Empty Shelf

It's one of those voices over the phone where...you just kinda expect there to be trouble.

It was a customer, who started the conversation with "I was in there early today and your cashier, the young man...what's his name?" 
Which...isn't always the best sentence starters to be greeted with because it usually spells trouble in one or another.
And considering I recognized the accent of the customer on the other side...meaning I'd dealt with them myself in the recent past....
I was expecting it to not be a good conversation. 

So the customer had been in the store earlier today to buy a certain kind of dog food.
Only...our shelf was empty.
Which the customer was not happy with because the shelf had been empty like the last twoish times that they'd been in the store. 
And when the customer had talked to our cashier, our cashier had said something about it maybe being on the truck.
Which...even though we had a truck come in...we don't work it until the next morning because we can't ever guarantee when the truck is going to arrive. So to save on the hassle of having people scheduled to work the truck...and no truck showing up...we just work it the day after.

In any case. 
The customer seemed to think that we'd have worked the truck already...even though we wouldn't have.
But they wanted to know when we could expect to get that particular dog food in. Because the customer has beagle puppies and they wanted to feed said puppies a certain kind of dog food, but they didn't want to buy the large bag of dog food because they had no where to store it. Instead they wanted like the small 2lb bags of the food. Which...okay?

But I also knew why I knew this customer's voice now.
It's because I'd helped them like last week or the week before....with the same problem.
Them needing to buy that certain type of dog food. 
*exhales* Which either meant that we hadn't yet gotten in a truck carrying that food, that it had come in and had already sold out again, or....our inventory was potentially off (as sometimes mistakes happen and things get lost/ruined/nevercamein/broken) and so our inventory thinks we have the thing when we actually don't.

So I offered to find a scanner for the customer on the phone to double check our inventory. 
As that would also give me a better idea of what our stock said. As well as to when we could possibly expect another shipment of the food.

I pulled up the info on the scanner....and was told that our inventory stated we actually had 6 bags of the small size she was looking for.
Only...the shelf was empty.

Which meant it was either an inventory error...or we had those bags elsewhere in the store.
I put the customer on hold.
Did a little digging -and chatting with the stocking manager---
And found out that there was a shipper -a display of that brand of dog food in our center aisle.
-Which those come and go so frequently it's hard to keep track of what random products are actually there. 

Turns out....the customer's missing bags of food were on that shipper.

So I was able to return to the customer on the phone and tell them that I had tracked down some bags.
And they ended up putting three on hold so they could come grab them later.

:) Yay for being able to help the customer! Woot. 

-Sarnic Dirchi