In clothes stores always finding that anything out on the racks is available in all sizes except your own.

Anyone who has done the Customer Service  course at the Quot Business School will have learnt the importance of the phrase ‘I’ll see if we have any in stock’. Having used it in response to ‘”Have you got this in my size ? ” the well-trained shop assistant will head breezily off to the stockroom through a door marked ‘Staff Only’ and return a few minutes later to say that having searched high and low, sadly, it seems they don’t have your size but they are expecting a delivery on Thursday. This ritual belies one of the best kept trade secrets in the retail business: there is no stockroom. There is no stock nor has there been ever since stores realised that holding stock was a dead stage in the selling process and that all a stockroom was for  seemed to be  providing a job for a grumpy man in a brown coat with a pencil behind his ear. All the merchandise goes straight out onto the shelves, the racks and the rails or it’s in transit into or out of the store. The purpose of that little charade of checking the stockroom was to detain you in the store  while the sales assistant hangs about in the stairwell for long enough for you to  find yourself beguiled by a cheeky little tank top or something which then catches your eye but which you had no intention of buying when came in.  Thus you do not leave empty handed and you do so happy that you have received exemplary customer service in every respect –  except of course being able to buy what you came in for.  However the message of this continual Quot experience is clear – get either bigger or smaller so that you’re a size which is  more readily available.( QQQ**)

(Devondra Mince, Wakefield) - enera