Where can I find Marsala wine? Grocery store or liquor store?
http://www.bevmo.com/productlist.asp?Ntt=Marsala+wine&Ntk=All&D=Marsala+wine&Nty=1
Imagine you drop something and break it open at the grocery store. It's totally your fault, but worth $3. What do you do?
I would notify a store associate.I work in a grocery store. We don’t care if you accidentally broke something. Please tell us. The minor loss from the item being broken is much, much better for us to take than the potential loss if we aren’t informed and another customer trips or slips because of it. Making you pay for the product or otherwise punishing you would dis-incentivize you from reporting the new slip-and-trip hazard. We don’t want that: we’ll thank you and eat the loss, and then quickly clean up the mess, because that policy ultimately saves us far more money and hassle than we lose from accidental breakages.It’s not just balancing liability, though. It’s also about good customer service. We want customers to have good experiences in the store so that they want to come back. Most people already feel badly about breaking things, and they fear being embarrassed (usually more than they fear paying for it). Those are negative associations with the store, then, and we don’t want that. So a smile, a “thank you, don’t worry about it!”, and then carrying on like all is normal is the best thing we can do to earn that future business.Only once have I ever accidentally broken something in a store and been made to pay for it. It was a candle, in one of those little knick-knack stores. It slipped from my hands, hit the floor, and snapped in two. The store attendant, who I assume was the owner, was livid. As in, threatening-to-call-the-police levels of angry. Over a $5 candle.So I paid him, took my broken candle home for repair (because fixing a broken candle isn’t brain surgery) and never went in that shop again.Raising a fuss over accidentally broken retail product is bad customer service. It’s different, I suppose, if the item is particularly valuable… like a widescreen TV in Walmart or a car on an auto lot… but I wouldn’t know. I do know that when a customer using one of our motorized mobility carts ran into a display stack of Belvedere vodka we did not make her pay for it, despite the loss of 27 bottles and the cost of two employees taking two hours to clean it up. That cost us over $600, product and labor.Ultimately, we are more concerned with liability from having debris on the floor, more concerned with ensuring your future business, and more concerned with customers intentionally behaving badly (oh, the stories I could tell, but this is too long already to get into that!) to make an issue out of accidental losses, especially small ones.
Price for Mini Bottles of Champagne?
The traditional wedding favor bottle size is a quarter bottle of champagne or asti. For Veuve Clicquot, quarter bottles run approximately $10-15 base price in the Midwest market, provided that you can locate them. Martini & Rossi should sell for considerably less per quarter bottle ($6-8), although traditionally I’ve seen these small bottles of sparkling available in packs of four. In general I would have to warn against buying quarter bottles without tasting one, as these tiny bottles can oxidize very quickly. Make certain to try at least one and do not order them too early, as something can happen to them while they are stored. The next larger size bottle from the quarter bottle is the half bottle (also sometimes referred to as a demi, filette, or split in some situations). In general, these would be around double the cost of the quarter bottle plus a little extra (minimum $20-25 per bottle for the Clicquot, $10-15 for the Rossi). They are usually easier to locate than quarter bottles and are less subject to oxidation, although you should certainly still try one before you place an order. However, giving a half bottle to most or all of the guests at a wedding can get a little pricey, even for common brands such as Clicquot and Rossi. As for sales, the Michigan liquor situation as it exists right now would require you to locate a retailer in your states, as Michigan does not allow interstate shipment of liquor from other states. The best place to find a wide range of bottles of various sizes would be to look in specialty liquor stores and wine stores, especially around the major cities in Michigan. Wherever you end up finding the bottle size you want, try to look a the bottles on the shelves. If there’s a lot of dust on them, then the liquor store, and to some extent, their distributor, might not have a high turnover rate. Slow turnover can mean that the champagne has been sitting around in a warehouse for a while. Fortunately, Clicquot and Rossi are major brands with high sales rates and turnover, so the slow sales are les of a problem here. And just for reference purposes, asti and champagne are two completely different types of sparkling wine that are generally not interchangeable in taste. Although I’ll avoid getting into exact flavor profiles here, asti is made through a different method than champagne and is traditionally somewhat sweeter.