Customer Experience Story

“They’ll Just Buy Something Else”

I once heard this from a very senior procurement professional at one of America's best quick-service restaurant brands. Outwardly, I responded calmly. 'Oh.' Inside, I was raging. Not because it was malicious — but because it revealed a quiet hubris: the assumption that customers will simply adapt to whatever the system delivers.

The Moment

When Trust Breaks

Great Brands Are Built on the Opposite Belief

They exist because they relentlessly focus on what the customer wants, when they want it. Substitution is not the standard.

They Thought About It All Day

A customer has been craving a specific menu item. They chose your brand over every competitor.

They Showed Up

They drove to the restaurant, waited in line, and finally reached the counter — ready to order.

"Sorry, We're Out of That Today"

Trust is broken. They may still buy something else, but the disappointment registers. Repeated outages quietly erode loyalty — even if short-term sales appear unaffected.

The Principle

Every Missed Sale Matters

The Goal Is Simple: Never Miss a Sale

By the time a customer is standing in your restaurant ready to order, the entire system — marketing, operations, supply chain — has already invested in that moment. Don't waste it.

Marketing Created Demand

Advertising, promotions, and brand-building drove the customer to want this specific product.

The Customer Chose You

Out of every option available, they picked your brand. That choice is earned — and fragile.

They Showed Up With Money in Hand

If the product they want isn't available, the brand has squandered that opportunity — and potentially weakened the relationship.

The Root Cause

Inventory Management Isn’t Enough

These Are Symptoms, Not Root Causes

The deeper issue is supplier risk: production capacity, ingredient availability, packaging, logistics, and labor at the supplier level. Managing supplier risk addresses the root causes of outages rather than just reacting at the store.

Store Misorders

Forecasting errors at the restaurant level lead to insufficient stock on hand.

Distribution Misallocations

Warehouses and distribution centers route product to the wrong locations at the wrong times.

Late Trucks

Logistics delays ripple through the system, leaving restaurants short during peak hours.

Labor Disruptions at Supplier Facilities

Staffing shortages at supplier plants reduce production capacity before product ever leaves the facility.

The Real Cost of Stockouts

Industry research shows just how much “they'll buy something else” actually costs

~4%

Average retail stockout rate across the industry

$1T+

Annual global lost sales from out-of-stock items

21-43%

Customers who switch brands or stores after a stockout

72%

Stockouts caused by upstream supplier issues, not store-level errors

The Lesson

Lessons from Yum! Brands

The guiding philosophy: never miss a sale. Never write off inventory unnecessarily. Forced obsolescence — ending a promotion on a fixed date even when inventory remains — is wasteful and inconsistent with the entrepreneurial spirit that built these brands.

Aggressively Manage Supplier Risk

Don't wait for an outage to discover your vulnerabilities. Proactively assess production capacity, ingredient availability, and labor stability at the supplier level.

Make Thoughtful Obsolescence Decisions

Inventory that expires due to slow sales is sometimes inevitable. But ending a promotion on a fixed date while inventory remains? That's a choice — and usually the wrong one.

Care Deeply About Never Disappointing a Customer

Customers work hard for their money. When they choose your brand, they trust you to deliver what they want, when they want it. That trust is the most valuable thing you have.

The Takeaway

Respecting the Customer’s Money

Anything Less Quietly Erodes the Trust That Makes a Brand Valuable

The procurement leader who said "they'll just buy something else" wasn't wrong about the transaction. She was wrong about what matters. The sale might still happen. The loyalty won't.

Substitution Is Not the Standard

The standard is simple: always have what the customer wants, when they want it.

Trust Is Built One Visit at a Time

Every fulfilled expectation strengthens loyalty. Every stockout quietly chips away at it.

The Customer Doesn't See Your Supply Chain

They only see whether you had what they came for. Everything else — the logistics, the suppliers, the forecasting — is your problem to solve, not theirs to tolerate.

What's Your Stockout Costing You?

Every missed sale is a customer who trusted you and walked away disappointed. Quantify your supplier risk before it quantifies itself.
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"They'll Just Buy Something Else"

Six Words That Stopped Me Cold

I once heard this from a very senior procurement professional at one of America’s best-known quick-service restaurant brands. We were discussing supply disruption scenarios — what happens when a key menu item goes out of stock at the store level. His response was casual, almost dismissive.

“They’ll just buy something else.”

Six words. Delivered with the easy confidence of someone who has spent decades in the business and believes, genuinely, that the system is resilient enough to absorb a stockout without meaningful consequence. The customer will pivot. They will choose another menu item. The sale is not lost — it is redirected.

Outwardly, I stayed calm. Inside, I was raging. Not because the statement was malicious — it was not. This was a thoughtful, experienced professional who cared about his company and his role in it. But the statement revealed something that I think is deeply dangerous in supply chain management: a quiet hubris about what customers will tolerate, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what a stockout actually costs.

The Moment Trust Breaks

Picture the customer. They have been thinking about this meal for hours. Maybe since the morning, maybe since they saw an ad on their phone during lunch. They chose this brand over every other option available to them — and in quick-service, the options are nearly infinite. They drove to the location. They waited in line. They pulled out their wallet, ready to exchange money for the specific thing they came for.

“Sorry, we’re out of that today.”

In that moment, something breaks. It is not dramatic. The customer does not yell or storm out or write an angry letter. They smile politely, glance at the menu board, and order something else. Or maybe they say “no thanks” and leave. Either way, the interaction looks fine from the outside. The line keeps moving. The register keeps ringing.

