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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Here’s some ASIN trivia from my time at Amazon in the early 10’s. At least at that time, there was exactly one inventory item at Amazon that could change ASINs during its lifetime: Amazon Fresh used different ASINs for green bananas and yellow bananas.

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That sounds like an inventory keeping nightmare! You buy 4000 units of green bananas and end the month having 0 units left, having sold none... while you somehow managed to sell 2200 yellow bananas you didn't even have and on top of that lost another 1800 (that never even existed!) to spoilage.

And then you introduce double entry accounting in your stock management and hell breaks loose.

That seems like it would require tensor calculus.

and a crazy training of all your new hires.

If a banana ripens in a forest and nobody is around to see it, does its ASIN change?

And weirdly, if there were no trees around [it], it wouldn't even be [called] a forest.

I would love to hear from a botanist/banana-related person what a bunch of banana plants are called. Are there similar differing names as for groups of various animals?

I never worked with Fresh. Among the more fun things so was getting X-ASINs to work at 3PL sites...

Seriously so, Amazon's ASINs are among the best part number systems I encountered in my life so far. And it is incredibly scaleable as well!

I don’t know if I’m more surprised that Amazon Fresh existed in the early 10s or that Amazon Fresh sold green bananas in that timeframe.

Fresh dates back to 07, actually, though it was delivery-based and almost entirely in Seattle originally. They have gone through a few pivots since then.

I knew it started here, now I just feel very old haha.

Really? Amazon (now) sells thousand of things that have an expiration date. I hope they track this.

Ah, I read the rest of the article: "They are using a new ASIN for each new expiration date on a given product."

I wonder if they have a different ASIN per batch on products where batches matter. Something like fabrics are not created identically each run, so getting all your fabric for one project from the same batch is important, otherwise the colour difference can be noticeable. Same goes for things like wallpaper, flooring, car wrap etc.

Is it actually a mutate or do you write off greens and add new yellows?

No idea hoe Amazon did it, but I suspect a inventory transfer from green to yellow. That is properly tracked and accounted. You never use inventory adjustments to move inventory, as tose are literally shooting inventory into the aether (negative adjustments) and creating inventory out of thin air (positive ones), resulting in zero inventory tranparency or traceability.

If you're Enron, you count both as being in the inventory

I heard this second hand; I don’t actually know how the inventory for Fresh worked at the time.

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