Out of Luck

A few nights ago I went online to purchase a Christmas gift for a member of my family. It was still more than a week before the big day, and I’ve never had a problem with paying for 2-day shipping when I need something in a hurry, so I wasn’t expecting any trouble. Unfortunately, the e-commerce site I was dealing with did not have the “in-stock” indicator on its web pages – and items like the one I was buying can take 30 to 40 days to get in from the factory. With deep misgivings, I filled in my card information and clicked on the purchase button. Sure enough, when I got up the next morning there was an email waiting to me that my purchase was out of stock and would arrive by February or so…

I’m not going to provide a link to the site for obvious reasons, and I’m also not going to name it, since I’m not really into litigation. If anyone really wants to know you can drop me a line in the comments and I’ll reply by private email. This is not to downplay my irritation, however. It’s hard to say which part of this is worse; the fact that they’re violating the First Law of Business by not selling me the thing I want, or the way they’re violating the Second Law by annoying me. Regardless of which, I’m now faced with finding a replacement gift before December 25, and with the fact that I’m apparently not nearly as clever as I thought I was…

Now, to be sure, it’s not entirely the seller’s fault. I should probably have placed my order weeks ago, and if I really wanted to be sure of getting mail-order merchandise (which is all e-commerce is, really; except the ordering part is faster) in time for Christmas, August would have been better. And no one is disputing the fact that keeping unusual (and expensive) merchandise in inventory at all times is bad for business. But in this case, the company could easily have avoided the bad feeling (and the Second Law violation) by just having an “in stock/out of stock” indicator on the page…

You might object to this conclusion by noting that no one will “buy” something that is listed as “out of stock,” whereas they might be willing to wait for it rather than going to the trouble of more shopping during the Christmas rush. Which is certainly possible, given that at least half of the population would actually rather chew off their own foot than go to a shopping mall during this time of the year. But even if we accept this logic, it still does not account for the massive amounts of bad public relations (and bad customer relations) created by this sort of management practice. I’m not going to wait until February for a Christmas present; I’m not even going to wait until next week. I’m going to the competition right now, and I will probably tell more than the industry-standard assumption of 26 other potential customers about how this vendor was going to make me wait until Valentine’s Day (or possibly St. Patrick’s Day) to get my merchandise. In fact, I’m probably going to find 26 people in the real world in addition to whoever is reading this post (assuming I have readers)…

All of which leads me to conclude that I’m not the one who is out of luck, here…