Smart Thinking: Grab another Thresher's Wine Bargain

Filed by: Darren on March 22, 2007 at 9:08
Filed In: Drink, Marketing

The Thresher's 40% discount wine offer is back on again - for one week only.

For those of you who missed it first time around, the original incarnation was a scheme dreamt up by Hugh MacLeod and his business partners at Stormhoek Wines. Simple idea: download a pdf voucher, take it into your local branch of Thresher's, get 40% off their entire wine range. Which really adds up if you're stocking up on £15 bottles of Chateau Neuf du Pape as a yuletide treat, I can tell you.

The rest is recent history: the voucher went viral, the media went into a frenzy - although a lot of papers and news progs for some reason insisted on reporting it as an 'error'; presumably they couldn't quite believe that anything doing so much good for all concerned could be planned and deliberate - and Thresher's reported that they'd notched up £15m in additional sales as well as clearing a lot of stock from their warehouse in the process.

And now it's back. As posted by Hugh last night on his gapingvoid blog, for a limited time only in the run up to Easter you can download the new voucher from the Stormhoek website, then march into your local Thresher's and get your 40% off all wines (champagne, sparkling and fortified wines excepted).

Jo and I will be going tonight on the way home from the gym, before they run out of Stormhoek Pinotage 2005, which is bloody marvellous stuff - goes with everything from a chicken shashlik to half a bar of Green & Black's dark & mint (and believe me, we've experimented with a fair few combinations...)

Edit 23.03.07: Did indeed call in to Thresher's on the way home last night. Sidled up to the counter and showed the chap behind the till the new voucher: "Are you taking... these?" I enquired. To which he replied:

"Oh, God, not again..."

Turns out this poor sod still bears the scars of the Xmas frenzy when, so he told me, he ended up holding the fort all-but single handed. "I'm not bloody going through that again..." he muttered as he picked up the phone to ring someone higher-up and check that the horrible rumours were true and that yes, indeed, that bastard MacLeod was about to ruin his life all over again...

I tried to win him over. "Hey, it's only for a week. And didn't Thresher's make an extra £15m in sales last time?"

"Oh, Aye!" this laced with an unspoken, yet quite distinct dose of 'yeah, but guess how much of it ended up in my pocket as a result, and after all the grief that I had to go through...'

His colleague who wandered in from the stock room at that point, seemed more sanguine about the whole thing when challenged about the return of voucher hell "Yeah, there was something about that on the memos for today." But then he tried to persuade me that their usual 'buy two, get one free' was actually a better deal. Immune to my counter-proposal that 33% off wasn't actually better than 40% off, he was on the verge of running through the calculations when I fled with my half dozen bottles of Stormhoek Shiraz (they didn't have the Pinotage, but the Shiraz is gorgeous so I was very happy indeed...)

"You'll need some more of these, I've cleaned the shelf out..." was my parting shot.

"Oh, Aye..."

I wonder. Is it a case of one staff member with a less-than-sunny disposition and bad memories of last time (the vouchers, the horrible vouchers!), or will Hugh's new deal not be quite as well-received by the front-line bottle-slingers as it will by the profit-counters at Head Office? A case of the joy not being spread far enough, goodwill bonus-wise, or just the usual "retail sucks, my job is crap, I wish I was dead" issues that you get almost everywhere..? Should Thresher's spend more time educating their staff on the joys of viral marketing, or should the guys and gals behind the counter just suck it up and get the heck on with it for the Good of the Company and, dammit, because it's their job to sell more wine?

Whatever. I'm six bottles of rather excellent wine at a very reasonable price to the good. My weekend's definitely looking up... :)

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8 Responses to 'Smart Thinking: Grab another Thresher's Wine Bargain'

Ed on March 22nd, 2007 9:59 pm

We don't have Threshers here :(
Ariel on March 23rd, 2007 7:04 am

Also applies to The Local, Wine Rack, Haddows, Victoria Wine and Bottoms-Up... any store in the Thresher's group, basically...
Ed on March 23rd, 2007 8:41 pm

Nope, not got any of those either.
From the edit: the staff could solve the problem by just not restocking the shelf too frequently :)
Ariel on March 26th, 2007 7:18 am

Yeah, but then they'd spend all day dealing with "hey, you, where's all the wine?" questions from irate customers.

Think the better solution might be for Thresher's to spread the joy a little wider... unless they already are, and the guy I spoke to was just an isolated moaner.
gary on November 8th, 2007 9:57 pm

I work for threshers, and working during that 40% off madness was awfull, the shop was 10 times busier and considering vertially all threshers shops are single staffed it made life hell. And NO they didnt share the wealth! We just worked 10 times harder for the same money. Its retail jobs like these that make me glad to be at university,i feel sorry for the people who have a 'career' at thresher
Darren on November 9th, 2007 8:04 am

Gary mate, I entirely sympathise. As an ex-Waterstone's staffer I know just how bad the big chains are at rewarding their staff for working above and beyond the call of duty - or at least, that used to be the case in my day...
lorna on January 22nd, 2008 11:30 am

i work for threshers , and i infromed all my customers of the voucher before it was placed on the internet. it was a shame you had
to deal with such negative people , i enjoy working when the vouchers are running , as this makes my shop busier , yes it is mad ,but it's fun
and enjoyerble ,the reward in my job is having satified customers that came back
Darren on January 22nd, 2008 11:50 am

Hi Lorna - that's more like it! The whole point of this sort of offer is that if you get behind it you can really benefit from it...

I think the guy I spoke to was just one of life's great put-upon, down-trodden, woe-is-me types (I should know, I once wasted a large part of my career thinking like that...) who was entirely focused on his extra workload and perceived lack-of-bonuses, and didn't have any interest in the bigger picture - selling more stock and clearing warehouse backlogs puts Thresher's in a stronger position across the chain and ensures the longevity of the business as a whole.

Which in turn means that the miserable shelf-stacking types get to keep their jobs for longer. But if they choose to see it as more of a punishment than an opportunity, I think the problem is largely theirs, although maybe there's still room for Thresher's to work on making sure it's staff do appreciate the bigger picture, or maybe just spreading the love with a bonus or two?