Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up?

Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by petecooper on Thursday February 02, 2017 @06:05AM (#13549658)

I worked at Tesco, a UK grocery chain, in my teens. I was involved with stock control, among other things, and was partially responsible for populating shelves at a new store.

All products at Tesco have an 8-digit product number (SKU) in addition to the EAN/UPC. There's also a three digit case size number. Like this:

05123456-024

Each product has an estikmated weekly sale and a capacity (shelf plus warehouse) to aid efficient warehousing. Each product has a case size of less than 1,000. Well, all but one -- white sugar. That has a case size of 1,024. It's annotated on the shelf ticket as '024', dropping the leading '1'.

I didn't know about this until ~43 tonnes of sugar arrived on 6 trucks the following day. For a new store. In a small town.

It turns out that me misreading '024' as a case size and over-ordering sugar by a factor of 43x was enough to have the internal ordering software updated.

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by jacobush on Thursday February 02, 2017 @06:14AM (#13549687)

See, that is what's wrong with you quiche eating europeans. Fixing the error... What a twist ending! (Twisted even!) A heartfelt "you're fired!" and a lawsuit, now that's the American way.

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by chewyfruitloop on Thursday February 02, 2017 @06:37AM (#13549793)

...isn't that the standard order size for a week in the states :p

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by jacobush on Thursday February 02, 2017 @01:18PM (#13552957)

Nah, they prefer their sugar hidden in other products. Besides, there's just no bang for the buck in table sugar. High fructose corn syrup is the sweet spot.

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by masklinn on Thursday February 02, 2017 @06:21AM (#13549720)

I've got to say a bunch of trucks loaded with pallets of sugar arriving at a small-town Tesco is a hilarious image.

Were you at the new store when the trucks arrived or did you get told afterwards?

Were there negative consequences for you personally or was it considered a process/tooling error only?

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by petecooper on Thursday February 02, 2017 @06:46AM (#13549828)

I was there. The whole warehouse team was screaming with laughter, I was properly terrified.

No obvious repercussions. This was peak Tesco profit era, so it was considered a blameless error (AFAIK).

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by gumby on Thursday February 02, 2017 @12:54PM (#13552711)

> until ~43 tonnes of sugar arrived on 6 trucks the following day.

I read about this happening to a novice commodities trader in London: several barges full of coal supposedly showed up at their building at Canary Wharf.

(Oh drat, I looked it up and the only reference I could find was on DailyWTF so...maybe not so true: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery )

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by brianpgordon on Thursday February 02, 2017 @07:27PM (#13556483)

That's a classic apocryphal horror story in futures trading - though it's possible that it really happened to someone at some point

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Re:Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up? by confluence on Thursday February 02, 2017 @06:32AM (#13549766)

This is brilliant. My day just got so much better.

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