Beware of Discount Marine

[Freeebird]

I have not commented on this. All I will say is that I would never tell someone to take their business elsewhere. I would tell them what I can and cannot do and they may indeed decide to take their business elsewhere, but I would never tell them that. Obviously, this guy lacks what they call the social skills.

Well, my "good grief" comment was directed toward Rob. May I ask what you ordered and if this is the first time you have done business with this company?

Seems like an awful lot of time an effort to be a PITA over a difference of one day. As for never telling someone to take their business elsewhere, in my 37 years of business (in a highly competitive industry), I have done that once. This in a similar case where a customer wanted to rant and rave incessantly over something they too had options where expedited shipment is concerned.

To wit, I had a customer place an order for a safe that I did in fact have in stock, but he was closer to the manufacturer than he was me. That would result in lower shipping charges, and despite my telling him that shipping times would vary, he called multiple times to complain he hadn't heard anything from anyone. I told him he wouldn't hear anything until the item had been shipped. He wanted to speak with someone at the factory, so I gave him their number and told him he was more than welcomed to talk to my sales rep there.

He proceeded to give this woman hell about how inept they were, and that all it would take is for them to simply slap a label on a his safe and load it onto a truck. This after I explained to him they don't have inventory just sitting around, and that his order would be shipped in the order it was received. My sales rep called me a few days later and said this guy was calling her daily with his continued complaints, even though she had given him an estimated shipping date.

With that, I called this gentleman and suggested he cancel his order as we obviously weren't capable of making him happy. He once again wanted to place blame on my sales rep (with some very choice words) and the manufacturer, so I told him I was canceling the order and refunding his money. He bitched and moaned when I defended my sales rep, but that came back to me in spades a few years later when that sales rep gave me a heads up that I was "being screwed" by her employer. She appreciated the fact that I stood up for her, and she returned the favor.

Bottom line is, the customer isn't always right, and life is too short to get so torn up over something so trivial. My guess is the seller had simply had enough and wasn't interested in a repeat performance down the road. No offense, Rob, but dayum!