A Wine Consequence of COVID and the Re-emerging Economy

Imagine that you own a small, somewhat upscale, but neighborhood focused restaurant. You're not in the middle of a big city, but instead out in the suburbs. And, while your clientele does drink wine, you can only sell so much of it. Some customers don't drink alcohol, some are beer drinkers, some are spirits drinkers, and some drink a mixture of things.

All that said, you want to have enough wines on your list to keep your wine drinking clientele happy. So, that's a mix of reds, whites, sparkling at a variety of price points. 

To complicate matters further, you're in area where a half dozen or so distributors call on you and they all want some of your business. You've found something you like about most of them or their product selection, so you have historically done business with the majority of them.

Then came COVID. And, as we emerge from the pandemic in different stages in different areas, you, just as your competition does, want to maintain and grow your customer base. You don't want your wine program to hinder you. You contact your distributors.

What you hear from all of them is that they are changing the way they are doing business. They all give similar reasons for doing this. The distributors are having trouble getting workers. One distributor tells you they can't get enough workers so that they can break up cases. Put in business terms, you can't buy 2 bottles of Wine X and 4 bottles of Wine Y. If you want Wine Z, the question that is put to you is how many full cases do you want. As a small restaurant, generally speaking, you can't buy any of your wines by the case.

Then you find another distributor that sells one of what you would term your house table wines. It's the least or second least expernsive wine on your list. And it's the only wine of theirs that you really want to carry. But, this distributor has a $500 minimum. And, you don't have room for 5 cases of this particular wine. 

At the third distributor, the one where you historically have obtained most of your "reserve list," they are now telling you that for every high end bottle that they sell you, you also need to buy at least half a case from their "we are stuck with these wines" list. So, in order to get 6 of your high end bottles, you get stuck taking 3 cases of wine you really don't want.

And, all of the distributors are giving you the same rationale. Even increasing their pay scale by 25% and giving what they consider to be excellent benefits, potential workers are staying home and collecting unemployment for half the money without working for it rather than taking a warehouse job.

Something has to give. Personally I hate it when the local small businessperson (in this case a restaurateur) who almost lost their business when COVID hit is now suffering because related industries can't hire workers.