The Sainsbury's Wine Delusion: Your 'Simple Fix' is Someone Else's Miracle

With Christmas looming, the annual panic has begun. Not the panic of shopping, but the panic of gifting. Specifically, the awkward, obligatory gifts for the people who quietly keep your life running.

It's the dilemma that leads most of us to the wine aisle at Sainsbury's, searching for a bottle that communicates "I appreciate you" without also communicating "I just grabbed this 30 seconds ago."

This exact dilemma is what led me to write this. It brought to mind my plumber, Dave.

I've been using Dave for about ten years, and he's brilliant. He's the sort of person you call when your boiler has given up the ghost and is making sounds like a dying whale. Like many brilliant tradespeople, his website was, to put it charitably, an afterthought. It was a single, sprawling page of text. No formatting, no clear sections, just a digital wall of words. It was not, as the designers say, an "optimal user experience."

Last Christmas, I faced that same annual dilemma. What do you get for the man who saved you from a minor flood in 2019? The default, of course, was that bottle of wine.

But I had another thought. I happen to know my way around building websites. So, instead of the wine, I spent an evening crafting him a proper digital front door.

To me, and to any other coder, what I built was trivial. It was a simple, clean, one-page landing site. It had his name, his services clearly listed, and a few very obvious "Call Me Now" buttons. I added a bit of formatting to make it easy to read on a phone. I thought it was a nice, practical gift. Certainly more useful than a Merlot.

I showed it to him. I expected a "Oh, that's great, thanks."

That is not what happened.

His jaw genuinely dropped. He looked at me, then at the screen, then back at me. "How... how did you do this?" he asked, as if I had just conjured a new wing for his house out of thin air. To him, it was as if Google themselves had personally rocked up to his door, hat in hand, and offered to revolutionise his entire world.

He saw a miracle. I saw a few hours in VS Code.

The Curse of Expertise

This is the moment I call "The Sainsbury's Wine Delusion."

We, the entrepreneurs, the creators, the specialists, are all suffering from a "Curse of Expertise." We are so close to our own skills, we know exactly how the pipes fit together. We see the code, the spreadsheets, the legal clauses, the brush strokes. And because we know the effort involved, we mistake it for the value.

I knew it was "just" a landing page. I saw its "cost."

My plumber, Dave, was blessedly free from this curse. He had no idea how it was made. He only saw one thing: the result. He saw a bright, professional, reassuring 'front door' for his business. He saw something that took him from "a man with a van" to "a proper business."

The gap between what I thought it was worth (a bit more than a bottle of wine) and what he thought it was worth (a Google-level intervention) is not just a funny anecdote.

That gap, that vast chasm between perceived effort and perceived value, is precisely where your entire business lives. It's where profit is made. It's where brand loyalty is born. It's the source of all 'magic' in commerce.

The Ingenuity We Ignore

This brings me to us. The entrepreneurs navigating the world with a "difference."

Those of us who are neurodivergent, or who live with a disability, are forced to be ingenious just to get through the day. We are constantly building "workarounds." We create systems to manage cognitive overload. We build shortcuts to navigate inaccessible websites. We invent new processes to handle tasks that the "default" world makes bafflingly difficult.

We do this so often, it becomes second nature. It's just... breathing.

And because it is so natural to us, we assume it has no value. We think it's "just a little fix." We think it's our version of a simple landing page.

This is a catastrophic mistake.

That "simple" workaround you built? That intuitive process you designed because the standard one was maddening? That's not a "life hack." That is a product. That is a service. That is an innovation.

You have become an expert in spotting and removing friction. This is a superpower in a world that is drowning in it. You are, in effect, a master of seeing the "wall of text" in every system and knowing, instinctively, where to put the "Call Now" button.

So, here is my challenge to you. Look at the "simple" things you do. The little systems, the clever fixes, the intuitive shortcuts that you've built for yourself.

Stop devaluing them. Stop thinking of them as a bottle of wine.

That, right there, is your ingenuity. And to someone else, I promise you, it looks like a miracle.