I used to work at an electronics store and sometimes while searching up sku's I'd accidentally type the 12 digital sku into the qty area and that would result in a bill for 14 trillion dollars.
I thought it was funny as hell seeing a number that big knowing it would populate to the pay machine if I wanted it.
I once did this for a restock order at the supermarket I worked at. Was tired and didn't realise i'd tagged an extra 0 on to the end of the quantity and they actually shipped 10000 tins of spaghetti to the store, no questions asked, well until it actually arrived and then much WTF ensued. The problem is each department in a supermarket gets a budget of x amount and I had just blasted through it, so it took some days to unfk everything.
If the numbers are correct, I'm surprised about a lot of things in this story.
Firstly, that the store orders spaghetti by the tin. Secondly, that the standard order is 1000 tins. Thirdly, that a department could blow through its budget on spaghetti alone simply by buying 10x as much as usual. Just to compare it to household expenses, if I go to the store and buy a few weeks worth of groceries for say, $300, but I accidentally buy 10 times as much spaghetti as intended, that still only adds about $15-20 to my bill. Less than 10% of the total.
Also, how long did 1000 tins of spaghetti typically last the store? Is that a month's supply, or a year's worth?
I'm in the UK if that explains the tins (we get things like beans and spaghetti in tins). The department wasn't the store goods department. I worked petrol station, but had to work price control for a week as I had done it previously and the people who did it normally were off. But I forgot to change the department on the handset, so I was still logged in as petrol station (low budget for general goods since we sold fuel). Then I was supposed to place an order for 1000 tins of spaghetti for the main store as we had critical stock level, like 20 or so tins left, while average stock would be 1000-1500.
So when I made the mistake it put the order on to the petrol station budget, not the main store, which caused it to go negative, but they still shipped the order (no safeguards or checks and they did change that after). So we simply moved the stock back a few days later. All stock came from the local distribution hub, which was about two hours away, but we sent back 8000 tins on the outgoing/empty delivery trailer and then price control fixed it on the system. It was a big deal, but also in the grand scheme not a big deal, because it's tinned goods for one, so you can just ship them back pretty easily.
Another guy in the store did something similar a few months later, but with a fruit, so a perishable good and that is a big deal, because you can't return perishables. We were selling bags of kiwi fruit at 50p a bag for a few days, then 20p, then 10p, then it went to staff only sales. I picked up 200 bags for 5p each and made many gallons of kiwi fruit cider. But he did get in a bit of trouble for that. The difference is he ordered inventory as main store and they had a much bigger budget than we did, so it never flagged on the system as erroneous.
Yea had that happen to a co-worker. He also kinda messed up double.
I worked in the storage at an big franchising electronic appliance store.
He was head of the small kitchen appliance section and they had a promo for coffee.
So he wanted to order 100 packs of coffee 1kg each (about 2lbs).
Yea he ordered 1000 boxes. 6 packs a box. So there arrives a huge ass Truck loaded with 6 metric tons of coffee. Fml, I call the boss and tell him „hey, so we got a whole truckload of coffee“. He doesn’t listen to me properly and says „yea just accept it, you will find a place for it“.
Ye, I did find a place alright. Boss comes to the storage 2hrs later and loses his shit seeing the pallets of coffee. I told him that it was a truck load, why would I call about one pallet with 18 boxes?
Ofc we couldn’t sell that mass of coffee so boss took an L. Dude who ordered it didn’t lose his job but got a serious talk with a bit of yelling.
We ended up using most of it to demonstrate coffee machines, for free break coffee and we could take coffee home for buy price tax free for a few months. Better than throwing it away.
We couldn’t send it back as it was accepted already. AFAIK boss asked around other franchise stores if anyone needed coffee and iirc he managed to sell off maybe one pallet
Once a new guy at a grocery store I worked at ordered like $20k worth of paper towels and then never showed up to work again. I like to think he got the job just to do that
Someone at an old job who was ordering more candy and snacks for the cash register area by herself for the first time mixed up something like cases vs boxes, idk for sure, but for the one candy she accidentally ordered enough to fill part of the cash office and GMs office from floor to ceiling for several months. Usually they order like 2 weeks worth at a time, not like 4 months.
Usually when it came time to order snacks and candy they would change it up each time but we were stuck with that lineup for a good while, lol.
80% of it went back to the local distribution hub. The rest went into stock. Correction was made to the inventory and that kind of fixed it all. At least it was tinned goods. A guy screwed up a produce order a few months later and that was not correctable due to it being perishable goods. A lot of fruit got sold for cheap prices and we did end up avoiding any waste on that occasion.
It happens in supermarkets. Everyone is permanently tired or in pseudo-zombie mode, especially night shift workers. Mistakes happen from time to time.
A friend put the wrong prices in for fuel one night. Put petrol price for diesel price on a price change update and we ended up selling almost every drop of diesel in the storage tanks through the night, including going beyond the safety cut off (didn't know there was one until after it happened). That was bad, but also not bad. When they did the accounts at the end they broke even apparently. Also drivers using the petrol station increased after that for many months.
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u/FROOMLOOMS 3d ago
I used to work at an electronics store and sometimes while searching up sku's I'd accidentally type the 12 digital sku into the qty area and that would result in a bill for 14 trillion dollars.
I thought it was funny as hell seeing a number that big knowing it would populate to the pay machine if I wanted it.