine Businessperson for half a century, I think I might understand this.
There are various reasons that Total Asshole Beverage might not wish to discount a given product:
It’s window dressing, to show that they have famous, expensive wines; they represent ~1% of the inventory (by value; much less by volume) and they don’t care if or when they sell. Actually if they sell, they then have to replace them at higher cost and sell them again at a low (by their standards) profit margin. So they are not motivated. I haven’t been to any TAB often, but would like to know if any WB customers have ever been led by one of their floor salespeople to look at a locked case wine.
I’m betting no. They don’t make no money doing that.
They are selling Famous Brands of Putrid Swill, have to price competitively with supermarkets on Josh. No discounts.
They are buying domestic or imported wines directly and pricing them competitively but still making rapacious margins, as they are essentially bypassing the three tier system. The wines in question are categories that are known and sell, so they have no reason to discount them.
In the Locked Cases, there are some Great Wines, moldering under fluorescent lamps that may not improve their quality. Some of them may have been there for years (the company is a little young for decades), in attractive vintages, with prices that are not updated. There could be some bargains there, if you don’t care about storage conditions.
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Not much there to disagree with other than I don’t view them as negatively as you. They are a business and we are all free to go there or not. There was very little in there ever that I would actually buy. But occasionally there would be a great deal that I could get on something great that I would pick up a case of for myself and my friends. 08 Heidsieck Rare at $140/btl comes to mind as one I bought all we had of. I also enjoyed selling what I wanted to and not what they wanted me too. Occasionally, there would be something really good at a good price that they wanted us to sell. I’d get a bottle and have all the other people on the floor taste it. We went through about. 50 cases of Caterwaul Cab in my store and then had the other two stores in the county send all theirs to our store and we sold all that too in about two weeks. I also sold a few cases of Ramey Russian River Chardonnay around $32 a bottle. After a couple of months, the computer system must’ve picked up that we were selling too much of it and they raise the price $10 a bottle lol
The lock cases are typically located right in front of you when you walk into the store. They are eye candy and most people don’t even know what they’re looking at other than Wines with prices in the hundreds of dollars. It’s a way of establishing credibility that hey we sell the best wines in the world In addition to value priced wines for every day customers.
And all the prices in the store are updated regularly. They have very sophisticated information systems that analyze what is selling and pricing. I spent many a night changing shelf tags on Wines there.
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The location closest to me is ‘out of stock’ on a lot of popular superficially fairly priced items. For example, something like Roederer Estate which is the adult equivalent of Coca Cola in my region will be priced the same the same as Costco a mile away, but there is a gap toothed spot on the shelf for it. It will be OOS for weeks/months and if one inquires if possibly this wine/liquor store end cap staple might be in the back, the people working the floor will instead point you to their house/unknown brand. As mentioned with the Veuve above, again often OOS at $58, but they’ll happily sell their house coop branded Champagne for $50. Given that a tremendous amount of that is often gifted, I don’t think that’s an appealing / fair deal for the purchaser – the label/brand itself is the signal of importance of the recipient.
What is strange to me is that I never see closeouts within their store, no area for bin ends / odd lots / scuffed labels etc. I do see some of their line of spirits make it to other closeout channels though, typically at 1/3 the GO frontline price, which can be fair enough. At one point, they had lots of old Beaujolais sitting on the shelves, not the serious cru intended for aging, but just vin ordinaire that was 5-6 years from release date. And it would never get moved, cycled through or discounted etc. I asked one of their staff about it, and they just shrugged. So I mentioned it in a Yelp or GoogleMaps review…and lo and behold the next time I went back to the location all the shelf spots had been freshened up with current releases. Kind of sad that they need to get called out on the interwebs for dealing with perishable stock, rather than tracking it themselves.
At one point TW used to put lots of coupons on my app, but perhaps they did some kind of lifetime customer value analysis and realized I’m a net negative. (I wouldn’t offer me a coupon if it was my enterprise either). Generally speaking I like the K&L pricing model better, and obviously their selection/sensibility.
PS: one other way to get more value out of TW is that on a semi regular basis will have Amex Offers or Citi Merchant Offers for credit card holders; typically it’s $20 back for a $100 purchase. And unlike other vendors with those, there are no exclusions for gift cards, so one can buy those and use them stacked with a (rarely seen) deal. I would not go loading up on them given the aforementioned issues though; I have a half used GC festering in my wallet for two years maybe.
I’m not sure if they still do this, but they had a great psychological tool that was a bourbon raffle ( to buy allocated bottles). Pappy was the sought after offering but people “won “ Blantons like they were on the Oprah Winfrey show.
Clever marketing to take focus off of price.
I think they changed that model but i did score a bottle of Pappy for ridiculously cheap this way a handful of years back.
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I almost never see any ‘bargain’ priced wines at Total Wine. At least not anymore. 5-10 years ago you could still find some decent deals on geek staples. Especially with coupons. But the prices on those wines have been brought up to market for the most part and they just don’t send any coupons for anything other than “winery direct”. At least that’s what it is in the OC, CA market. And yeah, never seen a .97 that caught my eye in terms of value. Heck, my last trip in for some beer couple weeks back I walked through the Zin aisle to see they are carrying no Ridge. They usually had 3-6 different bottlings.
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… {editing}
You disagree with me on this.
This is because what David has been saying is correct. “.97” is used by Total Wine only to denote a wine that cannot be further discounted. Some of these wines have already been discounted, and it is those that likely represent your “random” bargain priced wines.
Don’t make that assumption.
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Brian, you are probably right.
(I feel dissected!)
Total Wine cannot compete with Costco. For example,
Il Poggione BdM 2018 (Total Wine) $90.99
Il Poggione BdM 2018 (Costco) $58.99
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They still do it. There is an annual high-end bourbon lottery for grand reserve members. I’ve gotten good bottles a couple times and we’ll see if I get one this year. But then again I know how it works and how to increase your odds, but I can’t put it out on the web out of self interest.
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As far as I could tell ordering was done on either a national or regional basis. It’s not like a wine shop where you can walk in and say hey can you get me half a case of this and the owner will order it knowing they can sell the other six bottles. They don’t really seem to do close outs either. They just let the stuff sit there until it sells or the computer/some centralized employee marks the price down.
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They could they just choose not to. Costco will buy 100 skus in bulk. Total Wine will buy 5000 skus but they mostly want to sell 100 skus. Different strategy but the two largest retailers in the country
One of the few safe ways to use their narrowly constrained coupons is to buy a bottle of the Clos Floridene ‘blanc’. It’s Dennis Dubordieu (dec’d) family estate, and makes a fine white Graves, that can keep. It used to be hard to find, but now is more prevalent, between more vineyard plantings, and TW distributing it broadly.
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