[Cal578]

FIRST is going above and beyond when they offer free items like that. It's great to work with an organization that not only acknowledges mistakes, but works so diligently to take responsibility for them and to correct them.

That said, I think we (the teams who are consumers of FIRST Choice) need to be careful in our complaints. I've seen many posts that are some variant of "we lost our order due to the restocking problem". That happened to me, too. But it is important to understand that we didn't actually lose an order, because we never had it. If the restocking problem had not occurred, the order would have been rejected to begin with. We only "lost" an order compared to our mistaken belief that we had an order.

It is possible (but I bet a careful analysis of the data would show this only happened to a few teams) that the restocking issue caused a loss in this limited scenario: You were considering ordering two items, one that is close to going out of stock, and one that incorrectly appears to have stock but is actually out. You only have enough credits to get one, and you choose the one that is actually out of stock, and that order is (incorrectly) accepted. By the time you find out that your order must be canceled, the other part has gone out of stock. You've lost out on that order. I'd be curious to find out how many teams actually experienced that.

Where some of us actually lost orders was due to not being able to log in for the first 10 to 15 minutes, so stock was gone before we had a chance to place the order. In that case, there is a reasonable possibility that we could have gotten a valid order in, had we been able to log in at the correct time. That happened to my team, and I have sent an email to FIRST (in response to Kate's email sent out yesterday). It will be interesting to see if they can do anything about it.

It's also been great to see all the constructive suggestions for a better system, on this and other threads. I bet we'll see a much improved FIRST Choice next year. Keep up the great work, everybody!