Ordering on line

[JohnW2]

@JohnW2 I did see the two figures, but like I said earlier, it's common now to see prices given for an item, and also the price per kg or meter for comparison. ... As I was only interested in buying 100m didn't take any notice of the smaller figure. Although if I had done the maths, I suppose I should have noticed that 100m at £0.15 doesn't equal £6.50

Fair enough - in that case I presume you were assuming that it was not possible to order less than a whole 100m reel?

As I said, these are clearly pitfalls waiting to bite people not familiar with how TLC do things. For example, in more-or-less the opposite sense to what you have experienced, even when 'bulk packs' cannot be split for sale of smaller quantities, one generally has to enter the number of items (not packs) - but it then at least pops up an error message if you specify a number of items which is less than the pack size, or not an exact multiple of pack size ...

Kind Regards, John

 

[SUNRAY]

In BT we used to have to do annual orders for domestic supplies such as soap, floor polish, paper towels etc. Every year we had the regular problem of trying to work out which items came as single items, packs of n or boxes of n packs.
So one year the truck turned up to offload amoungst other things one bar of soap (we were expecting one box of 144), 144 boxes of 144 packs of paper towels (expecting 1 box of 144 packs), 12 boxes of 72 bottles of toilet cleaner (expecting 12 bottles) and 2 broom heads with 200 handles.

 

[JohnW2]

In BT we used to have to do annual orders for domestic supplies such as soap, floor polish, paper towels etc. Every year we had the regular problem of trying to work out which items came as single items, packs of n or boxes of n packs.
So one year the truck turned up to offload amoungst other things one bar of soap (we were expecting one box of 144), 144 boxes of 144 packs of paper towels (expecting 1 box of 144 packs), 12 boxes of 72 bottles of toilet cleaner (expecting 12 bottles) and 2 broom heads with 200 handles.

I can well believe it!

The silly thing is that, in terms of on-line ordering, it would be so easy to make it unambiguously clear as to what quantity one was ordering. The factr that many don't suggests that they are not getting many complaints from the (I imagine many!) people who end up receiving something different from what they thought they had ordered!

Kind Regards, John

 

[SUNRAY]

quite recently I needed some 16 way DIL header plugs and at 12p on ebay I ordered 10, 10 bags of 10 turned up and when I read through the listing it again it was indeed correct. So for £1.20 including postage I have 100 plugs - so far I've used 2.

 

[securespark]

How come only Secure gets kisses?

Because I'm lovely!

Dunno - it must have been some gremlin sending them to him, since I certainly didn't type them deliberately

 

[OwainDIYer]

And yes I did complain to TLC their reply was:
"You have ordered 1 metre of bell wire, that has been cut from a 100m coil."

They must have an awful lot of part-used coils if they only cut from 100m.

But it is very useful being able to get cut lengths to the metre, especially of expensive stuff like meter tails, rather than buy either 1m or 5m packs, which are either too short or too long.

 

[JohnW2]

They must have an awful lot of part-used coils if they only cut from 100m.

To be fair, they only said "from a 100m coil", without any indication that the coil was 'full', 'brand new' or anything like that

Kind Regards, John

 

[John D v2.0]

if you cut 1m from a 100m coil, is it still a 100m coil? how about if you cut 99m from it?
that's like if you have a pile of sugar and I have a pile of sugar then we have two piles in total but if we combine them then we're back down to one pile of sugar between us.

 

[JohnW2]

if you cut 1m from a 100m coil, is it still a 100m coil? how about if you cut 99m from it?

Oh dear, it must be a holiday weekend

To be slightly serious, I suppose it depends upon how you interpret the word 'coil'. In context, I would regard it as simply being a description of the way in which something was (originally, before any was used) packaged/presented - whereas you appear to be regarding it as relating to an actual 'real-time' measurement.

There are countless possible analogies I could cite but, since you brought sugar into the discussion ... if, in a commercial kitchen, there was an unopened 50 kg sack/bag of sugar, I could tell one of the staff to "go and get 1 kg of sugar from the 50 kg sack". If another worker then needed similar, I would also tell him/her to "go and get 1 kg of sugar from the 50 kg sack" - because "the 50 kg sack" was the container from which they were getting it - I would not tell the second person to get the sugar from 'the 49 kg sack' I would, indeed, still describe the place from which the sugar was being obtained as "the 50 kg sack" even when most of its contents had been used.

Kind Regards, John

 

[bernardgreen]

How much wire is there in a 2 metre coil ? ( hint.. trick question )

 

[Laurence Harvey]

How much wire is there in a 2 metre coil ? ( hint.. trick question )

...is it 37.7 metres?

 

[bernardgreen]

..is it 37.7 metres?

No

 

[Laurence Harvey]

No

...is it 12 metres?

 

[stem]

It's no good asking me! I don't know the difference between 1m & 100m

 

[bernardgreen]

...is it 12 metres?

Much less than a metre