mhicken October 23rd, 2009
In two unrelated pieces of news today:
Amazon.com is apparently giving up on its fledgling wine business. This will likely be welcome news for wine retailers in the U.S. who would have had to compete with Amazon. However, it demonstrates the extreme difficulties of dealing with the post-prohibition patchwork regulatory system in the U.S. which make the inter-state shipping of wine a legal nightmare.
Speaking of nightmares and just in time for Halloween, the City of Vancouver has put forth a nightmarish bylaw proposal for city restaurants under which they would be required to continuously check their liquor and food sales such that liquor sales never exceed food sales in any 8 hour period. The proposed law seems ridiculous from a policy perspective as well as administratively unworkable. Theoretically, a restaurant would have to stop selling expensive bottles of wine during the evening if they thought that food sales might not match the wine sales total. Who dreams up this stuff? And, more to the point, why is taxpayers’ money being spent on this?
Tags: amazon, bylaws, food, law, liquor, Restaurants, sales, vancouver, wine
mhicken June 1st, 2009
In a surprise development that could have far reaching implications for online wine sales, one of California’s leading logistics and fulfillment houses, New Vine Logistics, has suspended operations this morning. The shut down will have a major impact on many California wineries and wine businesses which depend upon New Vine for order fulfillment and processing. In addition, New Vine was Amazon.com’s partner in its fledgling online wine site which had yet to launch.
Update: the CEO of New Vine issued a statement today confirming the shutdown and indicating that New Vine is attempting to transfer shipping and fulfillment operations elsewhere for its customers.
Further Update: New Vine is now operating again after Inertia Beverage Group took over some of New Vine’s debt.
Tags: amazon, california, fulfillment, marketing, online, shipping, web, wine
mhicken October 20th, 2008
I noticed today that web browser requests sent to http://www.amazon.com/wine are now redirecting to http://wine.amazon.com although you get an “http service unavailable” error message once there.
Previously, all you got was a page not found error so perhaps amazon/wine is getting closer to launch. It will be very interesting to see what the effects of this new distribution channel are on the U.S. retail market, particularly for smaller wineries which stand to gain a lot through the clout of associating with the internet retailing giant.
Tags: amazon, internet, marketing, online, sales, websites, wine
