Restaurants employ a trick to drive sales of wine. (Image: Getty)
A behaviour expert has revealed the subtle yet powerful tricks restaurants use to force people to order wine when sitting down for a meal.
Wine, whether red or white, is of course one of the biggest money-spinners for the trade, with bottles often slapped with huge mark-ups especially when sold a glass at a time.
And for decades, restaurants have been employing several subtle psychology tricks to up wine sales and boost profit margins.
Advertising executive and psychology expert Rory Sutherland has gone viral on thanks to his videos exposing everyday behaviour manipulation which goes on in all walks of life.
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Explaining how restaurants get people to order wine, Rory said: “There are social cues to which we are highly attuned emotionally but of which we’re not consciously aware.
“I’ll give you an example: if you go to a restaurant and you order wine, okay, what nobody will notice is that there’s a contextual social cue that restaurants create to make sure that you do order wine.
“There are a variety of things: they already have wine glasses on the table. That sets an expectation; in fact, if you decide not to order wine, they take them away with a bit of a huff.
“Then they do something very clever, they bring you a drinks list which isn’t called a drinks list, it’s called ‘the wine list’.
“And it has about 57 different types of wine and then there’s a really sad page at the back with all the beers and spirits.
“But they do something much cleverer still which is they only give the wine list to one person. Now that one person has to choose for the whole table, which means he’s going to choose wine because there’s only one alcoholic drink if you exclude Pimms and tequila slammers, there’s only one alcoholic drink which you can order for a group, which is wine.
“So a man with a single wine list will always do the same thing: which is, he turns to the rest of the table and says ‘red or white?’”