Sure. But it’s not the customer’s problem if they want to take part in such underhanded sales tactics.
What’s the scam?
If I asked a waiter “Do you have pickled haggis?”, they said they’d check with the kitchen, then brought out a heaping plate and plunked it in front of me, that would be wrong, in so many ways.
OK? Except that has nothing to do with what I was replying to. The quote I replied to asked “Can I have the lasagna?”
Do you really not see the difference between “Can I have” and “Do you have”??
Would you rather the waiter just say “Yes.” and stand there unmoving doing nothing whenever someone looks at a menu and asks “Can I have x item?” You think that would be good service and is what is expected?
The bit that gets me is that you give them your contact information. If I weren’t intending to order the jobber, that’s the point where I’d say, “Oh, no, if it’s not in stock, that’s okay.” I wouldn’t give them my info so they could call me once they had the answer to the question.
As always, if something like this becomes an issue, I see it mostly as a logistics puzzle. How can you make it not be an issue again? The easiest approach, IMO, would be either to decline to give your contact information, or to clarify at that point: “Yes, please call me once you find out if y’all can get it, but don’t place an order yet: I’m just pricing things out right now.”
Yeah I really don’t understand why you gave them your contact info or what you then expected them to do? Wouldn’t that be a pretty clear answer that no, the item was not available?
I already knew the item wasn’t in stock at the store. I was asking if it was something they would be able to get in stock (along with the price).
This was not an unreasonable question. I was looking for an expansion to a boardgame. It was printed in 2018. The usual practice for things like this is they do a print run and that’s the total supply for the item; only if an item is unusually successful are there additional print runs. The number of games that are available are the number that are sitting in some distributor’s warehouse. So a game store will contact distributors and ask who has an old copy still in stock.
But it’s not an immediate process in most cases. Especially because I was at the store on a Sunday afternoon when I assume some of the distributors were closed. I figured the store would send out some emails or texts on Monday and then get back to me with the information. So giving them my contact information was reasonable.
I plan on telling them this when I pick up the game this Sunday.
Well, not really. Your only real complaint is that the employee was not aware of the fact that you didn’t know the price of the item. If you had, ordering it immediately would be the obvious thing to do, as he knew that you knew that it wasn’t in stock. That was why he asked for, and you gave him, your contact information.
Not sure what you’re saying here. Ordering it immediately wasn’t a possibility. The product might not have been available.
Trying to get money I did not in fact owe out of me by claiming I had committed to a purchase when I had not.
Not you ordering it immediately - the store ordering it from the distributor immediately. Rather than finding out it was available, contacting you and waiting to hear back from you only to have it no longer be available when they get back to the distributor. It sounds like it’s possible the distributor might have only a single copy which could have been sold in the time between phone calls.
Although I’m still a little surprised they did this without asking for a deposit unless they are certain they can sell it if you didn’t want it.
This has happened twice to Mrs. Cheesesteak. Once was at the local movie rental, she asked about a particular DVD and they indicated that they would “get it”, but she didn’t realize they were intending to add it to HER inventory, not their inventory. I think this was an honest mistake.
The second was with a paper supply company, we had wanted a special kind of synthetic paper and the guy didn’t carry it. Come back a month later and he’s “I bought a bunch of it for you, make an order please.” I think this was just a way to pressure us into making a purchase.
“I called last week to ask if you had it in stock at the time and have made other arrangements in the meantime. I’m sorry if there was a misunderstanding.”
I can see the possibility for misinterpretation when you say ‘Is this product available?’ and they think you mean ‘Is this product in stock? I want to buy it.’
Maybe you could say ‘I’m interested in product X - please tell me about it.’
That sounds a bit strange to me.
‘Are you ready to order?’
‘Do you serve lasagna?’
‘Yes, I’ll bring you some.’
‘Oh, I don’t want any … I was just curious.’
Given the OP’s subsequent explanations about game expansion print runs, distributors, etc. …
Ultimately, the product is only available to the OP if the store can get it from the distributor. And them calling to ask is not definitive. They call, the distributor says “yes”, they call the OP to tell him, who gets back to them 3 days later wanting to order it, then they contact the distributor and the last one was shipped to somebody else yesterday.
All because the term “available” means different things at the level of the OP, the store, and the distributor. A charitable interpretation of the salesperson’s thinking is that the product is only available to the buyer after there’s a copy here on the shelf at his store. So ordering it is the only way to be sure.
Maybe I’m a conceited ass, but I always assume almost nobody in a chain of businesses can communicate completely and accurately. So it’s up to me to eliminate all the ambiguity for all of them, since I assume they can’t possibly do it themselves.
“Is it possible for you to order this [whatever] for me? Is there stock available right now at your distributor?” Etc. Don’t answer any further quedtions of theirs until you asked them to explain why they want the info and how they’re going to use it, and you agree that their plan is what you want done.
When the salesperson asked for the OP’s contact info if he had said “Why do you need that to check stock?” he would probably have gotten a response like “So I can order the [whatever] for you.” At which point the OP would have at least the opportunity to recognize that he was asking for a stock-check and the salesperson was trying to place an order.
Defensive retail thinking is like defensive driving but harder. You have to assume everyone around you is trying to screw up your transaction. Not through malice, but through sloth, ignorance, & sloppiness. Plus just maybe a little bit of sales-pushing.
Just to be clear, this isn’t true. A lot of the companies that distribute products to stores also have their own online retail operations. I have seen two online stores on Amazon that have a few copies of this game available. I prefer to support a local small business but if I hadn’t been able to buy a copy from them, I would have ordered it online.
Almost all scams can be avoided by reasonable-sounding steps from the recipient. That doesn’t make them not scams. If the store here was trying to pressure buyers by confusing them about what they committed to, that’s a scam. A fairly mild one, on par with lots of other stuff that happens in sales, but a scam nevertheless.
What pressure? If they say one word after ‘misunderstanding,’ as far as I’m concerned, it’s all “Lol, naw.” No one can really help another beyond that.
I’ve certainly done this before. I may have another dish in mind and am wondering if they have lasagna. Then I may ask what kind it is. Then I may decide whether I want that or the other dish I had in mind. Not weird at all to me. Usually, it’s asked before the “are you ready to order stage,” but not always, and that doesn’t fit as analogous to the OP’s situation, anyway.