Strangely befuddled
 

I must say its a pretty strange way of running a business.

I queried an up and coming shipment of livestock from a store to see what they were getting as I'm waiting for a certain fish, only to be told they don't know what they are getting and to call later to find out what they had.

This seems rather a backwards method of doing ordering, do you contact a supplier and go, well put stuff in a box and surprise me?

I've worked in pet stores before and normally you order off a list, specially if you have a wait list of people wanting certain things, granted its still out of whats available at that time of year/what has been caught.

And if you say, give me the surprise box, surely there should be a list sent to you in advance so you can prepare, would be a rather silly thing to have 20 black tip reef sharks show up and not have anywhere to put them...

Its not the way they want to run their business. It's the norm, ask any shop and they will tell you the same story. They do put in orders as per a list but it's at the other end where things go wonky. Fish expectedly get sick before shipment, the order before just took the last one, ship unexpected replacements. etc etc etc. it's especially bad if they are ordering direct from off shore suppliers.

Ordering from the list is really just a wish list. The inventory will show you that there are 50 of fish X in stock, but you have hundreds of stores ordering. So, out of the 50 fish you asked for, you get maybe 10. The box still needs to be filled for shipping costs, so you get what they actually have in stock. It's just the way it's done.

Granted, nothing goes according to plan with livestock ordering ever, doesn't matter what you are ordering be it birds, fish etc, but surely the supplier sends an invoice. Or some kind of note saying you can't get x but we put in w y and z.
I always knew what I was getting in advance of the shipment at my store.

Suppliers send invoices the morning they ship. Pretty standard, unfortunately.

The only time you're going to know what you're getting in advanced falls down to one of two situations:

A. You have prepaid for something special, be it a rare/unusual find or a sale offer.

B. You more or less only order bread and butter -- The second you stray out of Coral Beauties, Green Chromis and Yellow Tangs, it's a crap shoot.