Here are three that I can’t help pondering.

Rabobank’s report notes a number of important trends that, if taken to a ridiculous Taco Bell kind of extreme, might produce something that Demolition Man would recognize. Taco Bell was the only chain to survive the franchise wars and now all restaurants are Taco Bells.

Invited to dinner and dancing at a Taco Bell, he can’t help but think, Taco Bell? Really?īut it really is, as Bullock’s character explains. Stallone’s updated Rip Van Winkle encounters a lot that surprises or shocks him including, as in the film scene above, the inconvenient truth about retail consolidation run amuck. Pondering this thought, I unexpectedly found myself channeling a 1993 Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, and Sandra Bullock film called Demolition Man. Stallone plays a police officer named John Spartan who was put into suspended animation only to be awakened 36 years into the future in 2032 in order to catch Wesley Snipe’s bad guy character. What might the future look like under the admittedly unlikely “straight-line trend projection” circumstances? Take today’s trends as Rabobank reports and fly them straight out to wherever they take you. The future is out there somewhere, but it is almost never on a straight line that connects the last few dots on your time-series chart and then continues on out to infinity … and beyond.īut humor me with a little thought experiment. In other words I was doing exactly what economists are trained not to do, which is engage in straight line projection. premiumizationĪs I was reading the Rabobank report I began to wonder how these trends might unfold if continued at their present rates well into the future. Wholesaler consolidation and retail “chainification” of wine vs.

Securing long-term premium grape supply vs.The Rabobank report examines five important tensions that are part of the premiumization syndrome: wine market isn’t simply a case of what Paul Krugman calls “up and down economics” - in this case demand for $10+ wine is up, demand for cheaper wines is down –but rather it needs to be understood in the context of a broader set of wine market changes. The gist of the analysis is that the premiumization trend in the U.S. I’ve been catching up on my wine industry reading and one report that grabbed by attention is Rabobank’s May 2016 Industry Note, “The Premiumization Conundrum”.

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