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With Australia’s two major supermarket chains vying to increase their market share, the latest battle ground is using loss leader practices with aggressive discounting. These tactics initially targeted the milk industry which has had disastrous effects for dairy farmers. Now the supermarkets are using beer loss leading discounting practices to entice shoppers into their supermarkets.

The motivation is that the customer will come to the supermarket, in this case Coles to buy a slab of VB which usually retails for $38 (The cost is $33 but it in this instance the supermarkets are selling the carton or slab of the or at $28 which is well below the cost price of the beer) in the belief of attracting sales of non discounted products.
Apparently this isn’t the first instance where the supermarkets have adopted this practice with beer products.

With the recent fiasco over the Alco pops and the irresponsible behavior of the beverage companies, using alcohol to entice new shoppers/customers is both irresponsible and neglecting their obligation to put the community ahead of their own self-interests or perhaps maximising shareholder value.

With the massive increase in drunken violence and irresponsible drinking behavior amongst teenagers and young adults, encouraging people to purchase alcohol below cost is sending out very disturbing messages to the public. The most disturbing point is that they’re actually selling beer cheaper than bottled water which is absolutely ridiculous.

The other factors that needs to be taken into consideration is promoting responsible drinking, and given the increasing trend of alcohol consumption across the wine and spirits heavily discounting alcohol, especially to entice people into a retail establishment can be deemed to be not promoting the safe consumption of alcohol.

A recent 2007 survey showed that nearly 50% of males consume beer so making the purchase of beer more attractive will lead to increased consumption.

A very funny fit the story about how a Fitmate placed the bottle of wine into the fridge before boot camp.

While this may appear to be hard-core, getting home after the boot camp session and having a couple glasses of wine, the weather was predicted at 32°, so she was looking forward to enjoying a nice glass of chilled white wine after work.

It’s great to indulge with the wine or beer however you just have to watch your level of consumption as nowadays a lot of people will have one to two glasses of alcohol, which can get a little bit worrying if you become dependent on this level of consumption on a daily basis.

The recommended drinking guidelines for what constitutes a standard drink is actually quite small relative to the glass size and the quantity being 100ml for a standard drink of wine based on an alcohol content of 13.5%.

Next time you’re looking at enjoying a lovely glass of red or white just remember to monitor your consumption, it’s great to enjoy a glass here and there but be careful it doesn’t turn into a situation of dependency.

With summer just around the corner, and Christmas parties only a few weeks away for some people it’s easy to get carried away and over indulge.

Fingers crossed it passes through the Senate. With binge drinking out of control, any initiative to curb consumption is definitely a move in the right direction.