Wine thread

[horrie hastings]

Wesfarmers grapples with First Choice, a Masters-style liquor disaster | Australian Association of Convenience Stores

Simon Evans May 27, 2015 The Age Wesfarmers is grappling with its own version of a “Masters disaster”, albeit on a smaller scale. It is now 10 years since Coles rebadged its big box liquor chain to First Choice from Quaffers, but it’s been a decade of headaches. First Choice continues to be a...

aacs.org.au

 

[Bazal]

Very good summation there. Spot on about Vintage Cellars, the only decent thing that was left in their flagship,

Hmmm First Choice, that stems back even further to the old Quaffers days, Quaffers popped up either late 1994 or early 1995 when the first store took over the Farmer Brothers warehouse in Waterloo . After a few years they opened another Sydney store in Hornsby and then the big one in Melbourne. Differing at head office ( how unusual for this company) ended up running a successful entity into the ground, not sure what the dates were exactly but i think roughly 2003-04 they were throwing around the big box theory for Quaffers stores and even had a site picked on the corner of O'Riordan St and Gardners rd Alexandria for the first store and then everything changed again and Quaffers was just an after thought and closed in 2007.

Coles Myer to expand its Quaffers liquor outlets

Coles Myer is set to accelerate the expansion of its liquor retailing operations with a national roll-out of Quaffers stores planned, while its Vintage Cellars chain is also looking to open new outlets.

www.afr.com

First Choice was set to fail, the Naremburn store was wild, great range and set up like the old Quaffers i worked at only bigger, plenty of premium brands, your store in Canberra sounded like the perfect set up with people knowing what they were doing re premium and local wines and then the usual thing happened and the company shot itself in the foot again and are about to do it again with this latest news.

The First Choices that any where close to where i live are in such poor locations, the Maroubra store is half way between Maroubra Jct shopping centre and Eastgardens on a suburban rd so gets no one stopping there, the Rockdale store even though its on the highway is where there is either company offices and an auto product store and really nowhere near the main shopping strip, again no one stops there.

Would have loved to see how your Canberra store was run at its prime because the day that they killed off Quaffers and sent me into the Liquorland fray really killed off my enthusiasm for wine and learning more about the premium product.

Ah Quaffers. I used to get grog from the Hornsby store when I turned sixt....er, eighteen

I'm not sure that Firs Choice was necessarily set up to fail but I do think that they were late to the market and they didn't know what they wanted it to be. Dan's already had the best sites and the next inside running on the market. They'd sunk a lot into VC, which Woolies never really had a competitor for, and then they wanted to compete with Dan's as well.

Our store, Naremburn and Sylvania kind of became the blueprint after a while when they finally decided to put the effort in. Our store manager for many years was the Canberra Times wine writer, and Naremburn and Sylvania had started with career VC managers, so they had always attracted a lot of the right kind of clients across the spectrum. Even then it took some actual high volume retail experience coming into those stores to really kick them along.

Then they brought across a lot of the VC marketing and wine sales guys in the early 2010s and they had a very store by store focus, cos that's how VC runs. They also saw the opportunity to increase marketing efforts at the higher end - any big box store sells a tonne of beer, basic spirits, RTDs and sub-$15 wines.

That's where they pioneered he 2+1 bundles, which at the start were actually really good. They used to do like 1 Stoneleigh and 2 decent ELB Sav Blancs for $22, or 1 Pepperjack and 2 ELB Shiraz for $30. Those are great deals if you drink that stuff. And smart, because the ELB stuff probably landed at $3 so in the wash out you were making a dollar on that and still selling the name brand around standard sale price.

Then they went even further with that Matt Skinner campaign which, while it had some flaws, was genius IMO. And they were flying after that, but when the marketing team changed they looked at the concept of the bundle as the money spinner, not the actual contents of the deals. From there it all fell apart, that was 2015 and 2016 (which was when my store shut because they killed it off in six months).

Just randomly recalling all this makes me realise how weird my career has been in some ways haha. Retail, to liquor retail, I serious wine sales, and now employment law? Haha