GIANT Tanks from B&Q for £50

[martin]

and there was me thinking it was yanks who didn't "get" irony, (or the lowest form of wit......)

[wookey]

Ah well, as you are always saying things like that, I foolishly assumed you actually meant it. It can be hard to tell on this 'ere internet.

[martin]

It's a problem of which I'm all too aware - we tend not to use the most precise language on a forum, and things can often be ambiguous -"smileys" can help redress the balance somewhat, but even then it's not perfect!

[northern installer]

this thread is rather a waste of resources isnt it? the way I see it is like this:
1, b&q advertise cheap tanks as a clearance excercise(maybe could have been clearer on the ad?)
2,more people than expected 'want' the previously unsaleable tanks(greed creeping in here perhaps?)
3,b&q run out of tanks(suprise suprise)
so far,so good........BUT............(butt?)
5,those not quick enough to get the bargain turn nasty
6, hours are spent cooking up quasi-legal plots to sue for recompense(recompense for what for gods sake?)
7,in a final,desperate act of misguided paranoia,the whiskey soaked pothead in charge of the forum consults his inner delusions,and suggests that those trying to put a lid on this insane thread are....wait for it....ASTROTURFERS !!   
well,I can assure you,mr hippy breeches,that my lawn has as much real grass as the next mans!
Can we please stop winging about the non delivery of items you didnt need at a price that wasnt sustainable from a supplier that didnt want to sell them to people who didnt have anywhere to instal them in the first place? 

[martin]

there's none so blind as those that don't actually read what's been written...
And just for the record, I've been teetotal for 29 years, and gave up smoking some 18 months ago; despite these privations, I do actually retain a sense of humour, and a tongue that does tend to end up in my cheek quite often...........

[northern installer]

anyone who feels they have been affected by this thread,and feel they require counselling,sympathy,a hand out,or a new life in van diemens land, please contact the moderators for a compensation award 

[RichardKB]

Now hold on min there smarty pants.
I actually NEED these bloody things.
We have NO mains water so saving every drop counts.
I bought TWO I actually could do with more but held back to give others a chance.

Justme

Well then I am sure you would be quite happy to buy them at the correct market price if you are unlucky enough not to get the discounted parts from B & Q.

Rich

[Justme]

Well then I am sure you would be quite happy to buy them at the correct market price if you are unlucky enough not to get the discounted parts from B & Q.

Rich

Not at the price they think they are worth. Something is only worth what some one else is prepared to pay. Thats why they had to discount them.

Much better options at more down to earth prices are available else where.

At the full price two would cost over £3k. For £4k I could have a borehole (well another one as I have one already lol).

Justme

[Richard Owen]

Perhaps B&Q might like to sign up to offer their view on the matters?

I'm sure it would be enlightening.

[sleepybubble]

This thread bothers me slightly... I have been trying to formulate my thoughts on it but  I can't really clarify what I want to say properly (usually!) so I guess I'll just wade in.

Whilst I can see all the feelings of resentment by folk who feel like they have missed out on a good deal, I have to wonder why it is they are so het up. You missed out, oh dear thats a pity, why don't you move on with your lives and let it go. I can't understand why you are wasteing so much effort and emotion on this. You have your money back.
Somebody who works for B&Q made a simple mistake, either they typed in a wrong stock quantity to the stock management system or they typed in a wrong discount value to the system. Imagine how that person felt when the realised they had made a mistake, proberbly mortified.
I'm sure if this faceless employee could they would proberbly hand write individual letters of apology to all the disgruntled customers, but in such a large corporate entity that is not going to happen. Instead you have recieved your money back and a letter from B&Q telling you that they are unable to forfil your order. I suspect the word Sorry was on it somewhere.
I really can't believe that this is a 'scam' or a way for B&Q to cover their VAT bill, or a method to help their cashflow..
It is much more likely a guenuine mistake by a single employee. If it had been you in your workplace who had made this mistake I'm sure you might feel remorseful. How about a bit of forgive and forget. Nobodies dead, nobody actually got physically hurt, there are more important things going on in the world, to which your energy passion and dedication could be turned to, that are far more productive. Like campaigning against silly signs, overbearing H&S legislation, and blame culture in the work place!!!!

[martin]

It's yer perspective, innit?
There are times that I'm firmly convinced that I'm undergoing the last stages of transformation into Brian Sewell - how on earth can so many people be concerned and interested in a bunch of numpties kicking a ball, and then indulging in homoerotic pastimes on the pitch?, or the twists and turns of some blasted soap opera featuring actors running the full gamut of emotions from A to B in a sub-Blyton script, or the "doings" of siliconised brain-dead "moddawls" and their couplings..........
There's no accounting for taste!
Nobody's dead, but B&Q are proven serial rip-off merchants, and it amuses me to see them getting a well-deserved boot up the stern section (FAR better than wussball)

[sleepybubble]

It's yer perspective, innit?

...other stuff....

Nobody's dead, but B&Q are proven serial rip-off merchants, and it amuses me to see them getting a well-deserved boot up the stern section (FAR better than wussball)

and thats the bit that bothers me about what is a fairly epic thread for here at 10 pages.... anything else we would be discussing whether it is theoretical stratification of thermal stores, the DOD of batteries etc. somebody would have a tangilble link to evidential proof. I haven't yet once seen any proof or evidence that indicates that B&Q are the devil incarnate with regards shysterish rip off policy. The only person who had a reasonable gripe against B&Q was RenewableJohn and that was based upon the ethics of their garden centre supply chain practice. To be fair to B&Q it this is not unique to them.
Whilst they are not the 'ethical superstore' they are entitled to make mistakes just like the rest of us, and with the volume of their sales when they do make mistakes it proberbly affects a lot of people.

