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Comment by smileysteve | Hacker News Reader

Thank Goodness. Home Depot is pretty bad at grouping boxes; Your nearby store can have excess everything, but an online order might ship 5 pieces from 5 different stores in a ridiculous amount of boxes; and you'll get one item in 2 days, and 1 item 3 weeks later (which, anecdotally, you end up going to the nearby store for because you just want to complete the project this weekend.)

For what they ship, it's pretty inefficient. Zola or Crate and Barrel might be worse; You buy people house waring gifts, but every size plate in the set comes in a different super large box with quadruple ultra thick bubble wrap, protecting the box inside.

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This has been my exact experience with HD and Walmart. I hesitate to do online shopping with either as it seems so horribly wasteful. My last Walmart online order was various groceries that I assumed would be boxed together. Every item arrived from a different location. I don't ever again want someone driving to my house to deliver a big cardboard box stuffed with padding that contains a single bag of potato chips.

Walmart will literally do the same thing. I order cereal from them because it's cheaper, and they have free delivery. But they split the order into two shipments -- one from the store, one from the warehouse. Walmart is not yet good at this type of logistics.

This is assuming two shipments is "worse" from Walmart's perspective.

Fulfilling 2 of an item from a store might trigger a resupply, which takes truck space, which pushes other, higher-margins out of stock or into danger levels, etc.

Which isn't to say that Walmart's system isn't "dumb", but is to say that it's a very complex system, operating in realtime, and what look like dumb outcomes may in fact be optimized (according to whatever internal goals their logistics system has).

I made the mistake of ordering online from HD once. I found out that they assign the same SKU to different product iterations and you're gambling on whether the one you ordered is pulled from the store shelf.

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