The King's Speech
I thought it would an easy thing to get my mother a copy of The King's Speech on DVD, but it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult. I can get it just about anywhere on BluRay, but on DVD? Nope. I work fairly cloe to the HMV superstore downtown, though, so I checked online to see if they have any. Yep. One.* Fortunately, I have an account with HMV, and thus am able to reserve items. I reserved the DVD, which means they will hold it for me for seven days; I plan to go in on Monday and pick it up.
However, they sent me an e-mail confirming my reservation, which had a whole bunch of disclaimerese tacked onto the end of it. The very last line says this:
For limited quantity items, we reserve the right to decline orders to ensure stock is available for walk-in customers.
You got that? You can reserve things, but if there's only a few left, they'll give them to just anybody who walks in, your reservation be damned. So you can only really reserve things that they have a lot of in stock. You know, enough copies so that you wouldn't actually need a reservation to ensure that you got one.
HMV: Not really understanding why people want to reserve things.
______________________________
*I do not actually believe that they have one in stock. In my experience, any time an online check reveals less than four items, the actual number of items physically in the store is zero. To date, there have been no exceptions to this.
However, they sent me an e-mail confirming my reservation, which had a whole bunch of disclaimerese tacked onto the end of it. The very last line says this:
For limited quantity items, we reserve the right to decline orders to ensure stock is available for walk-in customers.
You got that? You can reserve things, but if there's only a few left, they'll give them to just anybody who walks in, your reservation be damned. So you can only really reserve things that they have a lot of in stock. You know, enough copies so that you wouldn't actually need a reservation to ensure that you got one.
HMV: Not really understanding why people want to reserve things.
______________________________
*I do not actually believe that they have one in stock. In my experience, any time an online check reveals less than four items, the actual number of items physically in the store is zero. To date, there have been no exceptions to this.