The hustling of booze at times resembles something akin to drug pushing

These are difficult times for supermarkets, price wars, falling profit margins and talk of closing huge out of town retail sheds dominate the news, and now the spectre of the Prime Minister giving consideration to minimum alcohol pricing.

Inventive solutions to these testing conditions are necessary, and it seems that Sainsbury’s has decided to sell as much cheap alcohol as possible before new regulations are introduced.

Sainsbury’s supermarket on Queen Street in Cardiff now sell a litre of white wine (or rose, if you prefer) for the bargain price of £3.20, slightly more than the price of sandwiches, a price which is guaranteed to make excess consumption an inevitability.
What could possibly motivate this pricing policy, given that the majority of evidence based research indicates that alcohol pricing has a clear relationship with excess consumption and alcoholism. All the studies that have reached the headlines in recent years seem to agree, cheap booze costs lives.

The packaging of this ‘special offer’ is interesting in itself as it is branded under the ‘Basics’ range, and sold at the queue-line for the automated tills in huge quantities.

Cheap alcohol, sold in a bargain product brand (perhaps to confuse it with the kind of cheap dietary staples that families desperate to make ends meet in a recession might buy) sold in plastic bottles with screw caps – the discerning wine buff is unlikely to be the target market.

More likely, the target market is the kind of person who values cheap alcohol, the sort of person who on a daily basis does the arithmetic of booze, calculating price against percentage per volume.

Sainsbury’s has perhaps considered that the golden age of bargain basement booze sales is drawing to a close, and that there might be few opportunities to sell the drug at so low a price as now.

Making hay while the sun shines, is, of course, a primary consideration for businesses, but if the troubles of our times are teaching us anything at all it should be this: We are more than businesses, our hearts and souls cannot be plotted into an Excel spreadsheet, we have higher responsibilities to one another than the simple mechanics of profit and loss.

The hustling of booze at times resembles something akin to drug pushing, and to sell a powerful, addictive and poisonous substance at the queue line for tills as if it were an impulse buy is a deliberate, calculated and cynical act.

Ironically, in many supermarkets, sweets and chocolate have been removed from the tills because harassed parents have often felt pressurised to buy their children unhealthy treats while doing the weekly shop.

It reveals volumes about our times that a Diary Milk or a Twix can be removed in the interests of customer health and well being, and be replaced by cheap alcohol instead.