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By Susan Elise Campbell
Purdy’s Discount Wine & Liquor store in the heart of Saratoga Springs is poised to expand curbside, delivery and online retail services.
The move is one that the current generation of owners, Brandan Greczkowski and his wife Kristen, has looked forward to implementing for many years.
“There will always be a need for a brick and mortar presence where shoppers can come and get help in the store,” Greczkowski said. “But long before COVID I had planned to offer online services.”
State-mandated capacity limits in the early months of the pandemic posed obstacles for smaller stores in the community and some, Greczkowski noted, moved much of their business online.
“Being a bigger store, we got a lot of their foot traffic,” he said. “But the name of Purdy’s had been out there and synonymous with wine well before COVID.”
The store is located in Congress Plaza shopping center. When a bank branch next door moved out one year ago, Greczkowski took the first step in expanding the store’s footprint into that space, adding two registers at the front of the store and dedicating the area where the office used to be for online orders and fulfillment, he said.
“The web site purdyswine.com is now geared up for product purchases and local delivery,” said Jaclyn Shyptycki, the company’s marketing and operations manager.
Additional registers help the store face the track season with greater efficiency, Greczkowski said.
“In July we may have lines of 70 people at the registers, and it wouldn’t be fair to them to fulfill curbside pick-ups while they wait,” he said. “Now there are six registers and a mobile unit handling orders.”
Right now online processing is being handled within the store, but once order volumes grow, Greczkowski expects the company will have to seek a space to warehouse product. Staff expansion will follow, and Shyptycki said the company may need 10 to 15 more people soon, especially to do deliveries.
“We may deliver to farther distances in the future and down the line, as our online presence grows, we foresee shipping outside the local area,” she said.
One of the biggest challenges they will face is doing enough volume to keep prices competitive, Greczkowski said. That means buying larger quantities, and “we just can’t put another 1,000 cases in the store, so we will need a warehouse.”
Another challenge is the added costs. One is the rising cost of fuel to make deliveries. Another is for the new avenues of marketing to reach the next generation of 21-year-olds, Shyptycki said.
“While Purdy’s has been a fixture for many decades, management suspects new customers will not respond to the older way of advertising,” Greczkowski said.
“We will turn to digital marketing and social media to get word out that Purdy’s is adding online options to purchase their full inventory of wines and liquors,” said Shyptycki. “We have implemented a new logo and it’s important to keep consistent messaging to target audiences.”
Greczkowski said he ran a big box store for 20 years and never saw the online or pick-up business saturated. Now, “with the reigns in his hands,” he and Kristen “will move forward” with the company’s online presence, he said.
“There’s more technology out there and more people will push a button to shop at Purdy’s,” he said.
Visit Purdy’s Discount Wine and Liquor at 70-72 Congress Street. And for more events and information, including the new Purdy’s app, visit FaceBook and purdyswine.com.