Thursday 26 November 2009

False Wine Promotions

The public have been warned against false price promotions on wine for quite some time now, but the practice still continues. I have been researching this and found an article in the press over 3 years ago, and I reproduce a snippet of it below.

Supermarket shoppers are being ripped off by bogus 'half-price' deals on millions of bottles of wine, a leading drinks boss has warned.
High street giants are misleading customers who think that they are getting a great deal but are actually just paying the correct price, according to Jean-Manuel Spriet, chief executive of Pernod Ricard UK.
The practice of 'marking up, only to mark down' has been rife for years, according to industry experts. The supermarket pretends to be offering a 'great discount' on a £7.99 bottle of wine, but the real price of the wine is £3.99.
'They make the wines designed for sale at £3.99, introduce them at a higher price, and then bring the price down,' said Mr Spriet.
'They start at £7.99 and are discounted down to half price which is crazy.


This article was in The Daily Mail, but over the years there has been similar comment in The Telegraph, The Observer and The Times amongst others.

Do not be foooled by these false promotions - what I like to call "The DFS syndrome" - if you are paying £3.99, you are getting a £3.99 wine - not a £7.99 wine at half price.

Another misleading type of promotion was the one that was prevalent in Threshers/Wine Rack/Haddows where the offer was "Buy 3, only pay for 2". What they omitted to mention was that the single bottle price had been inflated by a third in the first place. The holding company of this chain, First Quench, has just gone into administration, so its promotional tactic obviously didn't fool the public.

And whilst I'm on the subject of false promotions, do not be taken in either by the "Half Price" case offers in the Sunday Supplements by many of the larger mail-order retailers. Do you honestly believe that a company could afford to lose half their revenue, and pay the large amounts needed to advertise in the Weekend Press? Of course they couldn't - the wines were never that price in the first place - well strictly speaking they had to be by law - but it was still a false figure solely for the purpose of halving it later.

On our website the reductions are shown against the price that we have seen charged for those wines previously. No false figures - just genuine reductions.

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