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I imagine there was an investment in updating the local inventory. For internal tools, it seems to be fine to have more approximate data. People seem to offer t
by pfranz 5y ago
I imagine there was an investment in updating the local inventory. For internal tools, it seems to be fine to have more approximate data. People seem to offer to "check in the back" (whether that exists or not). For public facing tools that's a lot less acceptable.
Home Depot isn't /perfect/ in that regard. It'll often see "a few left" or "call for inventory" and I've had to hunt down people to find moving boxes in a store that didn't seem to carry a lot and moved them around on various end-caps. But it's way better than any other retail store I've seen. Getting that last little bit must have been difficult.
- karmanyaahm 5y agoI don't understand how this works, but shouldn't it be as simple as NumAvailable = NumIn - NumSold - NumDamaged? NumSold and NumIn are ofc eady to keep track of, and NumDamaged could just be like a portable barcode scanning device that the staff scans with whenever putting away a broken item.
- jamincan 5y agoNumStolen, NumScannedAsOneThingButActuallyAnother, NumLost...
- capitainenemo 5y agoStolen, moved around in store by customer, put in the front special deal display..
- ghaff 5y agoA lot of stores used to do things like close for part of a day to do inventory. I assume there is still some syncing up during the night or whatever. But I also assume that, as with many things, many stores have probably been willing to trade off a degree of accuracy for reduced costs.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoThey still do, but it usually only happens a few times per year.
- michael1999 5y agoYou forgot NumStolen, NumPickedUpAndDroppedElsewhere, and NumEatenBySquirrels. Shrinkage is relentless.
- ethbr0 5y agoIf the world were a deterministic computer system, yes. It is not. For instance, NumIn would indicate how many received at the store, no? But what then? It needs to physically exist somewhere. The display? Overflowing onto the overhead? Overflowing onto the next overhead over? Pushed to the back of the overhead behind something else? Kept in the back because there's no room anywhere? For 10,000+ different products or so per store.
- tapatio 5y agoAnd numStolen.
- nsv 5y ago>For internal tools, it seems to be fine to have more approximate data It's moreso that completely accurate inventory takes an incredible amount of resources and man power to maintain, and you get diminishing returns the closer you try to get to 100%. Retail is a big industry and there are many very talented people working on this problem. Retail orders are done automatically based on inventory, and if the numbers are off, either too little will be ordered (out of stock = lost profit) or too much (backstock = man hours spent dealing with it). So there's a clear profit motive to have tight inventory. This is a much bigger deal to these stores than whether the numbers are internal or customer facing.