Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/13/postponement-of-weddings-and-o.html
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they’ve lost $2 billion in reduced sales so far this year
Nope. Can’t lose what you haven’t made.
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I’ll do my part and drink some more if they sell it to me at a discount…
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Eh, sour grapes.
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So sell it at cost. Bet they’d move a lot of product then.
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oh no. we’ll have to put all that champagne in a vault and sell it next year, with a substantial mark-up for the vintage.
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I prefer oat soda to wine soda. It’s cheaper.
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The papillon effect.
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They shouldn’t do anything rash just yet. Odds are looking good for a surge in purchases come November and January.
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If the world is still standing November 4th I’ll practically bathe in the stuff.
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Not in the same zip code financially, but this phenomenon is hurting a lot of non-billion dollar industries as well. My wife’s business focuses on high end wedding cakes, and her cash flow is down ~80% from this time last year. Luckily, we don’t rely on her income to live, but not everyone in the wedding industry is that fortunate.
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One of my favorite recent documentaries. I was pleased to learn that one of the Kochs got scammed out of tens of millions of dollars on counterfeit wines, along with a number of other insufferable rich a-holes.
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Yeah, it’s easy to scoff at high(er)-end industries losing money and think that it’s hurting fancy pants, but those things employ a shit load of workers and small businesses that are the ones bearing most of the actual costs.
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I feel you. My sister-in-law opened a Yoga studio in LA almost exactly a year before the lockdown. She went into serious debt, was screwed over by multiple contractors and clawed and scraped to get the place up and running. She was just about at the level of being able to actually pay the rent on the space from cash intake when everything stopped. She’s back to being a semi-retired dancer with questionable prospects, and unlikely to ever be able to attempt something so ambitious again.
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Yeah, we print a lot of wedding invitations and after the rescheduling notices were finished we’re slow enough that I’m on here.
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You should expect deep discounts on bubbly wine in the future.
Destroying grapes is an effort to reduce costs and prop up the price by reducing supply, and it’s a strategy for later. Todays grapes are next years wine, and this falls expensive harvest operation. Champagne would do this because Champagne needs to maintain the price premium they get over crement, cava, prosecco and new world sparkling wines.
They can’t just sell the grapes because it gives up control of their branding. Some Jersey motherfuckers could import a bunch of grapes and claim to be real champagne.
If they’re too cheap for too long the illusion is gone. But they’re going to have to discount because if all the other wines are dumb cheap, and Champagne is still crazy balls. People will try those other ones and realize Champagne isn’t actually superior in any inherent way.
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I suddenly want to drink some fuckin’ Atlantic City authentic fuckin’ champaign.
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However the increase in day drinking has led to a spike in beer, wine and hard alcohol sales.
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I’d pay extra for some Trennin Rose.
Yeah no.
Certain kinds of off premise sales have spiked heavily. Super markets, any kind of delivery, beer distributors are doing rather well. Liquor stores have seen the highest spike.
But overall it’s nowhere near the volume needed to offset the sales drop in restaurants, hotels, breweries etc and the drop in seasonal tourism sales.
Overall the alcohol market is down anywhere from 25-75% depending on the state and what product catagory you’re looking at.
Source: My paycheck.
The number on that and the headlines it drew came from a Nielson study. Done on their own volition. Nielson is not a typical beverage industry market research agency, and they don’t have direct access to producer and wholesaler sales data. The claim was based on sales numbers from regional and national chain stores, who Nielson does routinely work with.
So what it boils down to is Walmart and Costco are selling a fuck more alcohol than they normally do.
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