Good grief. I'm not a super database genius webguru, but it seems like a big giant company like Sears should have some simple inventory control on their website. On Overstock.com I can see exactly how many of an item are left..

Didn't their website go down on black friday? I doubt with their declining sales they were prepared to have a high demand on anything they sell.

Sounds though like the BBB is going to be contacted regarding this. If you guys already paid for, have been charged for, and are waiting for this television, sounds like a breach of contract and bait and switch like mentioned.

This should be good...

It wasn't much better in the stores. I woke up at 4:00am to wait in line at the local Sears. I purchased the same 46" Sharp Aquos TV.

When I arrived at the merchandise pickup area, I was told that there were none left. I then had to wait in line again to speak to an associate who then tried to sell me the 52" Aquos at more than twice the price. Finally, they said that I could get store credit and it took me nearly 15 minutes of arguing to get a refund to my credit card.

Ouch, service is going downhill. How difficult is to track your inventory? Company should not be selling a product that they don't have in stock.

Sears is the worst, well second to worst, we still have wallmart to consider.
Wait, I take that back. Sears you win the first annual "Crappier Than Walmart Award."
Congrats.

@socalrob: I think you've got a good point. This is the difference between a living company and a dying one:

A living company, having suffered an extreme decline in sales, runs repeated load-tests and ensures adequate supplies of stock for the Black Friday sale in order to take full advantage of the hype. They plan optimistically and push hard to establish great customer service and great deals, on the one shopping day of the year where they're guaranteed to pull in at least some interested customers. Because of their good performance, they redeem their brand image in the eyes of at least some consumers.

A dying company, in the same situation, fails to take such precautions -- out of pessimism, technical ignorance, or plain old laziness -- and suffers even worse losses as a result. The consumers who came looking for deals went away angry, and told everyone they knew. The brand's deterioration accelerates after an event that could have acted as a shot in the arm.

Looks to me like Sears is dying...

A previous story a few entries down asks: What's Wrong With Sears (here: [consumerist.com]) and the one from yesterday, titled Why I'm Never Shopping At Sears Again ([consumerist.com]) is a veritable laundry list of Sears horror stories...
I just have to ask: does anyone think Sears is listening?
If they listen, do they care enough to change things?

While not exactly a Black Friday purchase, I got online with Sears on Saturday morning and ordered a new stove, a fairly popular model that was #2 in Consumer Reports' ratings last year and #1 this year. It was on sale last weekend for $150 off, and then another 10% off that if I ordered before noon on Saturday.

The only glitch was that next day delivery was promised, then promise broken, and so delivery was rescheduled for Monday. I made plans to work at home on the delivery day, and I happened to check the order status late Sunday night again, only this time the delivery had been changed to Wednesday. I checked my email and there was nothing about the delivery date being pushed back again, but there was an email from Sears apologizing for not being able to do the next day delivery due to heavy volume, and they're sending a $50 gift card for the inconvenience.

On delivery day I worked at home and the stove showed up two hours prior to the confirmed delivery window. I gave the driver a good natured hard time about that, but I guess I shouldn't complain that something happened early, especially from Sears. At least he called before he came to make sure someone was actually here. He said if not he would have come back during the delivery window anyway.

I smell an email carpet bomb.

From two emails about an order for an item purchased on sale that they canceled and, well it's self explanatory:

First:

Unfortunately, with the exception of the Gift Card, we were unable to process the rest of your order, causing that part of the order to be cancelled.
We do appreciate your business, and would like the opportunity to arrange a new order for you. Please contact us at 1-800-349-4358 and one of our Online Care Associates will be happy to assist you in placing a new order. You may also replace your order at www.sears.com. If any price increases or sales have concluded since your first order was placed, simply reply to this e-mail with your new order number. We will adjust any prices to reconcile with your original order.

and the conclusion:
We apologize for the difficulties that you have experienced. Unfortunately, we can't give you the sale price for your order. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience.

What a waste of everyone's time!

First, it is only "bait and switch" or "breach of contract" when your CC/bank account has had the money withdrawn and send you a lesser product.

Secondly, most reputable online companies, will only take the payment out of your account when the item ships actually ships out. Not when you pay for it at your "checkout" page The OP never said if this happened. Not just a "checkout" page.

Finally, and most important. A $1000 46" tv. How many do you think that they have able to ship? I haven't seen the actual sake page, but it is safe to say quantities were limited.

If you wanted it that bad you would have gotten in line for it. But you would still have complained because they pulled all the products from in the store, just to fill online orders only.

On a smaller scale... BestBuy sold a bunch of the 14.99 games from the BF add on-line. Four days later the 'not in stock' emails started hitting my email box. I don't really care if I get them or not... but the funy thing is that I received a 'BBuy on-line ordering' survey this evening.

