40 Years of ‘Cheers!’
George Szigeti of Better Brands celebrates 40 years providing Hawaii with quality beverages. Joining the former top surfer and model in a New Year’s toast are Shanna Hulme (left) and Kanani Oury
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Better Brands also has an in-house graphics department so it can produce a drink menu ready for restaurant use in a couple of days rather than weeks.
The business is not all about fun, though, as Szigeti feels the responsibility to educate about the dangers that can come from too much enjoyment of its products.
“I know there is a downside to it. I have a 15-year-old daughter at home, and I try to teach her to be responsible, not to drink, and I do all that at home,” says Szigeti, who helped with a campaign last year to educate servers on properly checking IDs. “Unfortunately, we still have issues that really bother me. You can’t legislate your way through it, you just have to educate the public. We don’t want them to drink a lot. We want them to drink moderately but enjoy the good stuff. If you are just drinking to get drunk, you are probably going to drink the cheap stuff.
If you are paying $90 for a bottle of wine, you are doing it to enhance the meal.”
Spending big money on wine is starting to become a luxury that fewer people can afford as the economy has tanked.
Belt-tightening has had to occur as clients are needing less, and the recent loss of brands like Ketel One to the competition has caused millions of dollars in lost sales.
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“This year has been the most challenging of my career,” says Szigeti. “But it has been challenging for everybody, so no one is going to listen to me complain, so I’m not gonna. We just go out and do the job. We have brands come and we have brands go. You don’t pound your chest when you get one, you stay humble because it is the spouting whale that gets harpooned.”
Even the charity events - which have been at the heart of Better Brands from its work with the Foodbank to fundraisers like the recent Game On event that raised $150,000 to renovate the coaches’offices at UH - are getting harder to green light.
“We can’t say ‘yes’ to everything like we used to,” says Szigeti. “We were going to do a yakudoshi with the Hawaii Foodbank next year, but so many things came at us as far as tough times and the meltdown, so that we are really just focusing on sales.
“We postponed doing any personal events; it doesn’t seem appropriate with the times. It’s a time for everyone to dig their heels in and focus on customer service.”
Fortunately for Szigeti, focusing on customer service has a different definition than it does for the night manager at Zippy’s.
“I go out four, five nights a week - there is always some supplier in town who is asking me to go out to dinner,” says Szigeti. “My job doesn’t stop at 5 p.m., that is just the middle of the day.
It is what helps separate us from the rest. We are very active.”
He knows that it sounds like a dream job to the rest of us, who are blessed if we get to go out to eat at a fancy restaurant once a month, but it does have its burdens all the same.
“There are times you want to just throw your feet up on the couch and relax,” says Szigeti. “I know no one is going to play a violin for me. It’s nice to be able to go out and see our customers, who are people like Alan and Roy. It’s a fun business. I’ve been doing it for 32 years, and there has never been a day I didn’t like it.”
And now you know why.
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