Wine industry insiders continue to speculate about what caused Jim Pattison to finally dip his toe in the liquor retail business after a lifetime of explicitly avoiding the trade.
The 82-year-old’s Jim Pattison Group spent an undisclosed amount of money earlier this month to buy three Everything Wine stores and two Libations stores. (See “Pattison Group buys Everything Wine” BIV Business Today, August 9.)
“[Pattison’s grocery chain] Save-On-Foods has its own bonded warehouse, in-house freight forwarding and customs brokerage,” notes blogger DorkUncorked, who writes about wine. “They also have hundreds of containers a week coming in from all over the world including all wine regions.
“The costly portion of transportation is when you cannot fill out a full container. If you wait to fill a container, you often are left out of stock on the shelf and that means lost sales. They could easily add a pallet or two of wine to fill a container and drop their transportation costs by 25%.”
What piques many insiders’ interest about the acquisition is that Pattison notes on his website that “The Jim Pattison Group does not invest in, or desire to own, businesses associated with gambling/gaming or liquor/wine/spirits.”
(See “Pattison buys into booze business” – issue 1138; August 16-22.)
That dictum likely stems both from his Pentecostal upbringing and personal preference as a teetotaler.
In Pattison’s 1987 book Jimmy, he describes his first taste of hard alcohol at age 35 in the bar at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
Pattison ordered a ginger ale and a potential business partner at a large car wholesale company told him, “I’m not prepared to talk to you about a deal unless you have a drink with me.”
Pattison was not about to let the sale get away – providing a lesson for sales people everywhere.
He ordered a martini that “tasted terrible” and which he couldn’t finish.
Still, he closed a business transaction with his martini drinking associate, who ultimately bought 1,000 cars from Pattison’s car dealership.
Glen Korstrom
Twitter: GlenKorstrom