One of the “Special” customers came in today. Holding an ad in his hand looking at it, then looking at our computers, then back at the ad. Finally he come walking over to ask me a question. It started off fair enough. He asks, “Do you have this computer on ad here?”, pointing to the HP Laptop on ad this week. I tell him that we don’t have that one here in the store (we sold out of most of our laptops in the last week due to us getting a whole new line of them on the 8th). So he ask if I can “Look it up on the computer to see what other Wal-Marts have it in stock”, I tell him that there isn’t a way for me to do that right now, but I will be glad to call another and ask if they have one.
He then looks at me and laughingly says, “So you are the only Wal-Mart that can’t look it up?”, he stares directly at me still. The phone now starts ringing right in front of me, I look down and notice that the managers office is calling me. I ask the customer again, if he would like me to call another Wal-Mart. He then turns away and looks off in the distance, so I take that as a “no” and answer the phone in front of me.
As I answer the phone I see the customer walk away, muttering to himself. I could make out, “Damn Wal-Mart, great customer service!” He walks off to go look at some DVD players and into the sunset.
Why the hell does he think we have some magical computer that can see what all other stores have in stock? We have two choices when looking up items, one we can use the website and check if it is sold in stores (doesn’t work all the time). Two, we use our hand-held device and scroll through each and every store for that item (which also doesn’t work all the time).
The easiest and most accurate way to look these items up is to call the store. Most of the time the customer likes that method due to the fact we can ask the store to hold their requested item till they arrive. We get people in the store that are sent from other stores that say we have their electronic; only to find out we don’t.
This is because most of the time these lazy employees look it up on the handheld and see we have 1 item left and then tell the customer to head on over because we have one. When the customer finds out that we did have one, this morning, they are pissed beyond belief. As they should be, I would be too.
So next time, NO, I will not look up that on our “computer”.
