I've worked retail a few times, and I always just went and stood in the back for awhile, maybe took a shit, had a smoke, and then came back to tell them we still don't have it. The best were the fucking clowns at home depot. My guy, you are in the fucking warehouse, there is no other storage. Luckily, at that home depot, there was an unsecured security door on the receiving area you could just pop out back and have smoke at.
You mean the clowns who used the app you tell them to use because none of you even know where things are anymore, to be told there's 562 in the store, but there's none on the shelf, but if we pester enough managers eventually, someone will get the lift and bring the box down that's been right there the whole time? Those clowns? Cus Home Depot customer service has been shit since they stopped hiring actual trade professionals who know what they're doing. You HAVE to be an annoying asshole or you'll never get anything there anymore. I've literally had associates tell me "we're out of stock" and I point up and go "what about those boxes right there??" followed by "oh, let me see if I can find someone allowed to use the ladder".
Home Depot gets the customers they deserve for the "service" they now provide.
I feel your pain my dude. After a unexpected hardfreeze I had to go get some replacement parts that fail so the expensive stuff doesn't explode. Saw the app that they had at least three or four boxes somewhere but they weren't on the shelf. The associates were utterly useless so me and another dude just started tearing boxes apart until we found them. It was glorious. They were like. "What are you doing?". Sure shoot! We found them and we got them and got out of the store so we could go start fixing our pumps and sprinkler systems and yada yada.
HD's inventory system is a shit show. The workers' app and customer app use the same stock database, and most of the time it's nowhere even close to what's actually on hand (at least for the electrical stuff). I've had days where I need a specific part, an worker and I will scour the store looking for a pallet on the rack to find nothing. I don't blame them, I think HD has just gotten to the point where they don't care, if you don't like it, go to Lowe's that has almost the same problem. My issue is the HD/Lowe's are an hour closer than my supply house, which is already an hour or so drive down the hill from my town.
Bravo! This is basically my experience in Canada as well.
I worked in a department store when I was a teenager. My favorite was when people came in looking for a video game console days after it released and ask you to look in the back because maybe one fell between some skids or something. Like Buddy, if we had one to sell we'd have sold it. Those things go right into a cage once their received. Ain't no one losing track of them, they literally print money for the store. A lot of people just assume retail workers are all incompetent.
Adding in edit: although sometimes it ended up with the customer screaming at us, it was always great to ask them if they really thought they were the first person today to come up with that idea. For a moment before they yell again they look dumbfounded. Worth it!
I used to do that too! "Do you have this?" "Oh, the most popular item three days before Christmas which I've been asked about thirty times a day for the last month and a half? No sorry, it's out of stock until at least after the holidays." "Well can you go look in the back?"
Then I'd just go back there and dick around on my phone for five minutes, the manager would come out and ask what I was doing, I'd say pretending to look for something we don't have and she'd go "oh, okay" and go back to playing solitaire in her office lol.
Except for that one time I went to pick up a video game that was just released. It wasn't on the shelf, so I asked someone about it. She said she would check in the back. 5 minutes later she came out, game in hand.
The reading comprehension here is something to behold. I'm going to break this down one time for any future comments.
The scenario at hand, per the post, is in regards to customers that want you to go "look again", after you've already verified that said product is unavailable, and they won't accept that.
This isn't in regards to basic customer service. This has nothing to do with initially verifying if an item is in stock.
I had fun with the home depot whiny bois yesterday, but I'm really over this at this point.
There are people who genuinely think the only reason they're not getting what they want is because they're not being enough of a hassle. It's never that what they were asking for was incomprehensible or physically impossible, it's that they didn't kick and scream loud enough.
I used to work in an electronics place, and we had a guy who came in once who wanted a specific camera at a very specific price. As in, he came in and flat-out said "I want this and I will give you exactly this amount for it." The price he had in mind was about $10 below our cost, which we told him, and he absolutely refused to budge on it, and also wouldn't just leave. Me and the manager literally had to show him the thing on the cashier screen that showed our cost and stuff and the managers was like "If we sell you this, it's like we're paying you $10 to take this camera from us."
He eventually left without it, but it took forever.
What a coward. He should have urinated himself on the spot.
As a customer, if I wanted to know if you have something at a counter, even if I said "are you sure?", if you clicked 3 times randomly on your computer screen then I'd be sufficiently convinced.
Why do you need to ask if you’re sure? When I worked retail the quicker I got you what you wanted the quicker you would leave me alone so why wouldn’t I be sure? It’s not like I would pretend to check.
So I had a similar situation on the customer side. I was looking for a canned vegan tuna salad, but after looking at several different stores of the chain carrying them, I asked a retail worker if they know whether they're coming back; he didn't know and without me asking got the store manager who told me no. I thanked both of them and continued my normal grocery buying. At home I researched the product, found the actual producer, found out they produced on demand of large chain stores and figured they're probably no longer in an agreement with the chain store and I didn't see myself as the person calling for hours just to get a very likely, but slightly more detailed no.
I don't see how people can't understand how retail economics work. Retail either has it and it will come back sooner or later or they don't and at no point is the individual retail worker responsible for that.
I don't see how people can't understand how retail economics work.
Look, I drove to the store to buy a thing. If you don't have the thing, that means I wasted my time. But since that situation means I am to blame for my own bad feelings, such is obviously impossible since I am a perfect and flawless being.
The only logical conclusions are that either you are incompetent, or that you hate me.
People also wildly overestimate what a normal retail worker has influence over. One time we were out of a particular new model of camera because an airport in Malaysia got attacked and all the shipping got delayed, and someone asked me what I was going to do about it. Well I was actually heading out to Malaysia this weekend to sort it out personally lol.
Most retail workers wouldn't even go that far if they got paid well with expenses.
The last place I worked retail was using an inventory tracking program in command prompt that polled and updated once per day at closing. You could sell through standing inventory and the system would still show how many you had started the day with. If you really had to know how many of something you had on hand, it required either polling each register's sales data individually or temporarily closing them to fake daily closure to run a report on a SKU. It was not unheard of to waste an hour checking to see if the store or any others nearby had a single item for a single customer at a national chain.
Can you check the back?
Are there any sales today?
I shop here all the time!
Is there a senior citizen discount?
Well _____ has it cheaper!
THERE'S NO PRICE TAG ON THIS SO IT MUST BE FREE RIGHT HAR HAR HAR
I always ask "I presume you only have what's on display but in case I'm wrong, do you have any other stuff"? (Mostly when I'm buying new shoes or a shirt, that's pretty hard to find in my size). If they say they don't, they don't. Why would they lie to me, their purpose in the shop is to sell stuff.
If the store has a price matching policy the last one is fair. I have started to see some electronic goods stores have online pricetags that checks price matching websites and lowers prices to match... Not sure how well that works
I feel like this would've been a great opportunity to specify what the customer was looking for. You know, so the employee can actually speak to him.
