Stocking Parts

A person goes to the hospital emergency room because they are having a heart attack. The surgeons need to put in a stent to clear an artery. The surgeon asks for a size eight stent. The reply comes back that there is no size eight in stock. They hand him a size ten and he says that is too large. Then they give him two size four's and he approves of them for use in surgery. When the patient gets the bill for the stents they cost $8000 each or $16,000. No effort was made to go to a store room to get the proper size and no effort was made to have emergency supplies on hand. In this very real example the hospital profits handsomely for not properly managing their stock of stents. This scenario is played out time and again millions of times a day around the world. Although the sums of money are much smaller business fail to keep adequate stocks of parts and materials and turn around and charge their customers for special parts runs and extra labor to remedy the problem. A plumber comes to your house to install some plumbing for a dishwasher. He is charging you for time by the hour and the cost of materials. In the interim he makes several trips to the hardware store to get parts to get common parts that any plumber would have on his truck. Here again the business is being rewarded for bad management and the bad management will continue as long as there is a profit in it. Honest business people in this situation simply do not charge the homeowner for time spent getting parts the ordinarily should carry on their truck. When the plumber signed up for the job they had plenty of time to shop for all the parts they needed. And in this example the parts they needed were so common they should have had ample supplies on their truck. If this is an isolated case of not having parts on hand there is little evidence that anything unethical has transpired. But, if the plumber frequently makes trips for parts while on a job week after week and year after year the tactical under stocking of parts should be considered exploitative and unethical behavior.

• Bad Management
• Inefficiency
• Over Pricing