TRU and Amazon came through 100% - everything shipped!

@sven.kirk: I think the point was that they confirmed his order after checkout. If the products weren't available, they shouldn't have allowed him to check out. Furthermore, since he bought the items on THURSDAY, the 22nd, they should not have been available for people to walk out of the store with on FRIDAY, the 23rd. Put a "Sold" tag on that puppy, he already bought it.

One has to remember that Sears is owned by one of the original bait & switch companies....Kmart! You can't really expect service or even the prices advertised when the corporate owner runs out of it's own advertised specials 30 seconds after the print has dried on their advertising.

Who does Sears think they are?

This sounds more like K-mart than... oh wait...

@sven.kirk: If they confirm the order, and then are unreasonable late on the estimated delivery date, I would be mad. But then to offer a paltry 10% discount on another TV is absurd. Does sven.kirk work for Sears???

Best Buy does this stuff all the time. I ordered a laptop from them and they charged my credit card not once, but twice and then refused to fulfill the order taking over a week to credit the card. Meanwhile I was sitting with almost $4000 in charges on my card. Had I not realized what they had done, I could incurred a lot of overage fees or had my card declined at an inopportune time.
I tried the BBB and the AG for Minnesota (their home state) but neither was very interested. I just wish we had a Mark Spitzer here in WI looking out for consumers' rights...

i work in the back room at sears. i can tell you exactly what happened. we have orders to confirm EVERY online sale. doesn't matter if we have the item or not. it makes our store numbers look bad if we turn down a sale. what should of happened was the guys in the back tell the office that we sold something we don't have and their suppose to call you right then to work out a deal with you. aka up sale you. so what you got was par for the course, just delayed. this stuff happens ALL THE TIME at sears. luckily with sales the way they are it wont be a issue too much longer. of course it will be sad not getting paid to surf the net for 4 hours a night when the store is dead.

@headon: Really? At least with Wally you expect to be scraping the bottom of the barrel... with Sears I've come to just expect utter disappointement, so in my book they're below Wal-Mart. Though K-Mart occupies a special place below the realm of human beings... certainly Dante was channelling a blue-light special when he wrote the Inferno.

@b612markt: Funny, you can't on Best Buy. Or with accuracy with Wal-Mart. I could talk about some things going missing that were in inventory, but won't.

Bad show on sear's part.

but, i can't say i feel too much sympathy for this guy. So he has to wait for his 46" tv he got for somewhere around half off because he was too lazy to go out on friday? oh em gee i feel so soooorrrry for you.

In other news, Sears recently posted a 99% drop in profits. Could there be a connection?

@sven.kirk: No, bait-and-switch doesn't require that you take a customer's money for one product and give him another. It only requires that you offer a product for sale that you have no intention of selling, in order to encourage buyers to pay more money for something else. Since Sears didn't make sure that their website blocked orders for sold-out products, they effectively pulled a bait-and-switch scam even if they had no intention of doing so.

@endless: Maybe he would have gone to the store to get the TV if they hadn't processed his order and told him it was ready for delivery.

@b612markt: Sure it seems like they would have that. And yes, there is a system, and yes, there is a field that is populated with a number, and yes, that field is labeled as representing the quantity of items in stock, but you'd be mistaken if you believed that number had any relation to the actual number of items to be found within the store.

Of course, it'd be perfectly reasonable to expect a variance for small items, like loose Craftsman sockets. I'm telling you that there are significant variances on things like lawn tractors and big-screen televisions. During my time there, I learned that it was foolhardy to sell any item without first verifying its existence in person. Like good service? Like checking out quickly? Sucks to be you then. Either I send you to merchandise pickup with a good chance that you'll get there to be told your item isn't in stock, or I leave you, with a whole line behind you of customers standing behind you, to go for a five minute tour of the warehouse. Are you at the back of the line? I'm so sorry, I'm going to be making three of these trips before I sell you the copy of Free Willy you're holding.

Sears isn't all bad. They do have great return policies, and the store branded stuff is generally pretty good. Craftsman hand tools are great. There's a kid's clothing program that will replace clothes for free if the kid wears them out before they're outgrown. Land's End stuff is exchanged instantly in-store, with a permanent warranty, just like Craftsman. Sears does need to add an inventory maintenance role to their stores. Someone, possibly even a new department, needs to be tasked with regular inventory verification. Every other place I've worked at had an inventory system that was many times more reliable than Sears, but all of them also put more work into it.

I've been fairly anti-Sears since their credit card was outed as the most scam-like several years ago (things may have changed.) However, my wife's grandfather was a VP of Sears catalog sales and the whole family are die-hard Sears users.

