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Comment by VTimofeenko | Hacker News Reader

Given the absolute state of their website on mobile it's hardly surprising. It's faster to find an employee and ask them where an item is at instead of waiting for the search to finish, see that it the "current store" now points to a random location somewhere in a different state, pick the correct store and re-do the search

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If you go to the home depot page for torque wrenches and click the filter for drive size, you get this list:

  1/2 in
  1/4 in
  1 in
  3/8 in
  3/4 in
  Specialty

Here is the same list in decimal to make the insanity plainly obvious:

What sadistic lunatic made that sort order?! It's not based on size and it's not alphabetic.

I had to check what the gold standard McMaster-Carr does: their torque wrench drive size widget is sorted 1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1 1/2". Glorious. https://www.mcmaster.com/products/torque-wrenches/

I'd expect nothing less from them. The right thing to do here is to implement a sorting key for different categories here. Since McMaster-Carr seems to be going to a category when you search, they seem to have better control over the available filters.

I've found that on a site like Amazon or Walmart that'll let you do a more freeform sort, the filter options becomes absolutely god awful.

Well done by McMaster-Carr. I assume they control their inventory a bit more than a marketplace like Home Depot, Walmart, or Amazon, so that's also an advantage.

The schemas for Amazon and Walmart's product information are absolutely bonkers and constantly missing features that they demand be provided.

Here's the XML Schema Definition for "Product" on Amazon [1]

This is joined on each of the linked category schemas included at the type, of which each has unique properties that ultimately drive the metadata on a particular listing for the SKU. Its wrought with inconsistency, duplicated fields, and oftentimes not up-to-date with required information.

Ultimately, this product catalog information gets provided to Amazon, Walmart, Target, and any other large 3rd party marketplace site as a feed file from a vendor to drive what product they can then list pricing and inventory against (through similar feeds).

You are right that the control McMaster-Carr has on their catalog is the strategic and technological advantage.

[1]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/rainier/...

Very interesting how nearly half the list is (assumedly) every single chemical listed under California Prop 65. Do they really need to specify exactly which chemical it is? I've seen thousands of prop 65 warnings in my life but I've literally never seen it tell me what chemical its warning me about. I just commented to a friends a couple weeks ago i wished they'd tell me what so i could look it up myself!

Mouser et al also do it right for mixed unit lists, eg. component dimensions are shown in their specified units but sorted as: 11mm, 12mm, 0.5in, 13mm, ...

McMaster-Carr's website is actually pretty impressive given how unassuming it is. It does a ton of pre-loading on hover and caching to make it feel like you're just navigating a static site. I didn't even realize that the page had a loading state until I enabled throttling from my network tab and immediately clicked on a link as soon as I hovered over it.

Even more impressive is that it's something like 20 years old, and was basically the way it is now 20 years ago.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978

Is it weird that I kinda want to work there?

No. You are likely and automatically extrapolating the attention to detail seen in the outcome into believing that it is a reflection of the attention , thought and method of their internal workings.

Which is a good indicator, but you can’t be sure of. Additionally you may imagine liking it but not enjoy it in life, even if true.

It's probably a default ordering or an ordering by an unshown database ID value. It's a small enough set that it doesn't really matter for practical purposes, but I guess it does betray a lack of attention to detail.

It’s simple alphabetic.

Is "slash" (/) before or after "space" ( ) ... or both... before and after it?

Is 8 before or after 4 in the alphabet?

Before. _E_ight vs _F_our.

But _T_wo is also before _F_our

The sorting briefly switches to reverse order there, so no contradiction.

No, there's no reasonable ordering going on.

If it were ordered by ordinal values, "/" is 47 and " " is 32, so "1 in" would come before "1/2 in".

It's not alphabetized by letter word. Because while "Eight" comes before "Four", "Specialty" would come before "Three".

No matter which way you attempt to order it, something is out of order.

Softtalker probably got it right. This is some default or id sort.

3/8 doesn’t come before 3/4 alphabetically.

Now look up impact wrenches.

