I am very impressed with folks at home improvement stores. I walk up, ask them where X is and they say 'ahhh, it should be over in aisle 17, towards the end past the Ys.'

Home depot lists aisle and bin numbers of inventory on their website once you've selected a local store as you're default store. After asking an employee and them pulling out their phone to check online for a products location, I've never had to ask an employee again. Surprised they don't advertise this on in store signage

Item location could be provided by a phone app today. My feeling is that they don't do it because they don't want you to know the exact location because they want you to browse the aisles in hopes that you'll throw something into your cart that you weren't planning to. Same reason that supermarkets put milk and eggs at the farthest corner away from the door.

The Home Depot app is how I find everything when I go there. I think the other stores didn't do it yet because the isles and bays in most stores don't have visible numbers. And without that they need to wait a few years for deployed internal location technology to improve a bit.

Walmart actually used to list exact shelf location for items on their site. Maybe they still do, maybe desktop only?

I've been in a retailer hackathon. This is true. (ratailer is a worldwide actor french born)