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Galen West’s strategy: “Lookie dem low prices… 2L soda for 68¢… woweee!!1!” REALITY: Zero stock, ZERO SHIPMENTS for ENTIRE SALE.
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This is why Galen West is a card-carrying member of the Parasite Class.
And yes, I confirmed the no-shipments, zero-stock with the store manager. 5 days and counting with no stock so far, when the sale started there was maybe 12-24 bottles for 128,000 residents in the city.
Except in this case, the store was out of stock 24hrs a day from the day the sale started. It’s now the sixth day of the sale, it ends on Thursday.
Those shelves usually have about 48 rows of 7 bottles across 5 different flavours of PC Cola. It tends to have some stock at all times, the only time I ever saw it totally out of stock was during the first COVID lockdown. Never before, and for the first time since.
I had talked to the store manager, who confirmed ZERO DELIVERIES since the sale started. Not one delivery in any of the five days, and I’m betting this sixth day will be more of the same.
That isn’t just gross incompetence - it’s intentionally malicious.
Surprised to hear Canada doesn't have laws against bait advertising, I know the UK, Australia & New Zealand all do.
They're provincial laws but I'm pretty sure that's not covered by the law since it's pretty much impossible to prove it was intentional/it affects all stores.
Unintentional bait advertising is just exploitation via neglect rather than with intent. Here if the bait advertising happened and customers were exploited, the retailer is legally obligated to remediate regardless of their intent.
Considering they give rain checks I don't think much can be done, how do you prove they intentionally had a sale on a product they knew was going to be out of stock vs any other sales where something just naturally goes out of stock as people buy all the store's supply until they get more in the next few days?
It's a prerequisite requirement on promotions. Any company that wants to promote their sales needs to do so in accordance with relevant consumer law, which means ensuring they have available stock for the promotion before starting it.
It's not as if retailers in this environment just say "well, it's a potential risk for us to promote something if we don't actually have enough stock to consistently offer it at that price, so we just won't promote anything". Of course, promotions are beneficial for sales either way, so they just make sure they have enough stock before doing the promotion. The requirement doesn't stop them from running effective sales promotion without intent to exploit.
They aren't at some risk of blank cheque liability resulting from this, they just have a legal responsibility to ensure appropriate resolution case-by-case. Often that just means offering a raincheck, so the outcome isn't even different in Canada. But there's a difference where in Aus the raincheck solution is secured by consumer protections, rather than the retail company policy.
Overall it's not hugely impactful legislation, just the company bears the consequence of their own mistakes in the unintentional bait advertising circumstance and whaddaya know, bait advertising is mysteriously not a problem anymore in pretty much all western countries outside NA
Deliveries are usually done once a week and flyers aren’t typically store specific
But I appreciate they needed pop so badly that they checked every day and talked to the manager
Sorry, no. I see those racks being re-stocked at least twice a week under normal circumstances. There are 3-5 full trucks coming in each and every day to this particular RCSS. This is not a tiny town, we have more than a quarter-mill residents in the overall region, about half of which live within city limits.
You can turn that negative sarcasm off, now. I was making a comment about the Parasite-Class greedwashing first and foremost, the fact that it was soda was just incidental.
And when soda is normally $1.50 to $2.00 per 2L (yes, even the PC cola stuff), it’s a pretty big deal when it’s 68¢ apiece.
Plus, we’ve been out of soda for a month-plus now. Just wanted to stock up for the next half a year (and have some at Christmas) at that price. Is it wrong to take advantage of a deal and have something special to drink for Christmas?
National retailers here do weekly flyers by state - usually one each for regional and metropolitan area stores per state. As long as they haven't overextended locations beyond that which they can reliably supply to, it's really not hard to ensure availability for a product before you put it on sale, or vary the sale conditions according to availability in a way that's totally fair to consumers.
In areas too remote for reliable supply to a national chain location, e.g. remote Western Australia, you just have co-operative independent retailers with their own prices. There needs to be a certain level of suburbia before a national retailer location becomes viable