Retail DIS-Service
by Miki SaxonI am a frequent Home Depot shopper, other than during the Nardelli regime, mainly because my Amex points a good conversion rate to dollars for HD gift cards.
Now it seems I only have to deal with corporate purchasing stupidity.
Let me explain.
I live in Washington State, just across the Columbia River about 20 minutes from Portland, Oregon, an area known locally for it’s dozens of micro-climates, multiple rivers and fast elevation changes.
This means that when it’s cold and rainy by me, it’s probably cold and snowy at my friend’s who lives about 15 minutes and 800 feet away.
But in general, we don’t get a lot of freezing weather — but we do get it.
A couple of weeks ago the entire area got walloped with the worst storm in 16 years and it stayed cold, with temperatures in the 20s.
So I wasn’t surprised when I finally got to HD to buy ice melt they were sold out.
However, I was flabbergasted when I went back this week and was told that they wouldn’t have more until October.
A very chagrined manager explained that they had sold out their year’s allotment and had no way of ordering more.
When pushed, he said that central purchasing decided how much of a given product would sell annually and if a store sold out tough luck.
So, based on the weather forecast, it was back to Lowe’s, where I shopped when Nardelli was in power.
Retail DIS-service; better know as retail stupidity.
Image credit: Mike Mozart