  1/2 in
  1 in
  1/4 in
  3/8 in
  3/4 in
  7/16 in

> 7/16 in

I had a major WTF moment there, until I realized that's probably for a hex driver (and thus something totally different than what I think of when someone says "impact wrench").

This is sorted mostly alphabetically with an allowance for people being bad with fractions. That's my guess.

SELECT ... ORDER BY RAND()

Or when the site tells you your store doesn't have a part in stock, but neglects to tell you that they do have 350 of the identical part, different brand, in stock. Because who would ever buy a 1/2-inch close Halex rigid conduit close nipple in-store right now when they could wait a few days for a 1/2-inch close Commercial Electric rigid conduit nipple?

I feel like the home depot website is fine. It's a lot better than most other shops, I've had a good experience finding the aisle and location of items, and it's generally accurate with the amount in stock at each location. If you didn't enable precise location or have bad cell signal then that is hardly the fault of the website.

Nah, I use both the website and their shitty web wrapper app on a regular basis and it's been a dumpster fire for at least the last 2-3 years. 3-5 years ago when they first rebuilt everything it was much more pleasant but at this point it's clear no one is maintaining it and have just let it bloat and rot

I will not argue with the stock part. When the search _does_ finish, stock info is usually correct IME.

What grinds my gears is the speed of this search, regardless of the phone reception. Even on the desktop it feels like they have a bunch of interns running a sneakernet. Or the website is laden with pointless javascript that slows everything down before the search is actually performed.

I go to the same Home Depot every time. (Well I don't if I can help it, but that's beside the point). There is no reason they cannot store the preferred store in the localStorage or cookies or wherever else. Other stores have figured this out.

> Other stores have figured this out.

Not CostCo though! I open their page and immediately 'Can Costco.ca use your location?" I say yes and then it asks me what province I'm in. I tell it, and then it defaults me to a store 30 minutes' drive from here and not the one five minutes away. Every. Time.

Costco’s website is worse than useless. It doesn’t tell you anything useful beyond the hours.

I have to believe it’s intentional.

On the contrary, you can also search for items with easily the least useful search I've ever seen.

Pizza pockets? Okay, anything that mentions pizza, or pockets. So frozen pizzas, in-store-made pizzas, pizza flavored pringles, pants with pockets, dresses with pockets, frozen items that are similar to pizzas but aren't pizzas, frozen items which aren't similar to pizzas, granola bars I guess, basketballs, and so on.

It seems as though their search just takes the search terms, matches them against every item in their database in order of relevance, and then just shows you everything regardless of how relevant it is. 0.00121 out of 100? Well, it's still technically relevant! Let's show it just in case!

its generally in HD stores you never have cell signal or wifi

This is definitely true and makes the experience shittier than it otherwise would be, but even with a great signal/connection it frequently loads so slowly that I've long run out of patience.

I have gotten in the habit of looking up what isle and bay the thing I need is before I get there, and then I screenshot it because too many times the page has needed to reload and start over

I bought a water heater that had a large (1k!) instant rebate that you had to scan, sign up on website and show the emailed coupon to the person during cashing out. Took me 25 minutes wandering around the store to get enough reception to actually do this process. Made me chuckle, thinking how having it online only but before point of sale in the store was such a terrible, terrible idea.

Never noticed this. The SAF store has guest wifi and my mint/t-mobile 5G service inside is full strength.

Their internal setup was also an absolute mess as of 4 years ago. A horrific hybrid of extremely legacy systems and new systems created around COVID which are both nicer and also deeply lacking in features we needed as floor workers.

I understand that upgrading and migrating to new systems takes time but this process never seemed like it involved anyone on the ground.

Home Depot reuses SKUs for different product models. It's a gamble if you'll actually get what you ordered

also, when I'm in my local store it seems like cell connection goes to shit for some reason and then I have to jump on their in store wifi in order to search their website

They probably don't have any repeaters. All those metal shelves are going to interfere with the signal. I have the same experience.

Their in-store WiFi is a repeater more or less. It's one of those bullshit forced auto-join networks that you can't opt out of (at least on iOS). Because that's not a massive vector for phishing or anything.

