CUSTOMER
WHAT?
I think
I’ve discovered why we have a 39 cent dollar.
On the weekend, I tried to buy a pre-formed waterfall for my garden. It comes
in two pieces and costs around $600. The Garden Centre which had it on display
in their specialist water section didn’t have any in stock. It’s not that they
had run out, you understand. They just don’t stock them. I guess they haven’t
discovered Brooks Rule of Retailing: You can’t sell what you don’t have. Anyway,
they didn’t have any in stock so I ordered one. Then I was told it would take
two weeks to get one in. I explained that I wasn’t happy with that. “If you
can’t get one by next weekend, I’m not interested,” I told them.
The next day, which was a public holiday, I got a phone call from the department
manager. She told me they couldn’t contact the company until the next day but
I almost certainly wouldn’t be able to get one by the weekend. It seems the
manufacturer doesn’t stock them either and -this is the good bit - his just-in-time
manufacturing process takes 2 weeks! Of course, I wasn’t happy about that and
I asked her to put some pressure on the manufacturer. “I can’t do that,” she
said. “If I try to pressure him he gets cranky.”
It seems that the garden centre orders about 120 of these units each year at
a wholesale cost of around $400 per unit. Thus they probably contribute approximately
$48,000 to the manufacturer’s revenue stream from this one product alone. But
instead of valuing the business, this manufacturer gets cranky if his customer
makes demands. Good Customer service!
The most amazing thing is that the garden centre tolerates this. In fact, they
go further than that, they advocate their supplier’s case to their customer
rather than advocating their customer’s case to their supplier. What’s wrong
with this picture?
A couple of days later I was talking to the garden centre manager again. The
best she could do was get my order filled within 8 days. She had, at my suggestion,
raised the issue with the manufacturer. He had told her that he had lots of
work on the books and his business was doing very nicely, thank you, so he
didn’t see the need to change what he was doing. In his view, he didn’t want
to alter the way he ran his business and her customers would just have to wait.
Like I said, I think I have discovered why we have a 39 cent dollar.
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