"self serve"
Oct. 3rd, 2011 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
milktreeI went into a True-Value store today to get a small collection of hardware, they have one of those walls with 5,000 bins each with 5-10 different sizes of whatever the bin is about. Usually there's some bags there so you can write down how many of each and what each costs so when you get to the cash register they can ring it up quickly.
This particular hardware store has the second most retarded system for doing that, ever. The bags have a nice little grid on them so you can keep the lines organized. The fields are, "part number" (or item number, I forget), quantity, and price. The first one means, to them, "SKU".
Today I swapped two digits on one of the SKUs, and they had *no way* to handle that once I got the cash register. None. they didn't send a guy with a red apron to look it up, they didn't just say, "Oh well, 66 cents each it is!" and continue, they didn't try similar numbers, or look up the number in a book. Their answer was, "go back to the shelf and get the right number."
#@$%@#$%@#$$#!!!!!!
What the hell? How did True Value's inventory control become the responsibility of their *customers*? There's *so* much wrong with that.
- It doesn't prevent theft or guarantee correct pricing. There's nothing stopping a customer from putting the stainless steel metric version of a set of hardware into the bag and writing down the mild steel English numbers on the outside
- Even if customers are well meaning and honest, they still screw up, they don't check that what's in the bag matches what's written on the outside, so they have to do inventory anyway
- It's incredibly time consuming to type in the numbers, and it depends on being able to read the customer's handwriting
- Even if customers got it right always and didn't try to cheat, inventory control isn't the customer's problem, it's a big nuisance and makes customers cross. I came within a half a second of just leaving the bolts on the counter and going to Home Despot, 'cuz at least they can sort all that out at the register and don't make it the customer's problem
This particular hardware store has the second most retarded system for doing that, ever. The bags have a nice little grid on them so you can keep the lines organized. The fields are, "part number" (or item number, I forget), quantity, and price. The first one means, to them, "SKU".
Today I swapped two digits on one of the SKUs, and they had *no way* to handle that once I got the cash register. None. they didn't send a guy with a red apron to look it up, they didn't just say, "Oh well, 66 cents each it is!" and continue, they didn't try similar numbers, or look up the number in a book. Their answer was, "go back to the shelf and get the right number."
#@$%@#$%@#$$#!!!!!!
What the hell? How did True Value's inventory control become the responsibility of their *customers*? There's *so* much wrong with that.
- It doesn't prevent theft or guarantee correct pricing. There's nothing stopping a customer from putting the stainless steel metric version of a set of hardware into the bag and writing down the mild steel English numbers on the outside
- Even if customers are well meaning and honest, they still screw up, they don't check that what's in the bag matches what's written on the outside, so they have to do inventory anyway
- It's incredibly time consuming to type in the numbers, and it depends on being able to read the customer's handwriting
- Even if customers got it right always and didn't try to cheat, inventory control isn't the customer's problem, it's a big nuisance and makes customers cross. I came within a half a second of just leaving the bolts on the counter and going to Home Despot, 'cuz at least they can sort all that out at the register and don't make it the customer's problem
