I have had several episodes where bottles I was interested in suddenly were no longer available. Once a Wine-Searcher inquiry located a bottle of Single Malt in the Midwest at a price presumably based on buying it 20 years ago. The website showed it was there as did the answer to an email. When I placed the order it had mysteriously sold out. Another time I was browsing a retailer in SF and found a bottle priced about 30% less than normal. When I attempted to buy it, the clerk refused telling me “You must be in the industry to know this bottle is mis-marked and we don’t sell to industry.” When I was in St. Louis for a family event I went into a retail shop and they ended up having some fun stuff that I didn’t see on the west coast so I brought up 10 wines wine and a couple pear brandy. The clerk rang it up and I paid for it, expecting to receive the case discount shown in signage. Apparently it only applied to wine and the clerk was a little bit of a jerk when I asked him why brandy wouldn’t qualify. So I told him to void the order and I would find 2 more bottles of wine to make a case. He then re rang everything and applied the discount. I was somewhat surprised that the new total seemed like more than 10% off but I wasn’t doing the math accounting for the additional bottles. It wasn’t until I looked at my receipts after flying home that I discovered on top of the 10%, the clerk had keyed in $2.99 instead of $29.99 on several wines.
The formula is retail minus the cost, divided by the retail.
In this case 180 - 120 = 60
60 divided by 180 = 33%
this type of stuff for sure happens and it sucks.
A board member bought some 98 Rousseau Chambertin at a great price and wanted to buy it all. They offered him 2-3 and said the rest were sold out. Within a week the rest went back up at nearly double the price. Ridiculous.
It’s honestly become more and more of a minefield trying to translate the results of a Wine-Searcher search into an order. Conduct a search on a typical high-value wine ($50+), and I’d say less than half the hits can be translated into a bottle of wine on your doorstep in a few days. Instead, you get:
- Stores that look slick and update their price list daily, but lag far, FAR, behind on updating inventory (Artisan Wine Depot, thanks for two wasted trips recently).
- Mom-and-pop sites that don’t allow online ordering. I have better things to do than spend 20 minutes correcting the spelling of multiple addresses over the phone for two bottles of Pinot.
- Stores that don’t ship, like Total Wine, yet W-S still insists on listing them. (I had to individually exclude like 30 Total Wine locations.)
- Idiots who just scrape listings from distributors/wholesalers. Typically can be rooted out by trying to add 600 bottles of wine to your cart, and seeing if you get a quantity error or not.
- Auction listings.
- Imprecise listings… where the item page on the website lists the wine as 2013 in one sentence and 2014 in the title, for example. Is it that hard to pay attention when updating an entry?
- Fraudsters trying to hock desirable futures under the names of their new companies.
- The infamous per-bottle price available only as part of a case. If I have to buy a case, just list the whole damn case price please. This is easy in W-S (the bottom of most listings usually contain entries for “cases of 12”).
You’re suggesting the retailer break the law here. There is no customer good enough to risk one’s license to sell alcohol.
As Doug mentioned upstream, it is illegal to sell below invoice cost. The best a retailer could do would be to sell at cost.
The other Doug was “mathing” for mark up, not margin as was duly pointed out. Wine retail margins are not great and prices listed as a special or on sale are often a 20% mark up (16% margin). Subtract overhead and the credit card fee and you’re well into the lower single digit margins.
That doesn’t excuse the terrible attitude and poor customer service found in the OP.
Next time, buy the wine over the phone and arrange to pop in to pick it up!
I don’t think this is illegal in most jurisdictions, but it is in some.
Please do so. All emails to Wine-Searcher are treated confidentially. Bait and switch tactics are not acceptable.
Sometimes these are examples of sleeze. But sometimes there’s an innocent explanation, as the inventory controls at wine retailers are generally pretty lame in my experience. Even buying things that are obscure (i.e., they’re not a lot of turnover of the inventory) and fully priced, stores often don’t have what their computers show. I’ve lost track of the number of times that’s happened to me.
