Order Me This, Please!

What I can't stand is when a customer wants us to order something, and then when we do finally get the item in, they disappear and never come back and we are now stuck with that item.

And it's usually an item that will NEVER sell.

Most of the time it's some off-the-wall brand of expensive cigarette that only men in their 70s still smoke. It's usually "Order me 3 cartons a week! I'll be in to buy them!" Against my better judgement, I order them, and that's when the customer suddenly decides to stop smoking. Or dies. Or just disappears, never to be heard from again.

And the obvious solution would be to return the cigarettes to the place we ordered it from, but they don't take returns on cigarettes just because a customer didn't want them anymore.

So then those cigarettes sit there. And no matter how hard we try to sell them to customers, no one wants them because usually they are $10 a pack or some insane amount. And as they sit there, they go stale. And we end up having to get rid of them because after 5 years of sitting on the shelves, they would probably turn to dust if someone squeeze the pack.

So this is why I don't order items when customers say they want us to carry something. And now, when someone wants a strange pack of cigarettes, I usually make them prepay for the carton now.