What's Up?

Well, things continue to go downhill at the Call Center. We've been told that we really should not be calling the retail stores to look for any of the items we're out of.

I do understand. For one thing, we have between 40 and 90 agents on the phone at a time - the stores can't handle all those calls from us AND be helping the people who are there in the store, too.

Second, our retail inventory computer search isn't live (yeah, I know, I don't know why either) so it's likely that even if the system thinks the store has it, they've sold out of it, too. Also, corporate is transferring things from the retail system to the catalog system as fast as they can, and that's not reflected in the search system, either.

I've been telling my callers to make a note on their calendar to order these things by next Halloween. I've been saying this since 2000. Do you think that I might be contributing to the problem?

And, yes, Hoss, I suppose that I could buy a bunch of stuff and resell on Ebay. There are plenty who do it already. And we've had callers accuse us of doing just that. I suspect that there might be some of it, especially with employees that live near one of our outlets in particular. And corporate DOES keep an eye on Ebay.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

My Site Meter report came in today, and I checked to see where my "referrals" have been coming from. One caught my eye.