Convenience store wine 2021

Convenience store wine sales, one of the few bright spots over the past couple of years, weren’t in 2021

This is the second of two parts looking at trends for wine sold in supermarkets and convenience stores. Because not all wine is sold at Costco, Total Wine, and your local retailer. Today, part II: Convenience store wine sales. Thursday, part I: Supermarket private label wine.

Convenience stores – yes, convenience stores – have been one of the few bright spots for wine over the past couple of years. Wine sales at convenience stores surged in 2020, the fourth consecutive year of increases at 7-Eleven, QuikTrip, and the like.

But it was, apparently, too much to last.

The 2021 numbers, released in June, showed that wine sales declined 7 1/2 percent. In addition, sales as percentage of all the store sold fell by one-half of one percent. Sales of beer and cigarettes, meanwhile, increased – 1.2 percent for the former and 2.6 for the latter. I don’t know about you, but when wine drops and cigarettes don’t, it’s really time to worry about the future of the wine business.

The only good news? More convenience stores than ever are selling wine, more than two-thirds — up from 58 percent in 2020. That’s especially impressive, given how many states, including New York and Pennsylvania, limit wine sales in convenience stores.

Still, Jeff Lenard, vice president, strategic industry initiatives, for the National Association of Convenience Stores trade group, says not to panic. The end of the pandemic, he says, probably inflated the 2020 numbers: “It’s not so much that the year 2021 was a decline continuing a trend, but a decline from an unusual year in 2020.”

Also worth noting – despite the 21.1 percent sales increase from 2019-2020, the number of stores selling wine barely rose at all. In the long term, it’s probably quite significant that that number is now more than two-thirds.

So we’ll focus on the good news – since there is so much bad news in wine otherwise.

More about convenience store wine:
• Convenience store wine 2020
• Convenience store wine during the pandemic
• Convenience store wine 2019