Notice how associates used to have custom apps to do the same thing? And now how they just pull up the website too, when you ask them?

It's almost like someone had the brilliant idea of unifying an internal and external tool that both did the same thing, and devoting more resources to making the result work better than either ever did.

This is super powerful when applied to tools, but also docs, pricing and decisions. At my current job, whenever we make a rule around licensing or pricing, we publish it to our external facing FAQ. This means that the sales people consult the same info as the customer can.

Many customers choose to cut out the sales folks and read the FAQs, which is fine. Some choose not to. Some choose to read the FAQ and chat with the sales folks for further details.

But having one place where everyone can go lets people consume that info as they wish, as well as acting as a forcing function for keeping it up to date.

I like the best of both worlds:

   * publish as much as you can online (it's not like another page in the CMS costs you anything, really)
   * make it very easy and clear how to contact a human, in case the online content doesn't answer my question

Home Depot isn't /perfect/ in that regard. It'll often see "a few left" or "call for inventory" and I've had to hunt down people to find moving boxes in a store that didn't seem to carry a lot and moved them around on various end-caps. But it's way better than any other retail store I've seen. Getting that last little bit must have been difficult.

It's moreso that completely accurate inventory takes an incredible amount of resources and man power to maintain, and you get diminishing returns the closer you try to get to 100%. Retail is a big industry and there are many very talented people working on this problem.

Retail orders are done automatically based on inventory, and if the numbers are off, either too little will be ordered (out of stock = lost profit) or too much (backstock = man hours spent dealing with it). So there's a clear profit motive to have tight inventory. This is a much bigger deal to these stores than whether the numbers are internal or customer facing.

NumSold and NumIn are ofc eady to keep track of, and NumDamaged could just be like a portable barcode scanning device that the staff scans with whenever putting away a broken item.

It is not.

For instance, NumIn would indicate how many received at the store, no? But what then?

It needs to physically exist somewhere. The display? Overflowing onto the overhead? Overflowing onto the next overhead over? Pushed to the back of the overhead behind something else? Kept in the back because there's no room anywhere?

For 10,000+ different products or so per store.

Like, if I see a price on the website on my home network (the lower one, yes?) then I go to the store and look it up again then I see the higher one, yes? But once I'm standing in front of the item there's a paper label on the item (or on the shelf under the item) telling me what the price is, yes?

What's the point of displaying different prices in different places?

Is it only for "online only" items that they're offering to let you purchase while you're standing in their stores?

I’ve had a few experiences where the site tells me something is stocked but an hour later I leave without what I came for.

They seem to all be trying to half copy Amazon? The ironic thing is this is now one of the worst features since they started "fulfilled by Amazon".

If you're not benefiting from the logistics chain, you're just adding a middleman they adds markup and makes disputes and returns more complex. In some cases they're just drop shipping it from Alibaba/AliExpress/etc and you might as well order directly at 25% the cost.

I knew Sears was really done for when I went in there circa 2010 and they had a prominent computer with their "catalog", which was actually just searching Amazon. It's like these companies completely misunderstand what their value add is - I wasn't going to Sears because I was a "Sears customer" who only wanted to buy things from Sears, and they could hold onto me by letting me purchase Amazon items through them. Rather I went to Sears to see what Sears's selection was, and if they offered anything additional to what the HD/Lowes duopoly carried. They didn't really, and the rest is history.

Back in their day my Grandparents bought from Montgomery Wards or Sears Robeck (note they used the full name of both stores - odds are if you remember those stores at all is just by part of the name, or perhaps from a history book) They had a lot of stuff from those stores, and it was all good stuff, so they could confidently just buy it if the store sold it. In the final decades of Sears they often didn't have the best and so I had to think about quality (I don't remember Wards).

Amazon always mixed the best stuff with junk, but it was real - now who knows if it is real. Walmart used to be "made in the USA" (or made in Canada for stores in that country), but that policy is gone - they are still a step above dollar store, but only a small step: everyone knows you often get better quality elsewhere. Amazon mixed counterfeit with real not long after starting, while WalMart had "Made in the USA" for decades (made in Canada lasted a little longer).

