It was the receiving/backend guys who messed up the inventory.
You "punished" the wrong person.
-- I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the United States of America.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
-------- I am the terror that flaps in the net! I am the little metal key missing from your IKEA furniture pack! [ Parent | Reply to This ]
You're right that it's a good idea to complain, to the right people, if you recieve poor service. However, you "blew your stack", threw down your purchases, and stormed out like a spoiled baby. The only feedback likely to make it up the chain is "some asshole came in today, make sure he doesn't get service from now on," because you didn't even bother to complain to someone who could make a difference. I hope you enjoyed fostering surliness in the staff.
The rest of your rant boils down to "people don't jump at my command". It's nice to know that people who run their own business are still willing to kick out undesirable customers.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
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The problem here is you're expecting book store employees to be both perfect and omniscient. And feel justified in punishing them when they are less than gods.
The books aren't locked down. If someone stole a book or moved it someplace you would never think to look, those employees are not going to find it short of looking at every single book in the store (and not even then if stolen). The employees could have done their job right and a _customer_ could have caused the problem. Yet you're giving the employees grief.
The other problem is that unless your performance was done with a manager in sight, you wasted your effort. Even with really conscientious employees, the bottom line is it doesn't hurt them directly if one sale walks out the door. A manager would care if he saw it, but the employees probably muttered about what an ungrateful person you were and went about their business.
Did you ask to speak to a manager? That's the only person you should have vented to and the only person who might have cared.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
Anyway, you sound like a complete tool. The book was misfiled, or lost or perhaps stolen. The clerk made a pretty good effort to find it for you and when he couldn't...you yelled at him and demanded the book in five minutes?
Your other examples prove that point quite well. Were you a potential customer of mine, I'd ask you to take your business elsewhere.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
Otherwise, it does make it extremely difficult to read posts without breaks. (I used plain text on this post, and got paragraph breaks without problems, after previewing first)[ Parent | Reply to This ]
Actually, if you'd read the earlier posts (which I concede may be hard to read) you'd notice he (she?) said that they made this "mistake" and similar ones umpteen times in a row over a period of months. That does seem rather different from a one-off bad experience, and suggests to me that the store in question (which city and location BTW?) is doing something systematically wrong.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
Which is it? Or is this just some "A Million Little Pieces" type recollection?[ Parent | Reply to This ]
Instead of blowing your top at the bookstore why not thank them for their effort, buy your books and go else where? They didn't cause your book to be published late twice. They didn't ignore your request for help. It sounds like they treated you with respect and gave an honest effort to helping you. It could have been anything from a computer glitch (nobody who reads this site has ever seen that before) to a new employee who really messed up and put it in the wrong place.
Chill a little dude. "Reward" people for the effort they give you. When you get poor customer service, that is the time to start bitchin. Not when you get wonderful service but despite their best efforts they can't help you. If you feel you must "express" yourself try thanking the person who helped you and then complain to the manager that the store doesn't have the product you wanted.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
If your problem was with the business (book not available), then you should have taken it up with the person best able to represent and control the business: the manager. Anything else is not an effort to resolve the problem, it's just spleen venting.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
I haven't seen anyone mention yet that retail stock items are stolen all the time, either internally or by shoplifters. These items generally remain on the stock list until a complete inventory or a "hot count" is performed. So now the poor staff is hearing you mouth off AND they're going to catch some grief because a shoplifter may have been clever enough to get the book out of the store undetected.
It would have been a whole different matter if you had pre-ordered the book and been notified that it was being held for you. Even then, I would have been satisfied to complain a bit about the waste of my time to drive down there. As long as they replaced the item in a reasonable period of time, I'd be fine.
The sad part about the incident you relate is that it dilutes the efforts of other people to correct REAL problems. When I ran a stereo equipment shop, I often found myself working on three or four customer issues at a time...three were just silly (yes, I DO mean silly) and one was actually a problem which should have received my undivided attention. Of course, even if I solved the important problem, I was bogged down taking and making calls to all four customers, as well as to my distributors and repair sites, so it took four times as long as it should have to make things right with the single customer who really deserved it. [ Parent | Reply to This ]
So someone can go out of their way to fantastic lengths to try to please you, but if they fail due to someone else's actions, you don't care. All you care about is the end result and if you don't get the end result you want you feel justified in taking it out on the very people who tried to help you. What are the odds that these people will try to help you in the future? I hope you never do this in a restaurant where they can do things to your food that you won't know about in the back room before they deliver it to you.
