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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

I was a pretty regular user of the Go store near my commuter train home.

Lately there are numerous items at my store that have gone out of stock, some of them for a few weeks now, and telling them about it gets a shrug and a "sorry, 'corporate' controls inventory" response. Not sure what 'corporate' means here but okay.

Long story short - Go is a fun thingy but I don't think they're ready for retail. I deleted my app.

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> Not sure what 'corporate' means here but okay.

They mean someone outside the store manages it. Someone who manages across the corporation rather than just at the retail location.

That was meant as an eye roll, as in “if Amazon Seattle already considers this high-visibility project as being an arms-length away, then perhaps it’s not as important as they make it”

Ugh this has happened to Whole Foods too. Evidently they started making the change before Amazon but it's getting worse. I'm still bitter they closed my neighborhood store, but when I make the trek to the next closest one only to find a handful of the items I regularly get are out of stock is frustrating. And it's usually not perishables which I can understand.

In contrast whenever I’m at Trader Joe’s and they are out of an item and I ask, they’ll usually tell which truck it’ll be on within a day or two.

Interesting, at my Trader Joe’s they always ask, and when I do say I couldn’t find something they just shrug and apologize. Ironically this is the TJ’s up the hill from the new Go store mentioned.

Trader Joe's is a bad example, they are notorious for discontinuing items that never return to shelves. This behavior is referenced in this old viral video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdB7GDZY3Pk

They discontinue plenty of things, but the employees are more helpful and more informed than the Amazon example.

This early, they’re probably running costumer/data experiments on out of stock scenarios.

How long can a thing be out of stock before its sales dip upon return? Do users who regularly buy those things stop visiting? Buy other products in the same category? (Do they switch back when stock resumes?). Etc...

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