All Marketers...

Geeks don’t buy expensive wine


Four of us visited a fancy restaurant on Saturday. Imagine our geeky surprise when they brought out a Microsoft tablet instead  of a wine list.

It makes perfect sense, of course. You could sort by year or by price, you could see the inventory and they could remove a wine instantly once it was sold out.

So what could be bad?

What’s bad is that the person who’s going to spend $100 or $1,000 on a bottle of wine isn’t a hyper-rational geek in search of the optimum solution (hint: we bought the cheap stuff but it was still 5x the cost of of the wine in a store). Instead, we’re looking for a buying experience (courting the sommelier, sniffing the cork) that adds a huge percentage of the value to the purchase.

In short: a cool story, but told in the wrong place to the wrong people.