Wine retailer cancels Cyber Monday, says "today everything is full price"

For the past 10 years, Delaware wine retailer Frank Pagliaro held a Cyber Monday sale, in which he posted hourly deals on Facebook and Twitter. And he sold a lot of wine.

This year, he sent out an email saying he was done with that.

"I would be in my office the entire day fielding orders via email, tweets and posts... 13+ hours of very little human contact doing nothing but typing on my keyboard.  Don't get me wrong it is a hugely successful marketing game to play, but I was never at all into Xbox or PlayStation.  I like people.  I like hearing their voices.  I like seeing their faces.

So today I'm going back to 1986.

That's when it all started for me.  No laptop, no cellphone, no iPad, no iWatch, no Constant Contact, no Facebook, no Twitter, no WIFI... and certainly no Cyber Monday.  Yup, today everything is full price here at FranksWine." (bold is mine)

Not only that, he basically shut off Internet wine sales:

"There's nowhere to click on this email.  Kinda crazy, huh?  It's like a dead-end street."

I read this and thought, how's that going to work, a non-sale on the busiest discount week of the year?



Turns out it worked out just fine. Frank emailed to say:

"This email actually kicked me in the ass!  Besides the close to 200 replies via email which I have yet to acknowledge, countless folks came in today pretty much to give me a high-5 and enjoy some wine.  Not sure why people are taking my "fuck you" to CyberMonday, but they seem to be diggin' it.  What I thought was going to be an early night is turning into a daylong social happy hour!  I'll take it!  I haven't run the numbers yet, but even if they're under last year - which I kind of think they are -  it's worth every penny lost.  Looking back on last year's sales, a majority of them were lost-leader giveaways… So even if we ring up less in gross sales today, I'm still ahead of the game :-) Best part of the day was not being glued to my laptop."

Counter-marketing! I didn't think to ask, but if you want to go visit Frank's Wine on Ordinary Wednesday, I'll bet you can find some full-priced wine then too -- so you don't have to worry about having missed out.

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