Corkage

[Response to RCAV and Minister]

After reading your article about the Minister requesting a meeting to discuss corkage, my initial and overriding impression was to be wary of the politician seeking an avenue to garner votes by ‘inventing’ a contentious issue about which he/she can pontificate at length.
The issue is, enough ’pontificating’ and a perceived problem will develop into a real problem - to the detriment of the industry. My advice, for what it’s worth, is to dissuade any ‘beat up’ of the BYO issue by anyone, because it’s really a non-event.
Why? Because any corkage charge is a commercial decision by an independent operator to retrieve some of the costs involved with BYO. Whatever that charge happens to be, it’s no one’s business except the operator and their customer. If the customer perceives the BYO charge to be excessive then they will go somewhere else! It is a free market, a free economy and end of story. Our little restaurant doesn’t allow BYO because we have invested a great deal of money and time in selecting appropriate wines, methods of service, advertising, etal and want a commercial return from selling booze.
On the other hand we may bend that rule a little if a person has a ‘special’ bottle we can’t replicate. In this very rare instance we charge $15 corkage per bottle because those are our full costs and on this we make little money.
Restaurants need revenue from the sale of booze to survive!
An opinion, judging on years of experience and in general, people who want to make BYO an issue don’t want to pay for wine in a licensed restaurant yet they want the restaurant to except them. Those people should buy a BBQ for their back yard and stay there.
Wendy, I am sorry to say that I believe the whole BYO ‘issue’ is dribble [no pun intended], albeit dangerous dribble unless people are made aware of all facets of the argument. What politician has ever made an argument transparent? We are professional restaurateurs with a significant investment in premises, food, booze etal and, most importantly, are a private business. We decide what we serve and the dollar value of that product. If customers like it they will come on in. Politicians may try to make a name for themselves by suggesting a popular price [without knowledge] and offering some glib comment like, “Well, if a restaurant charges more than $5 corkage I believe it to be wrong – go somewhere else”. In this case I believe a case could be argued that the politician would be responsible for his/her popularist dribble and indeed for any bankruptcies and/or angst caused through such an irresponsible comment.
Wendy, for better or worse, my background is in finance [MBA etc] and have consulted around the world to business’s challenged by stupidity. Personally, we survive the quiet times by controlling what we do and offering value added services, including food and booze. We are not here as a philanthropic institution offering our place for nothing – as we would if we offered BYO. We also offer our expertise to others silly enough to try and make a quid through food and booze with one of our axioms being not to price compete but to add value through other means such as service, premises, etc. Following on from this tenet, everyone needs to charge an appropriate rate for all services, actions and products given costs, location, etc. If a customer doesn’t like it or can’t see the value they will go somewhere else.