The Sad Death Of Boutique Wine And Spirits Retail

A quick point of clarification: the title of this blog post is referring to the career of retail, not the entity itself. 

Boutique wine and spirits retailers aren’t going anywhere for now. Their employees, however, are getting the hell out of Dodge. Those who haven’t already quit are thinking about it, and those who haven’t thought about it are too new to know any better.

What happens next?

So long as a retailer can keep finding new bodies to replace the more experienced workers exiting the business, they’ll be able to stay open. But when most of your new employees started as gig economy workers, used to choosing their hours and setting their own schedules, the idea of working from 11 AM to 8 PM on weekends is pretty much a non-starter.

I’ve seen the carnage firsthand this year. You hire someone new and they hand in their notice ten days later. No one wants to work retail right now. 

“Every Monday when I come back to work, I have at least two new reports who I’ve never met before,” a friend of mine who manages a major retail operation told me this week; “I can’t keep up with all the new faces. It’s never ending.”

So why has everyone decided that wine and spirits retail is no longer a job worth doing? In short: the internet.

The COVID pandemic simply accelerated a number of changes that were gradually integrating into the industry. What likely would have happened over the course of a few years happened entirely within a few months, as retailers scrambled to protect their staff and their customers from the virus. 

Stores without websites built them overnight. Online shopping became the preferred method of ordering. Curbside pick-up went from obligatory to mandatory. Delivery apps began spiking.

Retail sales went through the roof as stay-at-home drinking became the status quo, while some retailers discovered they could literally close their doors, pay their in-store workers to fill online orders instead of engage customers, and make the same amount of profit. 

For those of us who have worked in booze retail for ten years or more, the shift towards fulfillment shouldn’t have been surprising. The internet has made many subject matter experts completely irrelevant, and the amount of consumer resources available online have rendered most of our opinions meaningless. Yet, despite the writing on the wall, a number of retail employees blame their employers for the changes, not the change in consumer behavior itself. 

Take for example a former colleague of mine who reached out towards the end of 2020 and asked if I knew of any retail openings elsewhere in the area. He said he was tired of the changes at his current employer and felt under-appreciated given all the work he was doing. I managed to find him a position at a rival company for the same pay and benefits and he was thrilled. Four weeks into the job he quit without notice and went begging for his old job back.

As it turned out, it wasn’t his employer that was the problem. It was the job. And the job was actually worse elsewhere.

“We actually decided to hand out raises,” another friend who manages a store in Los Angeles told me recently; “We recognized who our best workers were and wanted to make sure they were incentivized to stick around. They ended up quitting anyway.”

What’s so bad about working in retail today? It depends on your expectations and what you know to be the job. Ask any teacher about their reality today versus ten years ago and you’ll find a chasm of anger too deep to descend. The same goes for retail. Ten years ago the job was to source products we thought were interesting, taste them with our colleagues, and market them to our customers. Today, the job is simply to fulfill orders that customers request. 

While fulfilling orders may not sound like a fate worse than death, it’s not the job that most retailer workers saw themselves doing. The perk for giving up your weekends and holidays has always been the education and the conversation. You spend a certain amount of hours each day tasting new products, learning about them from your peers, and then talking about them with customers. Today, however, there’s much less of a need to taste anything. It’s simply about putting bottles into boxes and packing them into trunks or the UPS truck.

As it turns out, more and more retail workers are deciding that’s not the life they envisioned for themselves when they got into the wine and spirits industry, so they’re leaving. The workers replacing them are often less experienced and less likely to stick around. As a result, in-store shoppers are seeing a decline in the customer service they receive in person, which makes them more likely to order online the next time around. 

You can see where this is going.

I texted an old friend in retail last night to get his thoughts on the subject. His response was tepid: “It’s a new era. Survive and advance. The old days are available on Spotify, but not as a job.”

It was fun while it lasted.

-David Driscoll