Personally, when the threats don’t work, I love toying with 'em…
“You picked the PERFECT time to call. I need to get gifts for my best clients to celebrate a deal, and I need it for THIS weekend!!! Is this as good as you say? Great. I’ll take 25 bottles. Wait… if you were part of a team that secured 100 million deal, you’d expect more than a bottle, right? Right? Right! So make that 25 cases. Hell, the secretaries did a damn fine job, too. 30 cases. If you don’t have it, just bring it up to 30 with something else you suggest. Okay, catching my flight now, but this takes a real load off. Thanks a bunch, and great timing as usual. But I need it by this weekend, so deliver it to the usual location, and bill the usual account. You are a life saver. Okay – flight attendant is ready to throw me out of the window - apparently, time to turn off the phone. How long is the flight to Shanghai, anyway? Oh, who cares when you got three cute little bottles of Jack in front of you, and three cute little bottles of Diet Coke. Yup, diet, which means the wife’s with me. What? WHAT? Fine! She needs some gifts for the ladies. Add a few cases of “something classy” - her words, not mine. OKAY! I’m hanging UP NOW? Wowzers. Thanks again - and remember I need this by the weekend. You won’t screw this up, rriii… oh, sorry, you’ve never done me wrong before. Thanks for the solid, man.”
In case something does show up -tell them you were sure you were ordering from that other store with a similar name. After all, why would they call after you asked them not to!
Brad,
As a retailer I would never cold call a customer to start with unless they asked me to lookout for something or if that is the kind of relationship that has been built, especially someone that is not a regular customer. There’s nothing more irritating than unsolicited calls and for them to repeat calling after you told him not to is on the verge of harassment . Serious pinch, recession, that’s B.S. If there was a chance of you ever being a customer again he has axed that and also taking the chance of turning other people away too, word of mouth is very powerful.
This store not only reneged on confirmed purchases, but also gave my confidential personal information to head honchos at BevMedia, who harassed me at home to cancel the orders and buy alternative, overpriced plonk. Axxholes from Grapes and BevMedia.
That’s what I was referring to with the cell phone itself - both the carriers [ATT, Verizon, Sprint, TMobile] and the software houses [Blackberry OS, Nokia/Symbian, Samsung/WinCE, iPhone/Darwin] ought to be providing “anti-spam” functionality.
Logistically speaking [both at the carrier level, and at the operating system level], it’s absolutely trivial to do this - so it’s very difficult for me to imagine that that functionality is not there already.
If you are where you can go in to the store, walk around and pick up a bunch of bottles and put them on the counter (or in a big cart, whatever). Go get more wine. Expensive bottles in particular. Make it look as if you are making a very large purchase. Hopefully then the owner will get involved to give you personal service. Maybe even have them take the time to ring it up (make sure to ask them to take all the price tags off, and see if they offer any sort of free gift wrapping). Then, when it comes to paying for it, tell the owner you forgot your wallet or simply changed your mind and walk out. They have to then reprice and restock everything. Make sure you call them after you leave to let them know that you were intentionally wasting their time, just as they have been wasting yours with the phone calls.
Register them on the FCC’s do-not-call list. Then if they call again, you can report them to the FCC and they can be fined. (There’s some defense for “existing customers,” I think, but I can’t imagine that should apply here.)
