A Cents-less Complaint

(At our store, when the chain stops carrying an item but we still have some in stock for a long time afterward, the price of the item is adjusted to one cent before the inventory manager actually goes around to collect the items and destroy them. We have one customer who must either spend all his time on our website looking for these things or he has some program set up to do it for him, because he orders almost every single one of them for in-store pickup before we can actually dispose of them. Furthermore, one-cent items are all he ever buys. He has probably bought hundreds of things over several years, and in that entire time, he has only paid the store a few dollars. Today, he gets mad at us because we can’t find some batteries he ordered. We have offered him some other, equivalent batteries at half-price to make up for it. This conversation is between him and one of the managers.)

Customer: “It’s not right! I ordered four cents’ worth of batteries and your worker tried to make me spend ten dollars, instead!”

Manager: “Mhmm. She assumed you actually needed the batteries and tried to find the least expensive substitute for you.”

Customer: “She’s trying to rob me for her own commission! Your customer service here just keeps getting worse. Give these to me for the same price as the ones I ordered.”

Manager: “We can’t do that, since that is less than we paid for them. We would be losing money.”

Customer: “Well, I’m just going to take my business to [Online Retailer] from now on!”

Manager: “Go for it. Good luck finding one-cent items there.”