Recently a gift (available exclusively through Sears' catalog division) was purchased for her Godson (aka our nephew.) Not only did it require 2+ hours on the phone (so far), but the gift was delivered to the wrong town, and the store that had it payed no attention to the package until they decided it was going to be sent back, promptly calling my sister-in-law, telling her what the package was, and saying that since she didn't come pick it up in the previous 10 days (no one was notified it was there), the package would be returned.

My wife is now an anti-Sears convert.

@LEGERDEMAIN: "great return policies"? When I tried to buy a vacuum there last year I was not impressed with their return policy. After going to two different stores to try to find a floor model with all the attachments (both of which were missing most of them), I decided to go ahead and buy one without trying them (all the attachments) after the sales clerk assured me I could return it, no problem. When she rang me up I noticed on the receipt that there would be a 15% restocking fee for returns, which of course she never mentioned. I canceled my purchase immediately and haven't been back.

I have some knowledge of Sears ecommerce abilities and as strange as it may sound, the website is NOT tied into inventory in any meaningful way. Sears has no idea what it has in stock in real time.

Sears = Kruger Industrial Smoothing

sears is the pits...falling like a streamlined brick....haven't been to sears in years...ain't gonna go either.....

wonder why my comment never appeared...is sears controlling this??????????????

@dialing_wand:
No, their credit card is still scammy and pretty aggressive. I bought a zero-interest washer & dryer there a year ago with a new Sears card. Once the interest-free period lapsed the rate went up to something over 25% -- and this was *before* all the interest rate hikes on cards. Also the late fee was something like $30+, and I noticed they kept shrinking the time between payments due -- all too easy to incur a late fee if you weren't right on top of the due date.

I spent reasonably within my means and paid it off early, but I can see where Sears is making money -- poor people buying appliances they can't afford, financing these purchases, and taking too long to pay off or paying "late." All those extra fees and charges represent a nice tidy profit, I'm sure (unless you end up having to send stuff to collection).

Although to be fair, washer and dryer are fine so far, and we had no issues with delivery/setup.

@The Bigger Unit: I smell an email carpet bomb.

I love the smell of EECBs in the morning! Smells like...consumerism!

I blame Tim Taylor and his hardon for Sears.

If they charged your CC and didn't deliver the TV you can probably take them to court over the difference in their price and purchasing elsewhere. Once money changes hands its a contract....

Their primary concern is profit...

And look how badly they do with that! Imagine how their secondary concerns go :-)

I really hate it when people who don't know the law just shout out "breach of contract" when it isn't even applicable.

I am absolutely not a lawyer, but there are just so many misconceptions of the law it is painful. What you could possibly do is sue them on a reliance claim based on the promise, but that is it...and even then you would have to prove foreseeable damages.

How about simply asking them to take the charge off your credit card, and failing that, disputing it in writing with your credit card company (i.e., "I didn't receive what I paid for")? It would solve your problem and, in the event they won't remove the charge, set up a claim under the Fair Credit Billing Act.

I am a plaintiff's lawyer (consumer class actions, securities, antitrust), so this should mean something when I say it: sure, you could cook up a lawsuit here, but is it worth the hassle? Unless you represent yourself in small claims court, a year from now you'll still be fighting over a T.V. when you could have freed yourself from the stress a mere days after it occurred.

I am an agressive advocate of keeping corporate America in line, and I see class actions and consumer suits as a sharp whip to do so, but there are some problems are best resolved without a court battle. If this was me, I'd get my money back and be done with it.

Sorry, this is just whiny BS. You ordered (NOT "bought"!) an attractive item that was on major sale, and they ended up getting more orders than they could fill. You have exactly two choices: wait longer until the item is in stock, or cancel the order. Sometimes, when an order is unfillable for too long, or the item gets discontinued, the vendor cancels the order.

The only implicit contract between a customer and a seller is that you give them money, and they give you goods. If they don't take your money, they have no duty to give you goods -- of any sort.

Sears is offering you a discount because of the out of stock situation. That's GOOD customer service. Attempting to jump on this week's Sears hatefest with something this pathetic is just entitlement whoring. How on earth did Cist post this? Doesn't Ben vet these things? What does the "editor" title mean if there's no editing or reviewing going on?

In K-Mart wardrobe...
Baby, this is love!
Discount coupons floated from above!
Broiled chickens sang us
Love songs from a skewer
Have you ever been this close
To going down the sewer?

sears: novel idea for you here - track your inventory. on the receiving end, it lowers your overhead by reducing the number of items that "fall off the truck", & allows you to make sure you are receiving merchandise that your vendors are billing you for.