But something has changed. The implicit promise that the brand made through its marketing, its advertising, its very existence — we will have what you want, when you want it — has been broken. And while any single instance might be forgiven, the erosion is cumulative. Each stockout chips away at the reflexive trust that makes a customer choose your brand over the one across the street.

What Great Brands Understand

Great brands do not become great by being adequate. They become great by relentlessly, obsessively focusing on delivering what the customer wants, when the customer wants it. The entire apparatus of a quick-service restaurant — the marketing that creates awareness, the menu development that creates desire, the operations that create consistency — exists to do one thing: make sure that when a customer shows up with money in hand, the transaction happens.

Marketing spent millions creating the demand. The brand invested years building the trust. The customer did their part — they chose you, they showed up, they were ready to buy. And at the final moment, the moment of conversion, the supply chain failed to deliver.

“They’ll just buy something else” treats that failure as trivial. It treats substitution as an acceptable outcome rather than what it actually is: a broken promise that cost real money to create.

The Roots Go Deeper Than the Store

When a stockout happens at the store level, it is tempting to treat it as a store-level problem. The manager misordered. The forecast was off. Someone did not check the walk-in cooler. These things happen, and they are fixable with better processes and training.

But the data tells a different story. Approximately 72% of stockouts in retail and foodservice are caused not by store-level errors but by upstream supplier issues. Late trucks from distribution centers. Misallocations at the warehouse level. Labor disruptions at supplier processing facilities. Quality holds that pull product out of the supply chain. Capacity constraints that prevent a supplier from fulfilling orders in full.

The store manager who runs out of a key ingredient at 7 PM on a Friday night is often the last person to experience a problem that originated days or weeks earlier, somewhere deep in the supply chain that they cannot see and cannot control. The stockout is the symptom. The disease is supplier risk that was never identified, quantified, or mitigated.

The Numbers Behind “Something Else”

The comforting fiction of “they’ll just buy something else” does not survive contact with the data.

The average retail stockout rate hovers around 4%. That sounds small until you consider the scale. Global lost sales from stockouts exceed $1 trillion annually. One trillion dollars in transactions that customers wanted to make but could not, because the product was not available.

And the substitution assumption — the idea that the sale is not lost but merely redirected — is contradicted by the research. Studies consistently show that 21-43% of customers who encounter a stockout will switch brands. Not items — brands. They will leave your restaurant and go to the competitor across the street. They will leave your store and order from someone else. The sale is not redirected. It is gone, along with some portion of that customer’s future loyalty.

For a quick-service restaurant brand, where the entire business model depends on habitual, repeat visits driven by consistent experience, those numbers should be terrifying. Every stockout is not just a missed sale — it is a small but measurable increase in the probability that the customer will not come back, or will come back less frequently, or will start defaulting to a different brand when they are deciding where to eat.

Lessons from Those Who Get It Right

The organizations that take stockouts seriously — truly seriously, not just in their mission statements — operate with a fundamentally different mindset. I have seen this firsthand at companies like Yum! Brands, where the approach to supplier risk is not passive but aggressive.

They manage supplier risk proactively, treating it as a strategic function rather than an operational afterthought. They do not wait for disruptions to reveal vulnerabilities — they actively seek them out, quantify them, and build mitigation plans before the disruption arrives.

They make thoughtful obsolescence decisions. When a menu item or ingredient needs to be retired, they do it deliberately, with a plan for transitioning customers and supply. Forced obsolescence — running out of something and hoping no one notices — is treated as waste, because it is. Every unit of demand that goes unfulfilled is value that was created by marketing and destroyed by operations.

And most importantly, they care deeply, at every level of the organization, about never disappointing a customer. Not because they are sentimental, but because they understand the economics. The cost of acquiring a customer is high. The cost of retaining one is low. And the cost of losing one to a preventable stockout is absurdly, unnecessarily wasteful.

Substitution Is Not the Standard

The mindset that “they’ll just buy something else” treats substitution as an acceptable baseline. It normalizes failure. It says, implicitly, that the supply chain’s job is not to deliver what the customer wants but to deliver something — and if the customer is flexible enough to accept a substitute, then no real harm was done.

But the customer does not see your supply chain. They do not know about the processing plant that had a labor issue, or the truck that was delayed, or the distribution center that misallocated inventory. They know one thing: they came for something specific, and it was not there. That is the entire experience, and it is the experience they will remember the next time they are deciding where to eat.

Substitution is not a strategy. It is the absence of one. It is what happens when the actual strategy — having the right product in the right place at the right time — fails. And every time we treat substitution as acceptable, we are telling ourselves a story about our supply chain’s resilience that the customer’s experience does not support.

The Real Question

The question is not whether customers will buy something else when their first choice is unavailable. Some will. The question is what it costs you — in lost sales, in lost loyalty, in lost lifetime value — every time you force them to make that choice. And the further question is whether those costs were preventable, if only someone had been paying attention to the risks upstream.

In my experience, the answer to that second question is almost always yes. The supplier risks that drive stockouts are not invisible. They are not unpredictable. They are quantifiable, and they are manageable. What they require is a willingness to look, a system for measuring, and a culture that refuses to accept “they’ll just buy something else” as an answer.

Because the customer who buys something else today might buy from someone else tomorrow. And the procurement professional who shrugs that off is not being realistic about human nature. They are being dangerously wrong about it.