[quote name='TedwardRoberts']Firstly, online inventory systems are always slow to update. In-store inventory systems often take an hour to two hours to post an adjustment from POS to the back-end, and then this needs to propagate to whatever server hosts that data to the web. Obviously, with a thousand or more stores, and 10,000+ SKUs, it would be very difficult to keep all that updated constantly, and not worth it.
Secondly, why didn't you call ahead to the store to confirm stock? If that's too difficult for you, have the employee do it.
Third, most retail stores have an inventory team that counts stock in the store, and does a sector of the store each day. Maybe once a week every item is counted. At this time, negative on-hands are usually reported, adjusted, and investigated. It's generally possible for a manager to make this adjustment at the moment the product is known missing, but this may not happen for a variety of reasons, and is usually not considered high priority for small adjustments.
This brings me to my final point: store inventory levels are not supposed to ever be customer-facing. That is, the biggest mistake here was that an employee told you the actual on-hand according to the system, and then that another told you that it was incorrect. They are not supposed to do this for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is that those numbers cannot ever be guaranteed without a physical check for the product, because of all the delays in updating the inventory, along with the inability to account instantly for shrink via theft.
I'm not saying there isn't a problem here and that those employees are 100% without issue, but you seem like you're really looking to be upset, no offense. Just keep in mind that all those employees that tried to help you will be penalized if you complain to corporate all in the name of a "reward"...and they may not even be responsible directly. Please just call ahead to confirm stock in the future. It doesn't take a long time.
Now that I step off of my soap box, I just wanted to let anybody in the DFW area that's looking for a Witcher 2 know that, as of about 2 pm today, the Best Buy in Weatherford had about 3 copies left on the shelf when I left.[/QUOTE]
If I have to call ahead to confirm stock, then the site becomes all but worthless anyway, for one thing. Particularly since, as I mentioned, there were supposedly 3 in stock, according to their system, and as the manager said, several people have come in asking about it and it has supposedly been a week or so since the first of those cases where people asked for it and they didn't have it. If they supposedly had one left, and they just discovered today that they didn't have it, I would be annoyed, but that happens. Like what happened at the first place. But when your own system shows that you have multiple ones (and at time of writing it still shows online as available there), and it has been wrong for at least a week, that is unacceptable.
And if they can't do their jobs properly, they deserve to be "penalized". If I made the same mistake several times over the course of the week in my job, with several clients, and still never corrected the problem, I sure would be. So why shouldn't they? (and incidentally, the only name I took down was the manager's...if he wants to sell his employees down the river to cover his ass, sucks for them but that wouldn't be my doing)
Yes, in retrospect, calling ahead *may* have found this out...but it really shouldn't be required when the company's in-store system (which I supposedly shouldn't have seen) says it's there, and chances are if I called the person would have checked the system, seen that it's "there" and said yes.
Don't try to make this my fault. They failed at correcting their inventory on an item several customers specifically asked about. To me, once you find out you're wrong and it has inconvenienced the customer, you make sure to get that correction into the next inventory update so it doesn't happen to another (or in this case, several more).