Also, with Wine-Searcher, I think there’s a lag. I don’t think you’re seeing the retailers’ real-time inventories.
Keeping up with all the details of inventory, POS and pricing can be a more than full-time job. It’s obvious the store in the OP’s story screwed up - most of the time I doubt it’s malicious, though the store absolutely should have taken the loss based on blowing multiple opportunities to correct their mistake before the customer drove down to pick up the wine.
I try to be on-hand for moments like one that happened yesterday - good customer was picking up a back vintage of Guigal La Landonne that I knew was priced much lower than the current release, but the bar code defaulted to another vintage priced in-between the two ![[head-bang.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/b1cd199e4b2b2988b5107c3c9598fd28dc92a776.gif "[head-bang.gif]"){kind=small}
, and fortunately I was around to make sure everything went smoothly.
Some distributors are great about making sure they let you know about vintage and price and bar code changes, some aren’t. Even the ones that do a good job fall down every now and then.
Anyway, as the guy in my store who would have been the equivalent of the owner type from the original story, I might have explained what happened to the buyer just so they understood it was a one-time price because of a mistake, but the store would take the hit.
At least you ought to get credit with the customer for making it right, eh?
Boy I don’t know what state you live in, but alcohol here is not even CLOSE to 50% margin. I think it’s around 35% and in some extremely rare cases, 40%.
We have a regional grocery store here, New Seasons, who has sold me cases at 25% off and that is just slightly above cost. I don’t really know what retailer is making more than 40% EXCEPT the wineries themselves who sell to us 
OP, I would have been pissed. I don’t know if you spoke to the manager or owner or not but that type of thing really bothers me. As someone already mentioned, I too once discovered a screaming deal on an incorrectly marked wine. The owner, rang me up and said, “you should look this wine up when you get home”. I had scored No Girls Syrah for a silly price. I’ve since revisited that shop dozens of times and given them a significant amount of business for a single customer.
Price error - We’ve done it. I entered the wholesale cost into the retail price column by mistake during an end of day update. Didn’t double check it and uploaded it to our website. We sold out the next day and didn’t make a dime. Shit happens, but you have to own it.
Buyer error - We offer a number of half bottles for sale on-line. The bottle size is listed but if somebody misses it, I’m a con artist or using bait and switch.
Speaking of Bait and Switch - Not going to name them but, there are a number of retailers in a certain state that always have the lowest prices on Wine Searcher. Good luck finding the wine on their website when you click on the link. Rather than taking you the wine, it takes you to their homepage where you can start your search.
That’s my experience. Seems like 101 level service, but it’s a crazy world these days!
My favorite one of these was the guy who got really shi–y over me refusing to sell him a $99.99 Cabernet Sauvignon he found abandoned by another customer in a $19.99 rum slot on the other side of the store.
That type of practice is in all sector of retail and commerce
On the halves, one store I have deal with (can’t remember which one, unfortunately) has a pop up message when you move a 375 into the cart – “hey dummy, you do know this is a 375, right?” Very helpful. Don’t know how easy it is to implement but I appreciate it
Any chance there is a video from the security camera of the moment Carrie found out about this? ![[whistle.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/87d24eb81ec6dc01d84f3d6c19fa9a357e90218e.gif "whistle"){kind=small}
So true.
Try buying a new car through a service that provides a price, similar to Wine-searcher.
Follow the same steps: check inventory online, call to confirm it’s there and the price, show up, and watch as the “alternative facts” emerge.
One dealer had a list of extra items to buy, one simply crossed out the price and hand-wrote a new price, + $1700, above it.
At least Wine-searcher will get involved if needed. The car referral service has a backdoor in tiny type so they do not really care. By the time the legal route is explored, the rep has left the store and the owner claims “rogue employee.”
We used another service for the car, through a trusted retailer, and had none of these problems.
Couldn’t agree more the store should have sold the bottles at the published price.
Sharing the offender’s name is the best thing you can do!