Misco reaps harvest of rage in Twitter Touchpad debacle

Does it matter?

The people they've allegedly pissed off are the ones who are only interested in bargain-bucket pricing, and those people also tend to be the ones who return goods with made-up faults ("I cleaned it and it no longer works; what do you mean it's not dishwasher proof?")

All in all, I don't think Misco will suffer.

Sold out?

Let me guess... thousands of punters heard of an imminent price drop on Tweeter, and in an effort to beat the rush bought up stock at full price in the hope that Misco would refund them the difference when the price drop came into effect...

I suspect Misco are going to have a lot of returns shortly.

WTF? Marketing men tell fibs?

Right up there with Estate Agents, Personal Injury Lawyers and Bankers in my mind.

/title

this problem wasnt exclusive to Misco.

We tried many companies on Monday, who had "plenty of stock".....only on Tuesday morning when new prices were announced, that miraculously all their stock had gone.

A sales person at Insight stated "the company are likely to do a price drop around 1pm so staff can take advantage of the offer during their lunch break".

I'd wager that company staff obtained the majority. Still some shi$$y jobs need to have some perks.

not the only shysters on the hill

Currys claim to be in stock for in store collection but no stores anywhere have them,

Tesco price matching! at £429 to Argos, stock levels magically 0 even with the inflated costs

Argos out of stock etc etc

Did any of these companies actually have any stock to start with? It was reported HP had a clogged channel of many hundreds of thousands of these items and whoosh, in minutes they had gone across the UK.

Given the number of alternatives being offered by the sites that lure people in I wonder if some regulator shouldnt be taking an interest in these sharp practices, after all, pretending to have an item at a price when you dont isnt legal.

Some Facts

OK, "The people they've allegedly pissed off" ARE pissed off. And being a top level premier customer that spends over £130K a year with them I'm not exactly one of the "bargain-bucket" demographic. To clarify there were roughly 300 units in total, about 130 of the 32Gig and about 170 of the 16Gig, so slightly more than 20. As of 10am this morning there were still units showing as in stock on Misco's own system, dispite an email from neer the top saying that they had all been sold. This meens that either someone is talking out their are, or someone has sold the units in a manner that circumvents the internal stock management of the company. The price reduction information was not even passed over to the sales team internal, never mind to the punters who were hanging out to buy the product. As of close of play yesterday there was no information given on pricing, as of 9:30am this morhing there was still no infotmation on pricing given, as of 10am this morning all units had apparently been sold, dispite the sales system being locked out of those product codes to the level that the couldn't even be accessed to create a quote never mind a sale, and there was still no information on pricing. So yeah, I'm pissed off, not because I didn't get what I have never had, but because some one high and mighty in Misco has clearly pulled a fast one and screwed over the customers who were waiting for this to go through.

Misco screwed up? I don't think so.

Is this really a *news* story? I've looked at Misco_UK's tweets and see nothing untoward...

1) Company selling item.

2) People asking for item to be sold at low price.

3) Company promises to look into it.

4) Item sells out.

5) Some people get angry at them.

I beleive the same thing happened with play.com yesterday, but did you report that El Reg?

The "rage" that's followed is hardly a righteous condemnation. I know the Twitterati can usually be a force for good, combatting evil corporate commercial overlords, but the conspiracy theories put forward by the digital pitchfork-wielding mob are nothing short of ludicrous...

If a product is sold out, it's sold out. Get over it. The daft conspiracy theory that Misco or any other company don't want to sell their stock has no rational explanation at all. Did David Icke come up with this piece? Are you going to pen diatribes against ticketmaster every time they sell out of gig tickets for A-list bands or major festivals?

I was chasing the Touchpad on nine IT resellers yesterday, and I saw Dabs, Equanet and Expansys websites fall down, and they also got a bit of verbal from Twitter followers.

Misco's ebay sales went down the same time it vanished off their website, but your reporter doesn't mention that fact, he chose to mention some inaccurate gossip instead. I won't boycot Misco but then I've never bought a thing of them. I think I will now in an 'anti-boycot' move!

Still don't have a Touchpad, but I am proud not to be part of the tin-foil-hatted nutters ranting at the 'shock' of a very-much-in-demand item being unavailable.

Not even available on EPP

HP have probably urinated the $1.6bn, spent on Palm, up the wall here. Or lets say £7k per worldwide employee.

Yesterday you could not see them on EPP. This morning there were listed at £106 for a 32GB or £69 for a 16GB version on the EPP site. All a waste of time when HP were out of stock anyway.

So staff get F'all pay rises again as HP try to recoup the loss per unit of over £100, the write off on dev costs of future hardware and potential write off if WebOS doesn't find licencees.

All that and we don't even get first sniff of the bargain.

Mark Turd bought Palm. I hope Leo has a plan and this and the float offf of PSG is a brave decision that makes HP strong rather than the cock up it seems to be right now

Don't Forget Amazon UK

Amazon UK also screwed EVERYONE that placed an order for the 89quid HP Touchpad.

They cancelled every order 2 days later (today).

I'm one of them and I'm beyond furious.

I sat back after having successfully placed my order and though - "right, I can just leave all this madness now 'cause Amazon has me covered".

Then they cancelled all orders. Twitter is full of people complaining about it.

If I'd known that they weren't going to fulfil my order I could have tried Argos or Dabs before they sold out.

Shower of.... #$&*^£$%

Tesco are in this club too

Misco are not the only villains in this saga. Tesco did exactly the same. Two days ago I rang them to see if they would be dropping their prices in line with other retailers and was told that prices on the website are updated at 12am. As a result I stayed up to try and catch this but there was no change. The following morning I checked again and was gob smacked to see that although the prices had not changed they were sold out of all stock! Again I rang Tesco but just got lame excuses that the stock had amazingly been sold at current prices. More like backdoor staff discounts!

Last time I will purchase anything from them. Never should have left you

Did anyone else have this experience?

Insert amusing title here

My wife managed to get one from our local Staples store in Torquay. She said that they had 1 32GB one left (which she got) and 1 16GB one. I tried later on at a couple of places but all had sold out. This was the day after the price cut. She was looking for a tablet and was prepared to pay £400 for one, so she was pretty lucky to snap one up (although she did make the mistake of paying full price for a case at Argos!).

I do wonder if some staff had snapped some of them up and it was a bit of a shame that I didn't get one like many other folks too, but I guess it's just one of those things, sometimes you're lucky (like the times when eTailers screw up pricing and sell TVs for a quid or something) and sometimes you're not.

Maybe eventually some manufacturers will be able to get their tablet pricing down to these sort of levels for a half decent spec tablet (even the cheap Chinese ones don't seem to be too close spec wise). Personally I'll stick with my laptop a bit longer :-)

Rob