And Other Mix-Ups in the Wine Aisle...
Longtime readers will know that I like to shake things up in this monthly letter, rarely discussing the same topic twice. But last month, after talking about my work at the Publix near where I grew up, I promised I’d tell you about the next job I held, working as a wine vendor. It sounds like fun, right? I suppose it was fun at times. At other times, it was madness.
Coming right in from stocking shelves at Publix, I figured the job would be great. Instead of being stuck at one store all day, I’d be driving around from location to location. And since I was three months away from being 21, I figured working with alcohol would be a perfect fit. But there was something I hadn’t figured; since I wasn’t 21 yet, I couldn’t technically sell alcohol! Right out of the gate, I was running into challenges, and in this case, I ended up having to help other sales reps with their routes for the first couple months of the job.
Fast forward a few months, and things were different. I had my own route, with different accounts (stores) to visit each day. I got up at 5 a.m. every morning to be ready for work, and more often than not — especially during the holiday season — I worked six or seven days a week. I also had moved to Bradenton for the job and held that route for a year, when I was offered a route back in Fort Myers.
It was a great route, but there was one catch. My predecessor on that route was “Sherri,” and she left big shoes to fill. Not only was she one of the best sales reps we had in the company, but she was also an absolute knockout. The majority of managers on my route were men who had gotten used to looking forward to Sherri’s visits and for them, I was a total let down. “You’re not Sherri!” the manager at one store exclaimed on my first day. His disappointment was obvious. A few stores later, another manager stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me walk up. “They replaced Sherri … with you?” My one saving grace was that, having worked at Publix in the past, I had an “in” at the various Publix stores on that route. But my self-esteem was never the same.
With time, the store managers realized that even if I didn’t look like Sherri, and I would never replace her, I was still good at doing the job itself. And man, was that job competitive. The reps for other companies could get pretty intense, and I quickly learned all the dirty tricks they used to one-up each other. Every vendor wants their brand to be at eye-level on the shelf, so they’d move products around and hope the shelf-stockers didn’t notice. If there was a display in the aisle and it blocked the view of their product, the vendor would scoot the display over the next guy’s brand instead. When that guy showed up, he’d do the same thing! Over the course of a week’s worth of store visits, I’d see the same display walk slowly down the aisle inch by inch. And then there was the dirtiest trick in the book: hiding your competition’s product so they accidentally ordered too many for that particular store. Why is that a problem? Well, the extra boxes would take up space in the back of the store, and that kind of crowding drove the managers crazy.
You know what, though? None of those tricks really did much in the long run. Sure, you might get the upper hand one day, or feel like you were putting some other vendor in their place. But as important as spots, placement, and displays might be, what really matters is good service. If you do your job well, back up your product, and support the store that’s selling it, you’ll get much farther along than you would with petty games. And more often than not, the store managers would end up “refereeing” the disputes between vendors — and they hated having to deal with it. Looking back, I actually think they felt the same way I do when I have to referee an argument between my kids.
As you can imagine, I eventually decided to move on from selling wine. That job was a great job early in my career, but not anything I would want to do long term, which is why I moved on to the mortgage business, and have been here since 2001.