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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote time!

I bought a water softener at HomeDepot about three weeks ago. Initially went to my local Lowes where I had checked if one was in stock and at the store. Yes and Yes. Get to Lowes and there is no water softener, as the website indicated. Lowe's employee checked the back as well, wasn't there.

There are many problems with humans doing this "inventory business" at $10 an hour or so. The professional counts that happen once or so a year by outside agencies wouldn't be necessary otherwise.

To be fair, I've had issues at Home Depot as well... lots of; "The computer says there are 2 in stock... I have no idea where they are."

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You’d think it’d be a simple matter of 1. automatically decrementing a counter when the item is scanned at checkout; and 2. manually decrementing the same counter when you throw things out for breakage or expiry (i.e. pretend the dumpster is a customer and ring up its purchases.)

That would just leave theft, which is usually predictable with ML (this being part of what loyalty cards are for), and doesn’t happen at all for most low/medium-ticket items.

>doesn’t happen at all for most low/medium-ticket items.

Everything gets stolen. Mostly by employees. When I worked retail somebody got away with a treadmill. Just wheeled out the door on a cart, nobody said a thing. Later I was looking for a treadmill after a customer had checked the online stock count, and the system was off by three, not just the one I knew had disappeared.

The other big problem with the counts is just stuff moving around the store. It's a limited physical space, and it isn't all merchandised according to the book. Un-recorded promo displays get set up, things get moved onto top shelves and departments where they don't belong.

I was checking online to verify local stock at Lowes and Home Depot last week. Both websites stated '2' in stock. I had to stop in both stores BC Lowes diddn't have another item I needed, so being curious I checked both stock counts of the item. Both had more than 10, which made me think: if item count >= 2, display 2

Obviously it's not the only explanation, but I assume they use marketing research to help decide what inventory counts to display

Yeah, it isn't perfect. Sometimes I see more variety on the shelves then was reported by the search results. But my primary use case is the store map. It is so easy to get lost in Lowes/Home Depot.

Home Depot's website can actually show you where items are on a map. I discovered this because my local Home Depot used to be a KMart and has the most bizarre layout I've ever seen.

It's too bad Home Depot doesn't have wifi and LTE reception is often crappy inside their big box. This is amazing when it works, but so frustrating most of the time when you can't actually load the info without going outside.

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