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Comment by nerfhammer | Hacker News Reader

One thing I appreciate about home depot's web site: they'll tell you not only whether the item is in stock, but exactly where in a given store it's located

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Walmart app does this too actually. The main problem is that their inventory tracker is wildly inaccurate. I went looking for an item they claimed to have 4 of, and they in fact had none.

I think for a store as busy and understaffed as Walmart, real inventory gets to be a big guessing game.

Why? They know what items are being delivered to the store, they know when they are delivered and they know what they sold. Ignoring inventory numbers being slightly off due to shrinkage, if you just connect the systems you can get a pretty accurate real time count.

And most importantly they have only one listing for the same item. In Amazon and Walmart you have multiple listings of the same product by different sellers at different prices. In Amazon it's really annoying to see several pages of basically the same product.

Amazon tries to coalesce these pages together in a single product-detail page with multiple offers. Sellers frequently try to avoid this coalescing (because otherwise, they're only competing on price). This could be as simple as pad printing a meaningless 5-6 character brand onto the product [making it technically different] or by making the description slightly different.

Yeah, it's a tough problem to solve. But I understand their complaint, it's often an identical product with a different name painted on it, pages and pages.

My favorite was a handheld coffee grinder. The item was unbranded, and the manual had some brand name manually scratched out with an inkpen everywhere it was mentioned. It's actually a nice coffee grinder, believe it or not.

Target does this as well. Super useful to get in and out, limiting my contact with potentially infectious people - though I usually use their curbside.

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