I am not sure if it is just me or if these types of things are just happening more and more. It seems that over the last two years I have ran into more and more incompetence from retailers than in my life. Maybe I am just becoming a little more intolerant or maybe corporations are just plain getting more stupid. I am going to give two examples from just this week. The second example will be one that I think could baffle anyone.
The first comes from the burger chain that declares that you can have it your way. Over the last 6 months I have stopped at one of their outlets about once a month. Out of these 6 stops my order was only correct once. Most of the time I was traveling however this week I stopped at one in my home town. After arriving home I found the order was incorrect not just in one way but several ways. As I was not in the mood to let this one pass I called and gave them the litany of ways in which the order was wrong. To their credit they took my name and indicated they would replace the meal whenever we wanted to stop back in. A few days later we decided to redeam their offer by stopping in on a day that was very busy for us. We walked to the counter, gave our name, and they indicated they would replace the order then. All well and good right? Well not exactly. We retrieved our meal and sat down only to find the replacement meal also had several things wrong with it. So if you look at it statistically, the chain was now batting at a 14% average of getting our orders right. They also had to replace a meal for free.
The second totally stupid thing that happened this week was from the chain store who's slogan indicates "Save Money Live Better". We had ordered a Christmas present for our grandson which was a battery operated tractor for small children to ride. As we live in the north our son-in-law decided not to put it together until the weather became more suited for our grandson to ride it outside. This week was unusually warm here so he put it together and found it was missing the battery charger. We contacted the store where it was ordered who put us in contact with the national customer service department. After a few calls their solution was to ship an entire tractor to us, asked us to remove the battery charger from the box, then return the entire tractor minus the charger to them. You should know that this is a 75 pound box that would take up quite a bit of space even in a UPS truck. Agan, we are appreciative of obtaining the charger so we can see our grandson smile as he rides his tractor, but really.
My point here is both these corporations are making money. If we are a sampling of their customer base, as we should be for both companies, then their pricing is also taking into account their ineptitude in order to still make a profit. If you really think about the issues that we have with retailers, and they can still make a profit, then how much could we save if they got their act together? These are just two examples of the idiocy I could document over the last couple of years and I am getting a little tired of paying for their incompetence. This is not to be a rant but more of comment on how much we pay as consumers for stupidity. I would like to see a label on all products that broke down the retailers cost similar to the ingredients on food packaging. What percent are we paying for components, shipping, labor, SGA, etc. with stupidity having it's own line item in the cost breakdown.
T1Truth
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