Finance & Legal Best Posts in Thread: OUT of STOCK

There are various forms of logic - it is an individual thing arising from our own brains. In your case, you seem to think I am blaming the customer for an item being out of stock - but I never said that, you did. Your 'logic' also looks at circumstances purely from your own viewpoint and seems unable to take account of life lived under a degree of trauma that most of us have no experience of. If you are unable to understand the 'logic' of living in a country where everything is not the same as in your own developed and wealthy country and where people receive a good education, then maybe time to go elsewhere.

 

Out of stock issues should be blamed on the inventory control folks, not the frontliners on grocery aisles or the merchandisers. These people aren’t in charge of reordering.

Also, if you’re in logistics, then you should know logistics is pretty much dependent on geography. The countries you mentioned you’ve worked on, aren’t archipelagos. Not the same thing.

 

I try not to refer to myself as an American or at least I don't say I'm from America. America includes a lot of countries across two continents. You are correct though. I"ll go as far as saying accents in the U.S. is almost equivalent to dialects in the Philippines.

I don't take offense to being called a Yankee when it's not being deployed in a derogatory manor. I think people who grew up in the U.S. south do not consider themselves Yankees.

 

Can't we all just get along? I think the answer to this one is "yes", yes, sometimes employees are lazy, sometimes management is incompetent, but sometimes they just can't get things or find it uneconomical to do so and sometimes there are cultural gaps which are getting in the way of communication. Whatever you think is the problem, you are probably right, but you are probably wrong as well.

 

I understood what you mean and agree with you.

As you know. YOU DO NOT SPEAK FOR ME.

 

I hope this thread has made us all think more about the staff and the circumstances of their lives and work and we can all show more tolerance towards them. Perhaps just showing them where an 'oos' item actually resides in their store would be a positive - for us and for them. If they actually do not have it in stock then they are the last ones we should be blaming.

 

I had a similar experience at Citi Hardware. I needed door seal. Same thing-no stock sir. Something told me to look around. I found a whole rack of them. I could barely contain my anger at the kid, but kept quiet. I would not put the manager on employees. They make slave wages, get treated like chattel, and can be fired for any infraction including embarrassing the manager in front of customers. These things happen for all the reasons others posted. I would also include that all employees in grocery and department stores seem to rotate out of their contract. I don’t most are being actually trained. Just told what to do.

 

My latest memorable "out of stock sir".
City Hardware, I looking to buy a drill press. Im at the front end of the "Tool Department" and I ask in a loud voice to the sales person in the back where I can find a drill press. He comes back with "out of stock sir". No problem and no surprise. After all I'm in the big boys toy department. I continue to wonder around trying to find something else to spend some money on. I end up in the very same corner where the sales person said "out of stock sir" and lo-and-behold less than 12 inches from where he was standing is THREE drill presses. I go to the manager and inform him that he should try training his employees on where the things they are selling are located at. He offered a discount if I wanted to buy. I said no sale because I do not like being told "out of stock sir", just because the sales person was to laze or to ignorant to know where it is. I got my new drill press down town at ₱300.oo more than it was at City Hardware for the very same drill press.
This was some years ago. Did the sales person learn anything? NO. Did the store manager learn anything? NO. Did I learn anything? YES. I learned that, "out of stock sir" could really mean one of several things;

1. We are really out of stock.
2. We have never ever stocked it in the first place.
3. I'm to lazy to look for it.
4. It is buried in all the other stock on the back and I'm not going to look for it.
5. I do not get paid well enough to look for it.
6. Screw this store I hope they go bankrupt.

I no longer fret over the reply "out of stock sir". I just keep on looking.