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Even that big players can't track there own stock. Recently I wanted a toy at toys-r-us, but found out the only way to get it was to call every local store onc
by icefox 16y ago
Even that big players can't track there own stock. Recently I wanted a toy at toys-r-us, but found out the only way to get it was to call every local store once a day until someone had it in stock. I paid the scalper fee and bought it on ebay. Similarly I wanted to rent a specific (more expensive) car with Avis. The only way to do it was to click on each office, put in my dates and see what they had, one by one. There was absolutely no way to search for a car to find out where it was or would be. I ended up just renting the cheapo car. You would think tracking your inventory would be a solved problem in this day in age for a company of either of these sizes.
- patio11 16y agoYou'd be gobsmacked how many big companies totally missed the boat on core, defining technologies, due to failure of vision, switching costs, or just belief that it did not matter for them. Hopefully they will be made into lunchmeat by their competitors, but that is not a law of nature. There are banks that still require humans to make credit decisions with $2,000 of maximum risk to the bank. There are airlines where rebooking a ticket requires getting three humans together on a telephone call. There are retailers who do not know how much of their bestselling product is on the shelves. There are retailers who do not know what their bestselling product is right now, but who can give you a pretty good guess two weeks from now. There are e-commerce companies who do not do A/B testing yet. There are newspapers who do not SEO. There are publishers who think that paper is the future of their industry. The list goes on and and and on.
- tibbon 16y agoAdditionally, there are still businesses that use 3-column ledger paper for their books, write all receipts manually, accept cash only, have no web presence at all (of their own), and use mechanical cash registers. Unfortunately, the presence of technology does not always mean adoption of technology even if the benefits seem crystal clear to most others.
- Poiesis 16y agoThis seems to me to be ("simply") a failure of marketing. If you can demonstrate value, then you would generally be a deployed solution. But you have to get that message out there, and if your target market is stuck in the stone age SEO isn't really going to be quite as helpful.
- mistermann 16y agoThe mid-sized (but nationwide) courier company we use in Canada for our web based business does not have a web service interface for us to add new customers to our customer database on their site. So when we get an order from a new customer, we have to log in to the website and enter all this information manually. This seems to be considered reasonable, according to several people I talked to on the phone. They have much lower rates and we have low volumes for now, otherwise we would have switched to one of the big names long ago. If these guys are still in business, it makes me think the big, efficient couriers must be hugely profitable.
- astrofinch 16y agoStarbucks, Chipotle, Nike, Apple, Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods, and Google all seem to me like examples of x done right for some x. But for each of example like those there are probably ten more xs that haven't been done right.
- icefox 16y agoTalking about being lunchmeat. I did notice that Target lets you put in an item and it will tell you which store in your local area has it in stock. Since than I have made purchases at Target, but not toysrus.
- crsmith 16y agoWasn't RFID supposed to fix this by now?
- _pius 16y agoThat and the Semantic Web.
- vdm 16y agoRFID will only contribute when all the stuff in Mom and Pop stores ends up having RFID tags. Then other people will start building systems that use them. But who takes the leap of faith and pays for putting RFID tags in everything they make, with little or no chance of a return? Chicken and egg.