This is a network carrier setting, the issue is that T-Mobile (and maybe others) pushes a profile that does this as part of their network configuration.

Right, so you can't opt-out of it.

I went to Wi-Fi settings, "Edit" in top right, scroll to bottom "Managed" section, and was able to turn off "Auto-Join" for the "t-mobile" managed network just fine. I did this many months ago, I think because I was infuriated at the idea of auto-connecting to a Wi-Fi network I did not opt in to, but regardless, the checkbox has remained off through a few OS updates since (on 26.1 now with a T-Mo prepaid eSIM).

There's no "Managed" section showing up on my phone and the last time I set that network to not auto-join it still did. Lesson learned, I just turn off WiFi and Bluetooth before heading out to Home Depot.

Yes, although I've had terrible experience with their wifi. I'm sure it depends on the store, but coverage is usually terrible and highly spotty, so if you're walking around or standing in the wrong area, it stops working.

At one point I also had to disable wireguard because I think it was triggering some sort of anti-abuse thing they had. It wasn't even using an exit node, just bridging me to my home network so I could access self-hosted services. I get the desire for anti-abuse, but that felt pretty draconian and I don't expect the average person to consider they might have to disable a VPN to get it to work, especially nowadays when many average people do have VPNs running.

I was livid when I discovered that my carrier had implemented that with no opt out. I worked around it by implementing shortcuts that disable my iPhone's WiFi when I leave my house until I've returned or reached one of the handful of other places I use it. It's ridiculous that something like that is necessary, though.

Always wondered if this was a deliberate strategy to enable more tracking… but it sounds way beyond the ability of their corporate planning.

> when I'm in my local store it seems like cell connection goes to shit for some reason

It's a giant steel and concrete box, that's probably the reason.

Indeed, Home Depot's software is generally so bad. I remember around 2017/2018 time frame when they started showing up to big tech conferences (especially K8s and React.js conferences) really trying to modernize. I spent a few minutes talking to the people manning the booth (which were surprisingly high ranking in the company, at least by title), and came away thinking "I'm glad you're making an effort, but y'all really have no idea what you're doing." The left hand and the right hand had completely different ideas/priorities about how to accomplish their goals. I didn't want to make any judgments on a simple conversation at a conference, but at this point I think time has shown that it was pretty representative of how they were approaching it internally, and unsurprisingly it did not work out super well.

Now that said, I don't want to minimize the difficulty in modernizing software at a corp like HD. It's wildly more difficult than most people can appreciate. I've consulted for companies trying to do it, and there are lots of challenges with legacy systems, migrations, and plenty of non-technical challenges as well.

Shout out to Wal-mart for genuinely kicking ass at this though. I'm quickly becoming an Onn fanboy. Genearlly speaking, great products at great prices, from their USB cables up to their smart speakers and more. You can really tell from the product design and implementation that they are letting the nerds geek out and have fun! That in turn enables me to do the same :-)

I'll bet money any new React/K8s/${WEBSCALE} stuff they're building is still just a wrapper over the same old inventory management they've been using for years...probably something like JDEdwards on AS/400.

You would lose that bet. Walmart has invested a LOT in modernizing stuff over the last 10 years. You cannot deliver groceries in less than an hour using the old inventory. It's not perfect, but what it's been done given the scale , it's nothing short of a miracle. Source: I have been working there for 10 years.

surely gp was referring to HD ;)

I was talking HD. Walmart has a rep for being a decent tech shop and given how well all their stuff seems to work, I would not be remotely surprised if they weren't on the leading edge of good software.

It's sadly all too common. I worked at a Fortune50 retailer with a massive IT org. Was on a call one day with one of our most Senior Ent Arch who was excitedly telling me about how "these Java scripts" were the hot new thing and we were building "modern web 3.0 pages" with them. He did not understand the difference between Java and JavaScript or a blockchain branding exercise and SPAs.

I think they made some splashy hires at the time, and they contributed to the Google SRE workbook. Same as Walmart. They definitely tried. Corporate inertia is a killer.

