And the winner is.............

[Botafogo]

Drew, we make him check the Speculum at the door as we have almost NO wines they talk about and then start talking about the Tulip Craze in the Netherlands in the 1600's as the closest anaology to his desire for those wines while we are showing him amazing things for less money. I then hand him my business card with my HOME phone number on it and tell hem we stand behind every wine we sell, something Marvin Shanken is NOT going to do. The guy who is offended by this will never be our customer anyway and when he starts raving about us in a negative way to his friends they are generally here the next day saying "if you got him that mad you must really have something going on... show me something interesting.". AND, as a result of this, we are enjoying the seventh year of exponential growth.

The biggest lesson I learned from the restaurant business is that not everyone is your customer so concentrate on those who "get" what you are doing and don't waste energy on the rest. As a sidelight, the wines in discussion here are generally sold at cost or nearly so in our market (as "bait") and thus they would provide zero input to the bottom line anyway, VERY BAD BUSINESS practice.

Roberto