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.

    • It’s not about the soda, it’s about the corporate hypocrisy, gratuitously fake goodwill, rampant greed, and bait-and-switching of hard-working Canadians.

      If you’re going to be defending Galen West in any way, I strongly suggest you find elsewhere to be licking those boots.

      • I’ve found most stores stock very minimal amounts of whatever gets I to the flyer as a pretty good deal.

        They just do it to trick you into making the trip so you spend your money on the over priced stuff since you’re already there.

        • 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.

              •  rekabis   ( @rekabis@lemmy.ca ) OP
                link
                fedilink
                3
                edit-2
                10 months ago

                Deliveries are usually done once a week

                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.

                But I appreciate they needed pop so badly that they checked every day and talked to the manager

                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?

              •  gila   ( @gila@lemm.ee ) 
                link
                fedilink
                19 months ago

                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

  • I saw this kind of behavior in many places.

    We had a LIDL discount store on the other side of the road in my old location. One day they offered a top-of-the-pop GFX card (25 years ago!) for an incredibly low price. Before opening times, there was a queue from the door across the parking lot to the street. I was there when the shop opened (not in the queue, just on the way to my car), and people stormed in. I saw people jumping over the checkouts to bypass the crowd. Later that day, I talked with a cashier. They had had serious problems that morning, because their allotment had been a total of three cards.

    Many years later, a superstore offered a high-priced LEGO set for a dead cheap price. So I was there when the doors opened, ran towards the toy aisle, grabbed one of the two sets on display. I thought for a moment to buy the other one, too, but some other guy just took it. At the checkout I asked if they maybe had another one in stock, but they admitted they only had gotten those two sets.

        • PC brand stuff is sold at like 3 different stores in BC.

          All owned by the same parent company, and thereby Galen Weston, and they do not do price matching between those stores.

          There is a Wholesale Club in the city over, I tried to get something else from them one time, where their price was nearly double that of the RCSS I normally go to. They refused to match the price.

  • the kmart in the town i lived in back in the early 1990s did this all the time…

    and since they knew ahead-of-time of upcoming percent or dollar-off promotions, they would jack the shelf price up on those items the week or two before so they could go ‘on sale’ (and sometimes even at a higher price than the usual regular selling price).

    ya. that store was bulldozed a few years later.

  • Isn’t there an ongoing strike at Loblaws distribution centres? I legitimately can’t find any news as to whether it ended, but I also can’t find very much news on other strikes that I’m pretty sure did get resolved. Fuck Loblaws, and fuck Google’s ever worsening search capabilities.

    • Isn’t there an ongoing strike at Loblaws distribution centres?

      Sounds like a great time to issue a sale on products that you know you won’t have to actually sell at the discounted price, and then blame it on the union.

      • Do stores do rain checks there if you ask for them?

        I’ve seen it at some stores in the US in the past, but not something that would be advertised, just some people getting a rain check if they specifically ask for it.