When the Fox Addressed the Hens (the wine version)

Posted by Tom Wark on Dec 2, 2020

“The dedicated team will be responsible for providing operational excellence, programming and promotions, digital content, category insights and performance management in the eCommerce area, across channels, as well as with online retailers and beverage alcohol delivery platforms.”

Yeah….I don’t know what that means either. However, you have to be impressed with the Southern-Glazers PR team’s ability to shove maximum jargon into a single sentence.

But that’s not what I found interesting. Southern-Glazer’s is touting “the launch of a new “Business-to-Customer eCommerce team” and whatever that means in that first paragraph is what they plan to accomplish with that team.

What’s particularly ironic is the claim that this new team is going to aid “online retailers” when Southern-Glazer’s have for the past 30 years done nothing but attempted to curtail all online sales and shipment of those sales. In those 30 years they’ve claimed kids will die, states will lose revenue, regulators will be unable to cope with hundreds of thousands of shippers, and that the earth will spin on its axis in a cataclysmic way if retailers interstate shipments are not stopped.

Now they are going to provide “operational excellence” in the service of online retailers. 

Of course they aren’t. No. Southern-Glazer’s is going to continue to pay large sums to help kill off their most annoying customers—the smaller, independent wine retailers who more and more rely on internet sales and shipping to crack a profit. They’ll do this by making every effort to convince lawmakers that interstate shipment spells the death of everything good and they’ll engage with courts to convince judges that discrimination against out-of-state retailers is exactly what the Supreme Court always meant when it wrote”

“the [Dormant Commerce] Clause prohibits state discrimination against all “‘out-of-state economic interests,’” Granholm, 544 U. S., at 472 (emphasis added), and noted that the direct-shipment laws in question “contradict[ed]” dormant Commerce Clause principles because they “deprive[d] citizens of their right to have access to the markets of other States on equal terms.”

Southern Glazer’s has zero interest in aiding internet retailers (which are increasingly also brick and mortar retailers) who can only truly make internet retailing work if they can ship across state lines. As I’ve noted in the past, the surest way to kill off the small independent retailers that end up being the biggest pain in the bottom of big wholesalers is to stop retailer interstate shipments of wine. And that’s exactly what Southern-Glazer’s has and continues to try to do.

So, I’m sure all the smaller, independent wine retailers out there are looking forward to the new Southern-Glazer’s team that is embarking on providing “operational excellence” in the service of online retailers.