Yes, IMO the real issue is the way it was handled by the store. A little white lie saying “we’re very sorry but it was already sold to another customer even though our inventory didn’t reflect that yet” is much better than “we know someone who might get around to paying for this eventually and we’d rather give it to him/her”.
I neglected to make the point that it was poorly handled.
FWIW, for any wine I find on wine searcher I call the vendor to ensure stock and ask the best way to place the order. For hard to find wines the answer is nearly always we do not have this in stock, sorry. There are lots of reasons why it can show up and not really be available some understandable, some not. But this simple process has always worked as I had this issue a few times and it was annoying to not know I found I had really secured the wine or not.
I would simply move on.
I had something like this happen from an online retailer. I placed an order for some VERY hard to find wines…the owner said it was an inventory mix up and the wines were long-ago sold. I know it’s beyond frustrating to think you’ve scored a wine you’ve been looking for. I’m sorry you missed out on the wine.
If you haven’t lost any money on the deal, forget it and forget them.
^This. I always get a kick out of how people find themselves in this type of situation. With one second of thought, the retailer could have come up with a response that would have made a crappy situation acceptable.
out them.
This happened to me a few months ago, in that case I even had the order confirmed over the phone before they charged me. Then they cancelled the order and reversed the charge without even telling me (I think they called but I didn’t pick up and no voicemail). No response to email.
But had the sale been confirmed and your credit card charged?
Wine stores’ inventories are never perfect, but that doesn’t sound like it was the problem here.
“Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.” Or just a simple mistake. Your cortisol levels will be lower in the long run. I wouldn’t blackball them either, if it were me. I’ve had orders cancelled after payment by merchants before, even merchants I love. It’s annoying, but shutting them out would be shooting myself in the foot for very little reason. Though they could have been nicer and more apologetic, I don’t think they did anything wrong. What you choose to do is, of course, your call.
If their POS isn’t sophisticated enough, then they shouldn’t automatically be charging credit cards. You should be able to “order” on their website and then it tells you that your order is subject to verification of inventory before they charge your card.
We don’t know for sure if it was charged and not just a pending hold for verification. As in, will we see an actual refund on the CC statement credited back opposed to no charge appearing at all. Sounds like he made the order and the same morning got a call telling him the wine isn’t available. So i can’t imagine the charge actually hit his statement and needed to be refunded. Most stores don’t actually charge immediately through their payment processor on their website.
Either way, doesn’t change anything for me. Stock issues happen. Whether the POS charged it immediately or not.
Yes this is quite a common (and sensible) approach IME
Thanks to everyone for their advice, it was helpful to get some perspective. So here’s how it wound up…
I nudged him, reminding that I’ve politely asked twice to make things right. His response was “There is nothing to make right.”
So he’s not even picking up a phone to see if maybe he can get more of that wine, or the substitute I suggested. This is the president, can’t blame an underling — this is just how they do things over there.
Several of you have asked for the name of the vendor, and in light of this exchange I feel no compunction in revealing it: Amsterdam Wine Co in NYC.
Oh well, I would have enjoyed serving this wine to my friends. Hopefully another, more reputable vendor, will have it in stock soon.
That’s a remarkably honest answer to put into writing: Big Lumber wanted the wine, and you ain’t Big Lumber [at least not yet*].
I’d imagine that 99% of the retailers in the USA would have simply lied through their teeth to you.
But it sounds like this guy was thoroughly straightforward.
That’s very, very rare in the wine bidness.
*Traditionally you needed a GulfStream, but with 1978 Pousse d’Or 1ers @ $8500, now you need a 737 and one of them military-sized helicopters.
One of my local shops. I live less than a mile away. Relatively small but good selection. Never the cheapest but they sometimes have hard to find wines. I stop in every once in a while, chat with the staff, buy a couple bottles.
Looks like that’s done. It’s one thing in my mind to have a processing or inventory snafu. It’s another for them to do what I think they did to you: take a bottle that was available to the general public away from you because after confirming your sale, a better customer wanted the same wine. (If that’s not what happened, and the wine you thought you were buying was already committed to that other person before you tried to buy it, that’s different. Also would be different, as pointed out above, if the sale was subject to confirmation, which is standard. Those would be excusable logistics snafus, and there wouldn’t be anything to make right unless the store wanted to go above and beyond to make you happy.)
In NYC there are so many good retailers that do right by the customer that it’s not worth doing business with a shop that doesn’t get or care about customer service.
Move on, don’t buy from them again, they dont value you as a customer.
Plenty of folks to buy wine from.
Good Morning. It has come to my attention that our store (Amsterdam Wine Co) is unfairly getting dragged through the mud on this topic.
Please allow me to set the record straight. A longstanding regular customer had been asking me to try to source the wines in question. We were able to get a few bottles and he agreed to buy them all. But he requested that I wait a couple weeks to run his card so it would be on his next billing cycle - a reasonable request. When the wines came in, they got input into our POS and therefore it showed that we had inventory. When Mr. Goldstein’s order came in via Banquet/Delectable it was never confirmed as he thought it had been. The confirmation he received is generated from Banquet/Delectable and is merely a confirmation that the order has been sent to the retailer. Immediately after receiving the order, I declined the order (so his card was not charged) and emailed Mr. Goldstein informing him that the wines were not actually available. After reading through this thread, I see that I must have fallen short on the communication to Mr. Goldstein which clearly lead to his misunderstanding. So, the wines were not pulled out from him in favor of another customer. We would never do that to anyone. I hope this clears things up. If anyone has any questions, please let me know.
How would you feel, if Mr. Goldstein?
So the card was never charged?