A Little Monday Rant

I have a little bit of a bone to pick with some of our customers. And I feel bad saying this, because it’s not like I’m not happy that people want to shop at the store where I work. I like money. It keeps me in cheap rose and overpriced beauty products.

 

But I don’t understand why people order completely anonymous, unremarkable wine from my store and have it shipped huge distances, in expensive, wasteful styrofoam boxes, driven by gas-guzzling trucks, at great expense to themselves and our planet.

Literally once or twice a month someone will order something like Gatao Vinho Verde from us and have it shipped to Manhattan. Gatao is a perfectly serviceable, but not at all noteworthy, Vinho Verde. Vinho Verde is basically adult soda pop from Portugal. It’s a white wine that’s light, low in alcohol, cheap, and not meant to be taken seriously. Ours retails for around $7. If you live in MANHATTAN, why on EARTH would you spend $40 to have a case of something shipped to you that you probably find mere blocks from your apartment.

I bet you could put Gatao in a lineup with 3 other Vinho Verdes you picked up in wine stores in NYC and have me blind taste them and they’d be practically identical to me, and I taste wine for a living! Again, a lot of the people doing this live in Manhattan, a place where you could probably get online and find someone to deliver cupcakes and blow to you on rollerskates at 3am in about 20 minutes. Why not get a local store to deliver wine to you? I know for a fact there are stores in New York that deliver.

Now, if you live in a deprived wasteland where there are no decent wine stores, then ordering average wine from a store like the one where I work makes sense. Our website is pretty easy to navigate an we have a nicely curated set of wines, if I do say so myself.

But you guys, wine is heavy! It’s expensive to ship, so unless you can get free shipping (which we rarely offer because we make no money on shipping, so there is nothing to discount), why pay to have it shipped such a long distance? Why are you doing the wine equivalent of having Kirkland brand bottled water shipped to you at great expense when you live across the street from a Shopper’s with an almost-identical product for less?

Explain this madness to me and win a free bottle of adequate, but forgettable Vinho Verde with a picture of a cat on it.

Advertisement