I've never had an employee know what a tool is, much less where to find it. All they're doing is doing this process on a slower, ruggedized phone.

I literally watched someone Google "masonry bit" right in front of me.

Though they should be on in store wifi. The big steel box store is a faraday cage that doesn't let the internet in.

The store I worked at for a while had a surprising number of real bearded experts, alongside at least a few younger folks who really understood the internal systems. It was great, but clearly was eroding as the experts retired and young folks with no experience were hired to replace them.

It varies a lot by store. I’ve been to HDs where they’re all useless, and others where there’s a good number of knowledgeable DIYers working there.

I think a lot of people just expect too much from a big box store employee making $17/hr… You go to HD because you have an easy job and you’re as cheap as their MBAs. If you need help, go to a supply house or an Ace Hardware or something.

Fully this. Every Ace or Do It Best I've been to in Washington has had at least one Rugged Grandpa ™ on staff who could have given me a PhD-level essay on whatever I asked them about; at Home Depot I'm lucky if the folks there have any idea what an impact-rated bit is or why I specifically need one and NO please stop trying to sell me this other crap if you're sold out of the impact bits, they are NOT the same!

(It gets worse the further from the power tools section you get, I find. I had to explain the difference between a three-prong and four-prong 240V plug once at HD and promptly told my friend to stop asking the staff for "help" finding things.)

I am buying an impact driver for someone for christmas. Any recommendations on a fastner/drill bit set?

I use the Milwaukee Shockwave bit sets almost exclusively, they’ve never let me down.

> It gets worse the further from the power tools section you get, I find. I had to explain the difference between a three-prong and four-prong 240V plug once at HD and promptly told my friend to stop asking the staff for "help" finding things.

The best feature of Home Depot is order pickup. No need to explain to someone that some appliances use both 120V for control power and 240V power for the motor or heating element; or that you’re installing a receptacle to backfeed a 120/240V panel with a 120/240V generator and therefore you need a 4-wire NEMA 14 series receptacle with a neutral conductor, you just buy one and pick it up from a locker. It’s made buying things from Home Depot tolerable for me, I’m used to buying material from supply houses where the folks are knowledgeable, I know that’s not the case at HD so I don’t even bother asking.

I asked an employee for something by part number and described it. The answer he gave was "why the hell would you want that anyways? I've worked here 13 years and never seen one". I found it on a shelf a few levels up and used a grounding rod from the electrical section to spear it and bring it down to ground level

Thanks for reminding me to uninstall that godawful app, which is like their website, but somehow even slower/clunkier.

> the "current store" now points to a random location somewhere in a different state

I thought that was just me. It gets the first, maybe the second digit of the zip code right and that's about it.

Jokes on you, all the employees do is use their mobile site as well.

MSFT Edging

I literally couldn't load their website with my previous Pixel phone. The performance was so terrible it would grind to a halt and freeze or crash.

Someone made their own version of the HD app that works much better:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tools/comments/1opufvq/a_lightweigh...

Its hard to locate anything in their stores these days and its even harder to find any staff. So what I do is order for pickup and let them do the work.

Not as bad as Costco. Their app and website are still stuck in 90s.

Someone should use their GH token to fix their website

I think the same people/platform made the Best Buy mobile website, they look very similar. Just absolutely atrocious design. It's slow, the UI elements bounce all over the place, it forgets your selections, and godspeed if for whatever reason you need to refresh the page because something chose not to render. That's outside of the store on a good connection. Doing this IN the store is a whole new level of hair pulling frustration.

Also I once asked an employee for help locating an item and they told me to pull up the app. I was like "you pull up the app", and we sat there for 5 minutes waiting for things to load until he decided he'll just help me locate the item lol

I'm just happy that Best Buy recently added the ability to filter out items they cannot actually sell me. The amount of searches I would do where I had to scroll through page after page of 'not available online' 'not available in store' items in order to find a search result they actually had was ridiculous.

Now Home Depot for some reason just doesn't load on mobile (white screen) unless I disable content filtering in the browser. Classy.

Exactly, their site and apps are trash.

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