I'm aware of a renewable energy equipment supplier who have consistantly overquoted me on their listed prices and even recently overcharged me on an item. Their communication with customers is terrible. However the products they sell are at a very reasonable price so I don't make big waves and threaten to sue them everytime they make a mistake, I just put it down to human error. After all I wouldn't want to cut off my own nose to spite my face. I can live with their occasional mistakes, which do get rectified in time (a refund of overchargeing after a period of weeks!) becasue I want the products they sell.
If the folk here who are so vehemently opposed to B&Q were saying things like 'I will boycott Kingfisher Group PLC' for the rest of my life over this then I would see it as a truly passionate objection to mistreatment. However I suspect at least a few of the people who didn't manage to get a 'stupidly' underpriced product have been into one of the sheds on at least one of the weekends since to buy something else. In which case they are showing a certain level of blatant double standards. Its no good saying a company is beans and still buying stuff from them.

Anyways its just my perspective, I could be less polite like NI and call you all money grabbing selfish witless barstards, but thats just as silly as, saying that B&Q are money grabbing selfish witless barstards.

As for stirring things up for amusement value, because reading forums is better than watching football on Telly... Well I can forgive that. I might even condone it.

[kristen]

As I ask above, I'd be interested in another view?

[FWIW I build and sell eCommerce systems - clients take anything up to the low 1,000's of orders per day and have up to low 10,000's of product lines]

I think it is possible that they had some in stock, they wanted to shift them, and they discounted them so they shifted. Also, that their systems are sufficiently rubbish that they did not automatically mark the item as out-of-stock when orders exceeded stock level.

It would be good to read confirmation, in this forum or another, that a forum reader did actually get the deal that was offered.

In the absence of hearing that anyone managed to buy them I am inclined to assume that someone wrongly priced the product.

My understanding of the law is that an item that has the wrong price displayed has to be sold at that price. I've benefited from that in a shop - but the cashier has then immediately removed the price from the product, so their damage was limited.  With online selling the number of items sold, as word-spreads-by-forum, can be huge, and it can be difficult to detect that lots of items are selling at ridiculously low prices (how do you differentiate between a stock-clearance price and a typo?). I don't have an answer, but I do see it as a teething-problem of the "new media".

As mentioned earlier I do think it is hard to have a web site accurately run down stock to zero, but I also think that it is unacceptable that hours after orders have exceeded stock the system has still not marked the product as out-of-stock.

If B&Q's systems can't run-down-to-zero they ought to clearly label the item as "Very limited stock", and I think they would be well advised not to take money there-and-then from credit cards, but to make the debit when the goods are ready for despatch [but IME that route is as rare as hen's teeth because the credit card companies make it technically challenging]

My customers, who have made this sort of faux par with their eCommerce systems, are absolutely 100% keen to make sure it never happens again. But its very difficult to guard against the human error that might create the situation.

Either way, B&Q (and others) need to sharpen up their act on this.

[Richard Owen]

I think it is possible that they had some in stock, they wanted to shift them, and they discounted them so they shifted. Also, that their systems are sufficiently rubbish that they did not automatically mark the item as out-of-stock when orders exceeded stock level.

And have been since at least 2005. There's a Computer Weekly article where the B&Q person in charge remarks that the on-line ordering system didn't check the stock system often enough.

You'd have thought that, knowing that, low quantity items, needing to be shifted, wouldn't be put on the website?

It would be good to read confirmation, in this forum or another, that a forum reader did actually get the deal that was offered.

Indeed.

As mentioned earlier I do think it is hard to have a web site accurately run down stock to zero, but I also think that it is unacceptable that hours after orders have exceeded stock the system has still not marked the product as out-of-stock.

Particularly if you've know you have had this problem for four years. Perhaps they thought they'd fixed it. I wonder if other retailers using this IBM system have this problem?

If B&Q's systems can't run-down-to-zero they ought to clearly label the item as "Very limited stock", and I think they would be well advised not to take money there-and-then from credit cards, but to make the debit when the goods are ready for despatch [but IME that route is as rare as hen's teeth because the credit card companies make it technically challenging]

My customers, who have made this sort of faux par with their eCommerce systems, are absolutely 100% keen to make sure it never happens again. But its very difficult to guard against the human error that might create the situation.

Either way, B&Q (and others) need to sharpen up their act on this.

B&Q have taken a different route. Instead of sharpening up their act, they've changed their Ts&Cs. Contract is now formed at delivery, not when the card is charged. Which is good for them for the future. Not sure it's going to be very convincing to any judge looking at cases from the recent debacle? Changing the Ts&Cs is pretty much admitting there was a problem with the previous lot.

But since B&Q have already lost a case on the old Ts&Cs, then they were pretty discredited anyway, so perhaps not much more to lose by changing them?

[kristen]

I agree with your points.

I can imagine the hassle in sorting out a system the size of theirs.  They will have implemented it at huge cost and expect to be able to leave it alone for quite some time - or they are beavering away, but it is going to take time. Either way whatever they have in place to synchronise the stock levels between their Web and Back-office order fulfilment systems is clearly inadequate and not fit for purpose.

Presumably it was a board-level decision to change the T&Cs as a short term stopgap. I would have thought a much better route would have been to tell IBM to fix it, and get IBM to pay for any increased-cost-of-working in the meantime, and fund the over-order issue that way instead. I expect that would get it fixed in a couple of weeks!

I just read on M.S.E. thread that someone had managed to put 999 of them in their on-line shopping basket [tight fit I expect!!] which, unless there were at least 999 in stock at the last stock-level-synchronisation, is further evidence that their system is rubbish. [I presume that even for B&Q that holding 999 stock of these enormous tanks is extremely unlikely?]