What could possibly go wrong?
About the Author
Timm has worked in Self Storage for over 10 years... so it's only fitting that he came to work for StorMan when he was looking for a bit of a change. Timm currently resides in the United States and is our Sales Manager for this region.
You can get in touch with Timm via our Contact page.
Recently, Ben and myself have been using our own product to send invoices to our new customers all around the world and have been amazed at the different sales tax amounts and weird and wonderful conversion amounts especially when dealing with foreign currency conversions. The Rand, UK pounds, the US dollar, the Euro and let’s not forget the Guatemalan Quetzal (yes we have quoted in Guatemala), all have their own special idiosyncrasies and I laughed at a quote I had to do where we had to go three decimal places for the cents. I mean other than the scam from Superman 3, who really cares about .003 of a cent?
Luckily StorMan software does and once you have sent out 600 invoices all dollar perfect you will be thankful that you didn’t have to proof read each one. Even getting the decimal place wrong can be disastrous. Most of us don’t feel sorry for the New Zealand couple, now long gone, who asked their bank for a $10,000 loan and were mistakenly given $10,000,000.
Obviously they couldn’t get to the bank quick enough with the withdrawal slip, but surely there are some of us that feel sorry for the bank worker who missed the decimal placing error and approved the deposit for the wrong amount. The worker has been re-assigned, which is bank speak for shown the door. Figuring a 10 million dollar blunder was the most costly typo ever we searched for other examples, and came across more costly typo’s than that.
Recently Dell Computers were ordered to honour a typo on their web site when they accidentally advertised 19” LCD monitors for only $15, simply because someone had inadvertently left out the last zero in the normal $150 price tag. No one realized for 8 hours and the orders flooded in and and totalled 140,000 by the end of the promotion. Now Dell is out of pocket almost $19 million as well as having to supply 140,000 monitors all because someone thought they could get the ad onto the net quickly before heading home on a Friday night. That worker has been re-assigned apparently.
Then there is the case in Australia where someone (we won’t mention names but suffice to say “they’ve done it again”) advertised a $2,999 plasma TV and was generous enough to offer a 15% discount, but instead of the percentage sign they added a dollar sign. So instead of the final price being $2549.15 it had an advertised price of $15 and the orders flowed in. They had only billed out 8 of them but it was a warehouse worker who first spotted they were sending out a TV with a higher shipping price than the purchase price and alerted someone higher up. Whilst all this was happening one astute competitor (again no names but its “Hardly Normal”) choose that time to order 50 of the TV’s for his own stock.
At the small profit margin these TV are sold on to replace the $173,130 lost revenue they figured they would need to sell 1800 or so TV’s just to get back where they started from. The warehouse worker has a nice new plasma TV at their house as a thank you but the person who wrote the ad, you guessed it, has been re-assigned. My advice is proof read everything from your printed boxes, to your daily invoices and letters, the signs printed up around your facility, and constantly check your website as well.
You may be inadvertently missing out on customers for the sake of a misplaced digit or decimal place. Then get others to check them as well given that occasionally you might want to get the ad out before 5pm on Friday or you just may be “Store blind” to things you see every day.
Case in point there is a national company (again no names but suffice to say they won’t be beaten on price) that has fire instruction signs across all its stores that instructs "What NOT to do in a fire"...
- Don’t Panic!
- Use the stairs instead of the lift.
Normally “Don’t Panic” is great advice and so important it is on the front page of “The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” in big red letters, but in this instance is a double negative. So essentially the company is saying to all its customers and staff in a fire, run screaming towards the lift in an agitated manner.
Regards,
Timm (International Sales Representative, StorMan).