There is a reason why some companies talk about the value of the brand. Coke needs to be very careful about losing trust (they almost lost it with "new coke" back in the 1980s - which my uncle says it was a way to introduce classic coke with HFCS instead of real sugar without losing the value of the brand - though he isn't in position to know what went on at Coke). My company often says we need to keep making high quality products to protect the value of our brand, we are well aware that we can rest on our brand reputation for a while, but bad quality has caught up to our competitors over decades and out market share shows is.

It's the first thing I look for after having been repeatedly burned by fake/damaged/obviously used items on Amazon.

Also their prices are usually better so it often pays to crosscheck.

I understand the retail employees are busy and things don't always go as planned, but there should have been some automation in place to help them here. Like don't offer items that are low stock, and automatically issue refunds on the 2 hour purchase charge after 4 hours. Maybe even automatically include an extra credit, as an incentive to try again.

I wonder if maybe there are two different teams at Door Dash working on this, one doing the upsell and the other actually handling the fulfillment. Seems they need to talk to each other more.

The issue with an actual store is that the "physical world overrides the virtual".

Your database in the virtual world may say that 20 items are in stock. When you walk over to the shelves, you only see 2 items. Well, I guess only 2 items are in stock. It doesn't matter that the remaining 18 were stolen by a shoplifter (or maybe scattered elsewhere in the store). You may have had 20 items enter inventory, but what's on the shelf is your final database.

There's not really any way to keep that up to date. Even if you have a bunch of minimum wage employees count the items constantly: as soon as the first customer walks through that row, your count is obsolete.

If you hook up your inventory system to the checkout: that still doesn't work, because thieves exist, and many customers pickup items, suddenly decide they don't want it, and then drop the item off randomly in the store (maybe they pickup some cheese, and then decided they didn't want it. So they leave the cheese in the clothes aisle and now the cheese is spoiled)

Honestly, it's bad UX that they even make you choose a store, that is an implementation detail. I have 3 Walmarts within 5 miles of my house, and 10 of them within 10 miles. They should present them to me as a single same-day warehouse, and then they can work out where to get which items from.

It's unbelievably slow for me, a perfect example of bad JavaScript. Product menus appear at the worst possible moment, inexplicably spreading across the page after I've looked for them and given up. It's impossible to bulk edit lists you've bookmarked. I could go on and on.

It's like someone took this beautiful inventory database and layered this textbook example of bad but typical modern web design on top.

This is so common. I can't count how many times I wished someone just exposed a normal desktop DB browser or an Excel sheet instead of their bullshit web storefront / SaaS service. Hell, I actually semi-jokingly suggested just that in a startup I used to work for[0]. I've given it some thought then, and I realized the reason for offering subpar experience is often because the vendor wants to railroad the users into a very specific workflow. This... well... is not how I want to do computing[1], so I tend to avoid SaaS whenever I can.

--

[0] - Wasn't totally unwarranted, given that our main competitor was a company literally selling an Excel plugin. Even with us having stellar people doing the frontend part, it was pretty clear we spent more time reimplementing a fraction of spreadsheet functionality in the browser, instead of working on the "unique selling point".

[1] - My full thoughts on this are too large to fit in this comment - this approach can be the right thing to do by the user, sometimes.

I have that same problem too -- the Home Depot site is painful to use because it's so slow.

I prefer Lowes, but I can't use it while on my my work VPN because they think I'm a bot, so when my wife sends me a link to look at while on VPN, I can't see it until I log off VPN at the end of the day. So we stopped using Lowes. I complained about this to Lowes and asked them to whitelist my company's VPN endpoint, but got a generic response back about cyber security and keeping me safe.

It seems to have gotten better, or maybe hardware and internet just got faster, but it used to take minutes for pages to load sometimes.

I have an iPhone. Their site does not work in Safari; it initially displays an item but a split second later everything just...disappears. I tried it in another browser, same result. I also tried doing the "request desktop site" in both browsers. Nothing. I've also never had more trouble getting a mainstream company's website to work properly in desktop browsers, a problem that has been going on for years.

Our home depot is a thirty minute drive and I used to do a stock check before driving over. Almost every time their stock system said they had multiple of a particular item in stock, nothing to be found and staff could not find the item in question. Last time it happened, I was trying to find a particular power tool and there wasn't a single employee anywhere to help. A manufacturer rep from another company spent 10 minutes of his own time digging through the upper storage. Never saw a single orange apron.

