Kitty poo happens

One of the frustrating parts of our business are the vendors I call Bad Kitties. Usually they're small companies whose products we love enough to order, but stuff gets screwed up so badly somewhere along the way that we have to stop ordering from them. Or we bite the bullet and keep buying, but keep an eagle eye on every transaction.

This is not the glamorous part of being a retailer. During the busiest parts of the year, when we're ordering a lot and selling a lot, I can easily spend an entire day of each week tracing shipments, tracking down mysterious charges, unraveling things like why we got 6 gigantic boxes of bath salts when we only ordered six small bags, or lotion testers but no product. Or 40 pound marble table tops sent with the wrong bases. On and on and on... But I digress.

Yesterday's meltdown involved our flatware vendor. I placed an order three weeks ago. They charged our card the following day, which usually means the product shipped. Ah, but they charged hundreds more than it should have been: a regular occurrence. There are two prices: one if you buy one little piece at a time (very high), and one if you buy in bulk (very reasonable). Someone always keys in the wrong number. And I always have to call back and straighten it out. [After tracking the charge and comparing it to the order that's in a stack of paperwork and adding it all up and...] HelLO! Not again! That got fixed, but where's our shipment? Should have been here two weeks ago, and now two customers got mad at me because I thought for sure it would arrive last week. I hate that. So it's another 20+ minutes on the phone, another 20+ minutes finding all the paperwork and writing a fax with a recap of the situation (because we're just about starting from scratch here), and I'm about to go curl up on our bed in the store and put our scented pillow on my face because I need to relax and breathe and not have a heart attack over this. Maybe asphyxiation by lavender isn't so bad.

So this is what happened: our order went to another Pomegranate. In Texas. This happens all the time, too. When we picked the name "Pomegranate" we never imagined that ten other unrelated Pomegranates would later spring up all over the U.S., and that they would someday be receiving our shipments, and we, theirs. Grrr. Just another afternoon in the litter box with the Bad Kitties.