A retailer than has gone way down hill. I bought into their little subscription model for free shipping just as the decline occurred and never found a single thing I wanted enough, even with free shipping! Oh well
A retailer than has gone way down hill. I bought into their little subscription model for free shipping just as the decline occurred and never found a single thing I wanted enough, even with free shipping! Oh well
I looked at their Black Friday deals and could not make a case.
I’m sure that as President, Gary V is a salaried employee of Wine Library. I have never heard that he and his family are not the owners. One does not preclude the other.
Yeah…Gary’s father is Sasha V. In the 90’s I spent three years selling wine wholesale in Northern Jersey and Sasha (Shoppers Discount Liquors) was one of my top accounts. I recall vividly when the young Gary V. entered the picture. He was just learning wine and as I recall was tasked with ordering beer for his father’s store. Gary always came across with great enthusiasm, but with limited wine knowledge or interest. But he never missed an opportunity to taste and expand his knowledge base, even when very young. He was working in his father’s store long before he was 21.
100% true. His father’s store was part of a consortium. They pooled their purchases to get better deals. Gary V started while in high school and eventually convinced his father to let him handle the wine. He was already making some crazy money trading baseball cards in school and figured that wine buyers were similar. He got the family to pull out of the consortium and go its own way. They were one of the first big users of the internet to sell wine - remember that there wasn’t great bandwidth at the time so nobody was streaming videos yet. Turned the store into a monster and when it became feasible, he started WLTV and turned that into a phenomenon. They used to turn over amazing amounts of wine, buying it by the pallet if he liked it. To his credit, he learned a lot about wine in the process and while selling seemed to come naturally to him, he never assumed he knew everything. Dad still owns the place and Gary has plenty of other things going on these days.
As far as the store going downhill, that’s because Gary is not involved full time. They’re still doing OK. He’s a hustler to be sure, but he knows it and I’ve never heard anything really negative about his ethics. He’s OK in my book, and although I was never a fan of the schtick, I admired it.
Gary was also an enthusiastic wine board participant in those days (WCWN for sure, perhaps others). He was even a member of our WCWN Fantasy Baseball League (still going strong, btw) for a couple of weeks before he figured out that he didn’t have nearly the time and he yielded his spot to another. To think we all knew him when…
remember Gary V from way back when, used to watch his videos for a while then drifted away…used to buy from Wine Library on occasion until they had to stop shipping to NY…