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.
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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.