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One time I was at a grocery store and they sold out of a particular drink I liked.
A manager was standing nearby and I asked when they would restock it.
"Never." He said. "It always sells out and I don't want to constantly order and restock it, so I'm not going to get more."
Reminds me of the story of the warehouseman who refused to give someone the last of an item in the warehouse because that would mean they'd be out of stock.
Ah. There's a reasons for that, as told to me by a supply sergeant in the military. A lot of suppliers had a BEL (Basic Equipment List), which says all stock must have a minimum and a maximum of XYZ in order to meet government spec. Some large items, like diesel generators, have a BEL minimum of 2, but also because of their size and storage complexity, have a maximum of 2. So it order to get a new one, you must get rid of one of the old ones. But if you get rid of the old one, you are below minimum BEL, and could fail inspection or an inventory check, if it takes a while to get a new one. Large items don't always "hang around," but they get manufactured on demand, so the only way to get a new one is to be without one for a very long period of time. Thus, you risk failing inspection. The best way to avoid that is to keep two and never order any.
Military logic.
Reminds me of my buddy’s story from his time as a warehouse manager for Blockbuster (yeah, we’re old…) Blockbuster’s management did loss prevention and breakage based on item count, not item value. If a new hire shoved a $30 DVD down their pants and walked out with it every week, corporate wouldn’t care. After all, it was only 1 DVD each week. And 1 is an acceptably low number. But if that same hire shoved a $5 box of 100 pencils down their pants, corporate would lose their fucking minds. Because each pencil was counted as 1 item, so they were suddenly 100 items short.
It was sort of an open secret in the warehouse that if you were going to steal something, you should only go for the high value shit. And only do it if nobody else had already done so recently. So if the system said you had 5 in stock and there were 5 in the bin, it was open season. Because as long as you only stole one of them, corporate wouldn’t care. But if you pocketed a dozen 50¢ “impulse buy next to the register” toys, loss prevention would be patting people down as they clocked out.
On top of that, everything is ordered by article number. So it happened on a boat that they needed two replacement bolts for the engine. The engineer wrote the order, and the captain signed it and sent it to HQ.
They were informed the order would take (a long time). When they finally got the word that the order was in, they were astonished that two heavy load trucks were waiting for them. Each containing a turbine nearly as big as their boat. Which had nearly the same inventory number as the bolts. With two digits switched.
E4 mafia could probably fix that and a few other issues.
While I get the joke, I feel obliged to point out that the military is one of the very few places this could potentially makes sense (not saying it does in this case): You can basically decide that the warehouse is responsible for holding emergency stock, not ordering materiel that is produced on-demand for daily use. Essentially, if it's produced on-demand, why would you want to go via to warehouse to get it? There are plenty of reasons you could want that of course, but if we ignore those, then the rationale can make sense.
I worked at a printing factory once, and we often needed to replace roller pins for paper, it's an enormous metal cylinders that, despite being couple of tons hunks of metal, were very prone to being harmed. They were in pairs and should've been changed in pairs so they wear out evenly. The problem is, in a warehouse, the item is "a pair of pins" but the task for a repair crew is "change a pin" which includes ordering a transportation. The problem is, if you're making a "change of a pin" you can only order a "transportation of a pin", but warehouse can only issue a "pair of pins", which transportation can't move. The corpo spent weeks trying to solve this conundrum, until the machine broke completely (a roller pin snapped if you can imagine that). After spending the entire year's revenue on fixing it all, they fired a bunch of people for following their corporate rules too precisely.
that's just cheating the system to achieve some metric
What gets measured gets done. For good or ill.
I asked about a certain type of cake that was on sale and wasn't in stock. I asked when it would be in stock. The manager launched into a big complaint, because they always sold out when it was on sale. See, he only ever ordered 10, because they never sold more than 10, and when it was on sale, they would sell out immediately.
He got very upset, calling me stupid when I said "If you only have 10, it would be pretty hard to sell more than 10".
I worked in retail for a while, and it was staggering to uncover that the majority of people with the control over inventory thought the same way.
Have you ever considered ordering 10 or 20 to see if they sell out in 4 to 8 days or less? Maybe then order 40 or 60?
Funnily it's the same people that also insist on having 6 weeks worth of stock, even if the supplier delivers in 7 days 95% of the time.
seems like a funny joke tbh
Which would have been funny. They didn't ever restock the drink, though.
Sounds like the shopkeeper was more interested in resting than infinite profits & money.
Nobody goes there. It's too crowded
That's what happens when the profits of a company do not benefit its employees.
That's how Dylan Moran runs his bookstore in Black Books.
Paraquoting off the top of my head: "Customers?? Who wanted to buy something???? What the hell do you treat them nicely for?!" ... "You don't get it; Paying customers who get what they want means books get sold. Which means you have to restock them and deal with additional customers!"