The Price Is Wrong
Many’s the time I’ve been enjoined, like the sullen and notched scrivener like that I am, to pick up my goose quill and etch - with quivering hand - my picaresque adventures in the wine trade. It would be a tale and a half told by an idiot full of the sound of carousing and the fury of eating. Never was a business so evidently bathed in such comity surely, in ostentatious revelry – here were funds of jolly anecdotes and much as I would like to recount “Five Go Mad In Madiran” (I will, I will) I have to admit that business is business and that the prosaic financial scrunch gnaws many dreary hours of my day as I seem to be forever entangled in number-juggling shenanigans with beady-eyed bean-counters.
It’s been a traumatic couple of months. We’ve all been using our powers of ratiocination at Les Caves to make our restaurant customers appreciate why their prices have had to increase dramatically.
Why is it so difficult to understand? I can teach simple maths by analogy to a toddler but I can’t make some restaurateurs and food and beverage managers comprehend that when the pound in their pocket depreciates then the price of wine (or any goods shipped from abroad) must go up. And that when there are shortages of wine or increased demand then prices also go up. That when fuel prices and the price of raw materials increases then prices go up. That when we have inflationary pressures in our economy then prices go up.
It’s the fragile economy, stupid, or in this case, mainly the exchange rate, dumbo. Last year the pound was batting at 1.47 against the euro, now it’s taking a bath at 1.25 and possibly headin’ southwards towards oblivion. That is a huge differential to absorb and, if you bring out one price list a year, as we do, you experience the full damage when all the rises are simultaneously aggregated. We deal with several restaurants (and hotel banqueting lists) who expect their prices to set in stone for an arbitrary twelve-month period, regardless of the vagaries of vintage and exchange rate or fluctuation in the broader national and international economy. Whilst for years we’ve been able to implement such arrangements because of price stability, this is a fantasy world where nothing changes and where suppliers’ terms and conditions can be flagrantly ignored. No merchant can make absolute guarantees in this current febrile climate. Some of our customers, however, are so adamant in their opposition to prices being raised (by a single penny, I kid you not) that they actually expect us to sell the wine for a loss. They argue that a contract was entered into and that guarantees are inviolable guarantees, but this convenient logic ignores their own breaking of part of the agreement, in that they do not strictly adhere to the terms of the contract themselves (payment by 30 days of invoice). I am curious to know, moreover, how far the pound would have to plunge against other currencies for these recalcitrant f & b bods to acknowledge that the situation had shifted sufficiently to warrant negotiations.
Every year wine merchants battle the growers for zero price increases. It is not a pleasant task, because we are asking artisans (in our case), people who farm through thick and thin, whose livelihoods depend on an equitable market price, to consider the fruits of their labour purely in terms of realistic price points for bean-counters in the UK who can see no further than a gross (the word is used advisedly) profit margins. It intrigues me that people who create nothing will haggle about a few pennies as if the entire horizon of their existence should be shrunk to the single price point; that they will cajole, threaten and bully for pennies on the same day as international disasters take place. This has happened recently to me and I have felt degraded by the process. Instead of listening to this ludicrous claptrap I should be sending my thoughts, prayers, best wishes, money elsewhere. I feel like asking: have you no sense of proportion, or tiny jot of humility or does your job description preclude empathy?
Maybe there is no room for sentiment in the business world? I don’t see how you can divorce economics from ethics. Lack of consideration, lack of flexibility, lack of understanding is responsible for the perpetuation of bad business practice. I believe that job-swapping should be mandatory. Flip each situation on its head; experience the reality from the opposite point of view. Every f & b manager should be compelled to do a stage in a winery and then for a wine merchant in order to understand the ramifications of every decision they make.
These are a tiny proportion of clients, the ones who have no love and even less understanding of the food and wine business. Business is not about numbers and number-crunching; it is about people, relationships, and partnerships. The most successful restaurants are wedded to quality and understand the product that they are delivering; they know the price of everything they sell, and they also know its value.