Yet when you make an honest mistake in not realizing that this blog uses HTML formatting by default, you refuse to acknowledge that honest mistake, instead blaming external forces. (Not that that surprises me. It's perfectly consistent with someone who yells at store staff who are trying to help but fail to produce after an extended effort.)
If you want to deal with the business, deal with the business, not the individual employees. Write. Write to a corporate office. Write a polite and detailed letter explaining your grievance. THAT is how you can get results and deal with the business. When you blow your stack at floor employees, you're hurting the wrong people without much of a chance of achieving the result you want.
Unless your desired result is to feel better by taking out your disappointment and frustration on another person by making them feel bad and by yelling in public. But if that is your goal, then you are not dealing with a business. Instead, the staff of the business is dealing with someone who is terribly spoiled.
Here's a couple of thoughts.
Maybe the book had arrived at the store, been properly shelved, and then someone stole it. Do you expect the bookstore to survey its entire inventory, every day, to see what might have "walked" and remove it from the computer?
You seem to misunderstand the very meaning of the word "good faith effort". It doesn't mean "The company gave you exactly what you wanted." It means that it tried to do so, within the means that it had available.
I'm not saying you should be glad they didn't have the book. Obviously, you were inconvenienced by their inability to find a book their computer indicated was in stock. But that's hardly a reason to become a diva and demand that the store serve you immediately, on your terms, or else you'll throw a tantrum and leave.
It's a book--regardless of how long you were waiting for it to come out, your life will go on if you didn't get it that day. It might have been nice if the store offered you a courtesy discount on your other items; it would have been smart of them to say "we'll continue to look for the book and if necessary, special-order it for you and hold it for you when it comes in". But it sounds to me like, for all the effort the company went through to TRY to meet your needs, you thanked them by throwing a fit.
I've had customers like that in my own business. Some of them have been shocked to find out that when they threaten to leave, I offer to beat them to the punch and cancel their accounts. Not surprisingly, most of them shut up immediately.
Second, the principal culprits in mis-shelved books are other customers, who commonly pick up a book in, say, the sci-fi section and decide while perusing romances that they don't want it anymore. So the sci-fi book winds up in romances, the romances wind up in computer books, etc.
Hard to blame either on the store, and few would blame them for being happy to have you go elsewhere to vent your spleen.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
As a customer, if I am looking for a computer book I will only look in the computer section. I won't be looking for books on programming in the romance section no matter how much affection I may have for a programming language.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
To misquote your statement, "The ecommerce system has CAUSED the retail industry to begin its own race to the bottom in customer service and inventory management." E.G: Sears.com is NOT an online store when it comes to appliances & items you must "buy online, pick up in store". They are relying on an accurate inventory of OUR STORE. Our computers always seem to be "off" by at least 1 on what's "in stock". Even if it WAS in stock when you put the item in your "shopping cart", a salesman at the store may have sold the last one to a customer who actually took the time to shop at the store just seconds before your online sale was completed. IT HAPPENS! Sears.com is, and other online stores are, doing their best to do away with salespeople altogether (saves them money). That online vacuum sale took about $10 out of the pocket of the salesman who tried to help out, not counting the potential sales lost while helping. That's one less meal on the table for his/her family. Yes, we work on commission. I am in "draw" more often than not, so my pay averages just above $6/hr.
As for your cookie dilema, give me a break! If the recipe is "no preservatives", you can't just bake them up hoping someone will buy them and leave them lying out. They'd have to throw the batch out after an hour & make fresh ones. Can you say "guaranteed loss"? Can you say "health department"? Sure, I knew you could.
1) Computers show items in stock when they aren't (human error on input or sale quantity at the bookstore). 2) Your grocery experience could be the result of troubles with the supply chain (trucking company, warehouse, accident on the highway, etc) 3) Noone wants to give anyone "the shaft"! That's an immature belief held by the self-centered and paranoid.
BOTTOM LINE: MISTAKES HAPPEN WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS! Please remember that rule I always try to follow: "Treat others as you would have them treat you." If we all followed suit, the world would be a better place.[ Parent | Reply to This ]
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