YEREVAN — Armenia’s major supermarket chain – Yerevan City – at a press conference on Monday unveiled its revamped strategy: improving the quality of counterfeit vodka by 30% in 2011: “We are committed to provide the best quality for the Armenian appreciators international alcohol brand fakes,” stated the press secretary of the supermarket chain at the press conference.
“Alex Grig” LLC of MP Samvel Aleksanyan who owns the chain has been harshly criticized at multiple occasions for flooding the alcohol market with low quality counterfeit. This step is hailed as response to the criticism and has been applauded by consumer advocate groups.
Press secretary of the company Karine Nalchikyan explains the new strategy: “Alex Grig” has always worked hard to deliver maximum resemblance of the fake vodkas of best brands, which are distilled at the company’s finest basements or as the simple folk like to call it – the faketories.”
Nalchikyan outlined the company’s plan on boosting the quality. “Striving to bring the bar of customer satisfaction higher, we plan to fully suspend all toxic additives to the produced vodkas, and not just toxic but also simply disgusting stuff will be reduced, as well.”
“We are sufficiently self-aware and use good self-criticism here,” Nalchikyan expands. “All the dubious employees have already been fired from Alex Grig. In 2009 we hardened the punishment for playful urination into the alcohol substance, which resulted in dismissal of over 75% of staff within a year’s time. So in practice, this led to swift and healthy generation change in the replication industry.”
A1+ reporter asked the spokeslady whether Yerevan City has any plans to also expand the range of products. “Indeed, I am happy to announce that this year we have bold plans to venture faking more sophisticated alcohol items. In May, our stores will offer Havana Club rum and Grant’s Whiskey which will be hardly discernible from original. And in summer we will also kick off generating tequila.”
The company representative owned up that rum and tequila are complicated drinks from replication perspective which may cause certain stomach misunderstandings in the initial few months: “However, we have taken good care of that odd, too. We have set up a hotline for potential poisoning incidents, where all poisonees can call to get first medical assistance free of charge ! And in case of repeated poisoning by the same individual, we will gift a bottle well-proven vodka counterfeit,” said the lady.
Rumors have it that Yerevan City plans on delving into the meat market next year for which the company is allegedly importing tons of soybean material