& when it comes to customer satisfaction, maintaining accurate inventory is a necessity. you are practically begging your customers to shop elsewhere. here's a few things you might want to consider if you want to be in business past 2015:
1) tie your entire supply chain together. in this age, it's not only possible - all your competitors are doing it.
2) items that are in low quantity at the warehouse level should not be available online. similarly, as you reach the tail end of an item's supply contract, force the quantities out to the store-level.
3) special deals (like the one we read here), should be offered "in store only & while supplies last".

this isn't even high level SCM stuff here. you learn this in like 1st-year business logistics.

I say good riddance to the dying company. 12 years ago, when I worked there, if you bought something that we said was in stock and the dock-boys and sales person (me) couldn't find it, I'd give you an equal-or-better model for the same price.

Granted, that was in the days of the 'Softer Side' of Sears took off, the company recovered from bankruptcy and was expanding. The days when the sales people wore suit and ties, were on commission so they cared about making the customer happy, because if you returned a $1K TV on me, that meant not only did I lose the commission, but that I was $1K in the hole.

Ever since they bought Lands End and K-Mart took over, they've been out of touch with their customers. They don't even know who they are. Someone should go place lilies on the doors and play a funeral derge.

Personally I think Ian is blowing things out of proportion. Sure Sears may have bad inventory control, but this is NOT bait and switch, but most stores online have inventory problems and even inventory is correct, items could've been misplaced or missing.

A store has every right to notify the user that item is not in stock and provide him options. If the item won't be stocked back any time soon, they really have no choice but to cancel the order. It was a courtesy to provide Ian with a 10% discount.

Ian should also have had the option to wait and it appears he's just one impatient fellow who doesn't want to and wants a good deal NOW.

@sven.kirk: this is exactly how I fee too.

@stopNgoBeau: You haven't shopped online much huh? Online inventory problems happen all the time.

@sauceistheboss: as noted above, the 10% coupon is actually a courtesy, they really have no obligation to offer Ian anything.

@CumaeanSibyl: As noted on Wikipedia's Bait and switch -

Likewise, advertising a sale while intending to stock a limited amount of, and thereby sell out, the loss-leading item advertised is legal in the United States. The purveyor can escape liability if they make clear in their advertisements that quantities of items for which a sale is offered are limited.

Therefore if Sears can prove they did in fact ship out a limited quantity of the TVs which I bleieve they can, this is legal and NOT bait and switch

Sears is no longer just Sears. Sears is just one company in a portfolio of companies including K-mart that are owned by the same person.

the only thing connecting them all is that they are Dying Companies.

one other thing...the sad thing is that Sears used to be REALLY great. now it just blends in with the rest of the turds that dont give a crap about their customers.

@missjulied: As far as I know, that must be new. When I started, they were charging no restocking fees across the board, or nearly across the board. The return period was "a reasonable amount of time" which meant it was wise to involve a manager if it was over about four months from the date of purchase on most items.
Eventually, they decided to crack down. Even then, the new policy was 90 days on nearly everything, again with no (or almost no) restocking fees. That's longer than most retailers I'm aware of. The only customer issues arose when customers reached 91 days. Sears had a strong policy, but it was brought with an iron fist. Exceptions to the 90 day rule were very rare.

I'm generally against restocking fees. I think they're reasonable on custom items, possibly on items prone to "rental". For example, refunds on generators and chainsaws in the New Orleans area were suspended or limited after Hurricane Katrina. Nearly all retailers were doing this to avoid selling what would normally be five years of generators, then taking back four years worth of used generators to sell at reduced price. Exchange and warranty privileges were unaffected, of course.

Online inventory values are not reliable.

Why?

As an example, while I am writing this post, there were 0 comments. Yet, when I complete my typing and submit my comment, so will have 39 of my best friends. This means that I may think I am the 1st poster, but in fact I am the 33rd.

Get the idea?

Online inventory values suffer from the same problems. SearsMark might have 4 or 4000 TV's at the start of your transaction, and by time you complete the transaction, all of those TV's might have been sold to other customers buying at the same time as yourself.

Secondly, completing a transaction online is not a "contract" or even a "purchase". Online transactions are buffered from various tasks to prevent timeout issues with servers. Large vendors may batch transactions with their merchant bank inorder to save processing costs. Thus your transaction may be "completed" according to the website, but the actual credit card transaction may be several seconds or even minutes or hours later.

In addition, most online companies complete a credit card transaction, THEN pull and process your order. Streamline operations are necessary to keep prices low, so few if any online companies will complete the credit card transaction after pulling and processing the order.

Given the method of processing orders, errors in inventory management, discovery of damage units thought to be valid complete inventory units, discovery of stolen units or prior picking errors, there is always a chance for a vendor to discover that they are suddenly sold out. This problem is compounded by vendors that have several servers will multiple streams of customers orders as well as businesses that draw online inventory from their showroom selling units.

When it is a life or death item, or going to be the hottest item since sliced white bread, it is best to ignore any online inventory values.