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Trenches comic: Tuesday February 28, 2012 - Mr. Toots!
Bogey
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
I'm back, baby!Santa Monica, CAModerator Mod Emeritus
Poor Planning on Your Part…
02/28/2012 - Anonymous
When the Playstation 3 was about to be released, the game retailer I worked for began ramping up its customer service training classes so that we, the phone warriors, would be better equipped to handle the influx of calls for orders. For weeks on end, we would attend the classes in the hopes that we would be able to deal with practically anything.
The night before the release, we had a “briefing” in the call center. Our bosses told us that we were going to be expecting a “reasonably high” call volume and that we were to be on our toes for the remainder of the day. The PS3 would go online at nine o’clock in the morning and we would be steady all day. They were fairly certain that we were
going to be all right.
“You’re aware that this system is highly sought after,” I said to my supervisor in a sidebar. “We’re going to be crushed.”
“We’ll be fine,” he assured me. “There’s more than enough units in the warehouse to cover.”
Everyone was under the impression that we were ready. We weren’t…
As soon as the PS3 went online, the call center exploded. Our entire inventory, however many thousands of units it was, was gone in approximately 45 seconds. For the next four hours, we fielded nothing but calls with the same theme: “I had it in my cart and now it’s gone!”
The call queue was in the hundreds. We couldn’t field them all. After four hours, we shut the queue and the call center down. When the dust settled, five managers lost their jobs, as well as several phone warriors. I was among them.
No one in the marketing department had been following the trends online. We weren’t even close to prepared.
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Why not put up a message on the site? "Sorry, this product is out of stock!" seems like it would do the job?
Unless it was just to placate people pissed off at losing out?
It sounds like they were so blindsighted by their stock going so fast the rest of the day was spent trying to put out fires, which ultimately failed.
Yeah, the impression I got was that all those angry people are people who tried placing their order in that first minute.
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Yeah, kind of weird. It's a good story though so I won't complain
The ironic part of the story is, give it about a month and the exact opposite situation was probably true
Five managers losing their jobs makes me feel better.
The shocking part of the story for me was that they thought it'd be enough. The more traditional Tale would have management knowing the team was not up to the task, telling them to be stalwart, and then firing them anyway. Considering the fact that they sold everything they had in 45 seconds, they didn't even need to prepare as much as they did.
Why not? A little Schadenfreude is OK now and again. Particularly when bad things usually happen because management screwed up, but it's so rare that they are the ones that get left holding the bag.
I'm sure their families can appreciate the schadenfreude you derive from their misfortune.
A. Doesn't track inventory real time, including taking into account what's in peoples carts (for less than a day).
B. Let's a customer put something in their cart that's out of stock without warning them.
C. Removes something from a customers cart for any reason. You can put a big red flag on it saying it's out of stock or on back order or whatever, and don't let them take it to the invoice screen, but make them remove it. It's their cart, they need to feel in control of it.
It sucks that bad design and management gets customer support curb stomped.
Hmm. I suppose it would be better if they were allowed to keep their jobs and eventually the whole company is run into the ground by their incompetence before it is bought out and everyone is sacked. (The management will get golden parachutes of course, and the grunts will get nothing but the bird.) That's normally how it works.
Incompetence should not be coddled even if they do have a family to support. Maybe they will learn what government cheese tastes like in the welfare line. I certainly knew all about that when I was growing up.
Edit: Derp.
Yes, first couple days PS3s were sold out like crazy. I'd say a good chunk of this were people looking to re-sell the system on eBay (aka people who remember the PS2 and 360 launches).
I think the problem is that intial stock was really low and by the time Sony restocked stores (which was not long actually), demand was mostly gone. Which ultimately lead to this (which took me awhile to find because apparently PA's archive search function is broken -_-):
I'm also hard-pressed to believe the Wii scarcity was artificial. The demand for that thing was through the roof for the first year or so.
Fuck, I botched my symbols. Should have read "supply << demand".
I don't think there isn't anything they could have done to handle these volume of calls. I don't think hiring a bunch of temp workers just for this occasion would have been very beneficial either. - The most effective would have been damage control like an automated message "PS3 - Sorry, we are out of stock" or a message on the webpage. And guess what, a lot of potential cutomers would still have called.
What? No. Schaden = damage, fraude = joy. Meaning you derive joy from someone else getting damaged.
Literal translations don't always wholly encapsulate an idea. Consider the idea of trying to translate idiomatic phrases directly from one language to another, for example.
In this particular case, I don't see what's so hard to understand about people taking some consolation from the fact that at least it appears some of the those who were actually responsible for the disaster suffered consequences, instead of just the peons taking the fall (as seems to be the norm with these stories). This is a shitty, depressing story all around (it is Tales, after all), and nobody is suggesting that the managers getting pink slips along with the rank and file makes it a happy story. It just makes it slightly less depressing for some people.
But the idea is that you are pleased when something goes wrong for someone else, isn't it? Nothing about shame in the idea. Maybe by implication.
Or maybe the word schadenfraude has a subtly different meaning in English than in German (or in Norwegian, where we have a translation of the word from German).
Yeah, and deriving joy from someone getting damaged is something you should be ashamed of. Hence, schaudenfraude is a shameful thing, generally speaking.
Too Galactic for you.
"A PSVita in the hand is worthless without the $100 memory card in the bush," for example.