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This is just an anecdote, but it’s over a decade old, so I don’t think I’m giving away any secret sauce. When I worked on Prime we were trying to build a progr
by jonhohle 3y ago
This is just an anecdote, but it’s over a decade old, so I don’t think I’m giving away any secret sauce.
When I worked on Prime we were trying to build a program to get the top 100 items that someone would want within an hour fulfillable in large metro areas (e.g. milk, batteries, toilet paper, whatever you frequently run to the store for because you need it now and it can’t wait).
To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to go inventory Walmarts. One day it was reported that on the end caps of a particular Walmart were clipboards with all of the inventory in that particular isle. The contractor photo’s each page and was never questioned and it cut down on research time significantly.
- gruez 3y ago>To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to go inventory Walmarts How would this work? Is the assumption that more items on shelves = more sales volume? What if some items have less items on shelves but are restocked more regularly?
- maxbond 3y ago[ES: Speculation] If you're sampling at or above the Nyquist rate, so presumably twice a day, you'll be able to capture changes in inventory. If you are also recording dates on boxes, you should be able to distinguish between sales and waste. Eg, you recorded an item as expiring tomorrow, and the next day it expires in 3 months - it probably got thrown away without being purchased. (Though this probably wouldn't work with things they can change dates on, like bakery items. It's a health code violation but a ubiquitous one.)
- maxbond 3y agoIt occurs to me that the refrigerators around the outside where high turnover items like milk and butter are kept are designed with a back door in the warehouse area so that they can be stocked throughout the day, so you would probably need to get more creative to accurately inventory the milk.
- utensil4778 3y agoRetailers like Walmart put significant effort into designing where a particular item goes in the store and how many of them. They use their own internal inventory statistics and whatever other creepy information they can get to decide what items go at eye level, or near the entrance or exit, how many on a shelf, etc. It probably works quite well. Amazon is scraping up all the effort that Walmart spent researching market demand in a given location.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoUsed to work at a F500 that dealt with Walmart a lot Walmart said, explicitly and unambiguously, absolutely none of their data was to go on or anywhere near AWS. They believed they had credible concerns about data security and absolutely required Azure or GCP or other providers. We had a lot of MS SQL Enterprise licenses so bundling those with Azure was cost effective enough, and that was that.
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah I'm kinda surprised our company is all in on Microsoft cloud services. Because we compete with them in some areas. If Amazon does such things why not MS? I mean they have our everything.
- mr_toad 3y agoWhat makes you think that Microsoft wouldn’t compete with their customers? Embrace, extend, extinguish was their unofficial motto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- wkat4242 3y agoNo I do think that. I'm just amazed my work is so all-in on MS, they trust them completely.
- jasondigitized 3y agoWorked with Walmart as a software vendor. Can confirm. You did not ever ever say the word AWS.
- jrockway 3y agoThere goes my expression "Nobody ever got fired for picking AWS" ;)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]