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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

> I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is. This is an incredible consumer experience.

Notice how associates used to have custom apps to do the same thing? And now how they just pull up the website too, when you ask them?

It's almost like someone had the brilliant idea of unifying an internal and external tool that both did the same thing, and devoting more resources to making the result work better than either ever did.

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> It's almost like someone had the brilliant idea of unifying an internal and external tool that both did the same thing, and devoting more resources to making the result work better than either ever did.

This is super powerful when applied to tools, but also docs, pricing and decisions. At my current job, whenever we make a rule around licensing or pricing, we publish it to our external facing FAQ. This means that the sales people consult the same info as the customer can.

Many customers choose to cut out the sales folks and read the FAQs, which is fine. Some choose not to. Some choose to read the FAQ and chat with the sales folks for further details.

But having one place where everyone can go lets people consume that info as they wish, as well as acting as a forcing function for keeping it up to date.

It frustrates me that our org chooses to hide a lot of the FAQs behind the help desk. The higher ups think this is like "white glove service", but in practice, it's so much slower for anyone who has the slightest idea about the what they're looking for, and because everyone has to go through the desk, they're sometimes overwhelmed. That leads to way more escalations than there otherwise would be (which leads to the non-higher ups having to focus more on answering tickets and less on what they're paid to do).

That stinks.

I like the best of both worlds:

   * publish as much as you can online (it's not like another page in the CMS costs you anything, really)
   * make it very easy and clear how to contact a human, in case the online content doesn't answer my question

But I could see how implementing only one or the other would be counterproductive.

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.

I 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.

NumStolen, NumScannedAsOneThingButActuallyAnother, NumLost...

Stolen, moved around in store by customer, put in the front special deal display..

A 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.

They still do, but it usually only happens a few times per year.

You forgot NumStolen, NumPickedUpAndDroppedElsewhere, and NumEatenBySquirrels. Shrinkage is relentless.

If 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.

And numStolen.

>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.

Wasn't there a store that was serving up a modified version of their site on in-store terminals with higher prices or something? CompUSA? Or was it Best Buy?

It was Best Buy.

Alot of stores futz with location. Target used to show higher prices within the friendly confines as well.

BestBuy - And I think they even hijacked DNS and rerouted you to the higher priced site if you were on their guest wifi in store.

I hadn't noticed this and am fascinated (and confused)- mind if I ask y'all questions to get more details?

Like, if I see a price on the website on my home network (the lower one, yes?) then I go to the store and look it up again then I see the higher one, yes? But once I'm standing in front of the item there's a paper label on the item (or on the shelf under the item) telling me what the price is, yes?

What's the point of displaying different prices in different places?

Is it only for "online only" items that they're offering to let you purchase while you're standing in their stores?

They want to convince you to buy it then and there - if you're looking at a doodad at Best Buy and it's priced on the shelf at $40, and you look at it online at Best Buy and it's $50, you're gonna be like "this is a steal I best grab it now".

If their online price is lower than their in-store price, if you go to price-match at the checkout, the website will show the higher price. But at home it will show the lower price.

Lowes does this as well. They not only point you to the Isle, but they also have indicators that show you where in the Isle it is. Spent 10 minutes looking for an item before I pulled up their website and felt like the biggest idiot.

Really? I shop at Lowe's a lot. I often find isle numbers like BW. I assume that means something like "Back Wall" but, nope. There is no map that I'm aware of and no indication where it might be on an isle (save a bay number, which is almost always wrong). It is "good enough" to get me in the vicinity on some products but not others. A store map showing me where isle BW is would be a great addition.

At least in my local stores, things have frequently been rearranged to be in a different location and the online inventory didn’t get updated. So I have to find an associate and ask anyway. Home Depot seems to be much better at it.

This is a great idea in theory. Although per usual the rubber hits the road when people need to find the physical item. If the stores aren’t organized or the employees don’t know where things are - you end up with a situation where now everyone is at the mercy of what the computers tell them.

I’ve had a few experiences where the site tells me something is stocked but an hour later I leave without what I came for.

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