Monday, March 11, 2019

Jack Daniel's is what's wrong with the PLCB's "catalog"

I've been writing about this for years, and still the PLCB can't quite get the listings for their #1 selling whiskey correct. Just imagine the lack of effort they put into less important items! Or, more likely, probably nothing is considered important and they screw up everything equally.

I like writing about the PLCB's historic inability to get their inventory correct. If I ever need an illustrative example of how incompetent they are, I know I can rely on good old Jack. He never fails me.

And talk about non-responsive! After eight years of pointing out how incredibly stupid the PLCB is with just this one product, you would think they would tire of being beaten up and fix the situation. How many clerks, managers, directors and senior executives have passed through the PLCB in eight years?  All of them learning how to do things wrong, from the people before them who did it wrong, because that is how they learned it from generations of iron-assed bureaucrats, passed on like a broken piece of PLCB DNA.
I work for the PLCB!
Why do I bring this up? Because there are more Jack Daniel's mistakes.

This time we have one listing in the "bourbon" section. Hey, plenty of people argue that Jack can be considered a bourbon, so that isn't bad right off. Only the company doesn't think so, and labels it as "Tennessee whiskey." More importantly -- when you're searching for it -- all the other correct PLCB entries list it as "whiskey." There is the continuing error (going on a couple of years now) of one item listed as a "blended whiskey"  but Jack Daniel doesn't make a "blended whiskey." The confusion Jack Daniel's new rye creates in the PLCB is comical. One entry is correctly under "straight rye," and the other is not.

As they say, this ain't rocket surgery. The sad thing is, an error rate of almost 7% on just one brand family is pretty good when compared to how they've been doing...until you compare it to the inventory accuracy of all but the most poorly run of businesses. People would be fired for years of error rates that high; hell, they'd be shown the door for a few months of it. This is the poster child for "You had one job..."

But that is what you get when they don't have to care. Hang around, get seniority, get a 2% raise, salt away that pension, and wait for your 30.  Confucius said: "It matters not how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop" and it seems the PLCB has taken it to heart.  They certainly aren't moving very fast and they aren't stopping to fix the problem.

I suppose they may finally get this right, and I'll have to find another go to subject. I'll miss it, though. There are dozens of errors in the bourbon and rye categories, but nothing so consistent, so reliable, as how the PLCB manages to screw up JD.
Sounds like the PLCB to me.

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