I want you to imagine the following situation, which I’m sure will be very simple because—if you’re anything like me—this scenario accurately spells out your new everyday reality:
Since the COVID-19 shutdown, your drinking has gone way up.
Just like toilet paper, Clorox wipes, and Lysol, you’ve gone out of your way to stock up on your favorite booze—to the point that it’s become a bit of a game.
After a year of lockdown and continual stockpiling, you don’t really need another bottle of booze. But if you see something special, you’ll grab it.
When you do need something basic—like Knob Creek or Grey Goose—you just add it to your next Instacart delivery, rather than heading over to the liquor store. A trip to Mission is reserved for something out of the ordinary or rare.
I’ve been back in retail for exactly 108 days now and I see two troubling patterns emerging for independent liquor stores as a result of our COVID-19 evolution:
Unless you’re able to make a compelling case for why customers should buy their everyday booze from you (i.e. crazy pricing, exclusivity, free shipping or ease of delivery), more and more people are going to treat alcohol like groceries.
With more national retailers like Whole Foods, Target, and Costco expanding their product sets to include boutique spirits, not to mention the emergence of 3rd party sites like Drizly, more and more sales are being siphoned away from wine and spirits retailers as consumers include wine and spirits as part of their general online grocery shopping.
That leaves independent retailers with the overflow, meaning consumers are only looking for something rare or out of the ordinary.
Which creates the gigantic, panic-inducing Catch 22 that is coming for every independent retailer in the industry: you can only get the rare bottles from distribution by depleting sales of everyday items, but your customers only want the rare bottles and have chosen to buy their everyday items elsewhere.
Fortunately, we’re in a pretty stable position here at Mission due to our size and scale, but we can’t ignore what’s in the rear view mirror.
This is the question I’m asking myself repeatedly: What’s more likely moving forward?
That independent retailers will eventually take back some of the general business from larger competitors?
Or that larger competitors will eventually take over the boutique business from smaller independents?
But that’s really a rhetorical question, isn’t it? We’ve got a lot of work to do.
-David Driscoll