During a recent long wait at Heathrow airport, I spent a considerable time touring the duty-free shop and the nearby World of Whiskies outlet. It was not an uplifting experience.
For a start, British airport duty-frees operate this strange Apartheid system, with some bottles sporting a blue square on the shelf price sticker, others a green one. Invariably the green ones are a better deal (although not that much), but they are only available to travellers bound for outside the EU. The blue squares identify bottles available to all travellers, but the prices are without exception higher than you would see in your local Tesco or Asda.
The vast majority of whiskies, especially malts, tend to be blue-squared, which means all fliers can buy them at that price. However, I could not regard them as bargains by any means. True, nearly all of them were litres but, after converting the price to 70cl, their prices were generally not competitive with most supermarket prices. Even big labels shouting “Just £90 for Two” failed to send me galloping to the till.
Other spirits were also not in the good-buy bracket. I saw one 70cl bottle of popular gin at £15.99, but I’d seen the same — in minimum unit pricing Scotland — at £14 a few days earlier. And one line of green-square premium gin was marked 40% off, yet still priced at £24 a litre. That means the “normal” price was £40, which again struck me as ridiculous for a spirit that was supposedly tax-free.
After a long trawl I did locate two blue-square malts priced just above £30 that struck me as not a bad buy, but — as I already had both in my drinks cupboard — I didn’t shell out for either of them.
Sadly, I see UK airport duty-free shops going the way of certain department store chains, although for different reasons. Owing to high airport rents and other factors, they cannot offer the prices seen in years past. Unless prices are far cheaper than in passengers’ home countries, why face the inconvenience of carrying bottles thousands of miles under the seat in front?
In a way, I saw this phenomenon at Heathrow already. In both the duty-free and whisky outlets, I was the only person there.
