What do you do with a customer that comes to your site wanting to buy a product you make? Well, if you are Timex you turn him away. I recently saw a Timex watch in a magazine that I wanted. That’s a strong consumer impulse to make a buying decision off of a print image and act on it. That puts Timex in an enviable position at that moment. All they need to do is give me the product I am coming to them to buy. But the first strike against them was that I knew from experience that their website was a mess of flash animation and endless subcategory navigation. So I followed the print directions to look at “select Kohl’s stores.” Well, my local Kohl’s apparently wasn’t select enough so strike two, and onto the website. After spending far too long searching I resorted to the live help chat. Great feature by the way. Unfortunately, the very helpful woman on the other end of the chat told me that the watch in question was only available in those select stores and not on the company website. She would be happy to report my frustration at being unable to buy from them and I wasn’t the first person this happened to. Apparently it’s not enough of a problem for Timex to decide to actually have their advertised product line available for purchase on their website. Telling the customer in this way that you don’t want his business is the kind of retail conversation you don’t want to have. Strike three, Timex.