25% off any six bottles – or not…

There’s one Italian red which has become something of a dinner party favourite at Casa K. It’s delicious, it’s dependable… but it has a drawback. Which is that it costs £16 a bottle.

But there’s a posh supermarket which stocks it – and, every so often, they offer 25% off any six bottles of wine. The last couple of times they were out of stock of our favourite during the offer period; I am not a suspicious man by nature, but this after all is a supermarket which admitted to The Guardian some years back that, during these offers, certain wines are “de-emphasised”. You might very well say “hidden”; I couldn’t possibly comment.

This time, however, Mrs K alerts me to the upcoming offer. I dive online faster than a Harry Styles fan after tour tickets, and mirabile dictu, they have our favourite on discount. So it’s the required six bottles in my online basket, thank you, proceed to checkout, and on to Delivery Options. Where the whole thing falls apart – and Mrs K, hearing what I am writing about this week, says “This is going to be a grumpy one, isn’t it?”

The Standard Delivery is £5.95. (That’s Standard as in surly driver, parking problems, they didn’t say you lived down a one-way street, mate, sign this impossible touch-screen thing could you, and can I use your toilet?) And that is going to cost me effectively £1 a bottle.

So my £4 discount, my 25% discount on six bottles of £16 wine, has suddenly become just a £3 discount. An 18.76% discount.

It could be worse. I could opt for Next day/Named day delivery. That would cost me a swingeing £8.95, or £1.50 a bottle – reducing my discount to just £2.50 a bottle. That’s 15.6%. Name the day? How about Never?

In order to get free delivery, and hence my full 25% off, I would have to order £150 of wine, to get free standard delivery, or £250 to get it free next/named day. £250! That’s 21 bottles of this wine arriving in our hall, like something out of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Never mind the cost of the wine, think of the marriage guidance bills.

Oh, but wait for it. The cheapest option, at £3.95, is Click and Collect. Or, as I prefer to call it, Leg it and Lug it.

And that’s 66p a bottle. To leg it myself down the High Road, and lug six bottles back. The cheapest possible way of ordering my six bottles is, basically, self-delivery. For which privilege I still have to pay £4, and be left with a 20.83% discount. Not 25%.

Some people would just have gone ahead and ordered it. Still a discount, still saving money. But that is not the point. The point is that I cannot in any way order my six bottles, and get a 25% discount. That is the point. And I am the one here with the pointer.

If you want to order six bottles and actually get 25% discount, you have to buy six bottles with a full price of at least £22.20 each. Then they will graciously let you pick it up, from them, for nothing.

(And no, I can’t imagine a wine merchant saying, “Are you coming in to collect it? That’ll be £4.”)

I am honestly not some kind of skinflint. It’s just that I had foolishly got it into my head, as I saw the ads, as I began this process, that I would be getting 25% off my six bottles of wine. And then, as with so much in life, disillusionment arrived, in this case in the guise of delivery options.

But, there was one other way of getting an actual 25% off. I took a chance.

I walked down to my nearest branch, and hoped. And what do you know – they did actually have six bottles, the last six bottles, of my wine on their shelves. Which I could buy at a 25% discount, put into my handy (Majestic) six bottle carrier, and lug back home. Without any extra charge for picking it up. So there.

I shall put down my pointing stick now, before I have someone’s eye out.

PK