In the decades I've been going to home depot across multiple states I've found their stores poorly laid out, their employees impossible to find, half the stuff I'm looking for is up on the sky-high storage (which employees will whine deeply about being made to fetch stuff from, often making a plainly trivial effort to actually look for something before declaring "it's not here, sorry") and their stock to be abysmal; something even slightly unusual and they'll have a spot for it on the shelf....that is empty.

I'm not sure how the stores are set up, but inventory and finding stuff can easily get screwed up at the store level. I've had the opposite experience. If I was worried and it was a long trip, I would get it for in-store pickup. I've had other stores cancel it when they send someone out to prep the order.

And I generally hew towards smaller, independent hardware stores when possible.

Last time I bothered looking at Walmart's web site, the "best" part of my experience was that I was able to phone the local store, and a live human there quickly told me "No, we do not stock $Item. Ignore what our web store says." This was after Target wasted my time by saying the opposite - then after I drove to Target it turned out to be a lie.

I ended up buying from Macy's - which has plenty of its own issues, but for my n=1 had $Far_More_Upscale_Item on their shelf, a competent sales person on hand, and a sale price less than 2X Walmart's and Target's prices for $Item.

(Another fun story about Target - they stock items which do not exist in their inventory and check-out databases. I once bought a great gift for a friend's granddaughter there...after the in-store security supervisor found it (or pretended to) in some anti-shoplifting security app, and the store's manager made a snap decision on the price.)

Heck, in some states a buyer can't even bring a lawsuit for false advertising, only a competitor can. Because when somebody has lied to me and wasted my time, money, or both, isn't the wronged party really the unrelated person who didn't get to take my money instead?

I'm not sure what legal basis there could be for anti-incompetence laws for web stores, nor how easily they might be passed. It'd likely have to be federal law, in the U.S. (At the state level, there are some nice, simple laws about in-store goods where the shelf says "Price $X", the check-out scanner say "Price $Y", and $Y > $X...)

My approach is mostly to have a long memory, and loose tongue, about such things. And to mostly shop at places considerably more competent and expensive than Target or Walmart.

Strangely enough, it's relatively easy to find stuff at Walmart that won't scan in the app or online, but is found by the registers, so something isn't fully connected.

Target being out of stock can be nice, order online for pickup and then they say they can't find it and ship it instead.

Home Depot won't penalize the first type of person unlike some stores that get mad when someone isn't in their area.

Lowes is trying to do as good as Home Depot but they seem to have a bunch of strange undocumented locations like N50 that nobody knows about.

https://i.imgur.com/E0AUjIL.jpg

As part of their modernization to the product locator system they were supposed to remove all the bin location tags (red triangular flags). If they were in fact removed you can count the bays yourself or look for bin locations on other price tags.

I don't know what kind of genius thought getting rid of fine grained location data and replacing it with coarse locations would help improve the customers ability to find items, but it is typical of Lowe's current leadership. They replace a well designed and efficient solution with a half baked solution and then go on to bungle the implementation of said half baked solution.

D:

1. Have trouble using the Home Depot website to find anything.

2. Finally find it under some alternate brand name or SKU (maybe) and figure out what aisle it's in.

3. Get there and the thing is not there, and sometimes the aisle isn't even where the site says it is.

4. No employees available.

5. Employees can't find it either, or disappear while trying to find it

Turns out I was probably thinking of the Home Depot website, which does prominently display this info.

For example, I needed to replace some deck boards this summer. I found exactly what I wanted on their site, and that the two nearest stores both had dozens of each.

I wrote down all the possible numbers that would help make sure I found the right items in store. For example, one of the items I needed was a 12 ft long 2x6 pressure treated board of decent quality [1]. That's model number 559000102061200, store SKU 388520, and internet number 202060477.

I wrote down all 3 numbers for all the items I wanted, and what aisles they were supposed to be in.

In store those aisles did contain lumber of the right size but not a single number on any of the labels matches a single number that I had gotten from the web site. I checked all the other lumber aisles and nothing anywhere else matched any of the numbers I was looking for.

Whatever system they use to assign numbers to lumber in store is completely different from how they number things on their website. Not even the formatting matched.

The lumber guys at both of the HDs in my area told me that there is basically no relationship between what lumber they have and what the website says they have.

[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/2-in-x-6-in-x-12-ft-Outdoor-Sele...

This is helpful when you don’t know the exact thing you’re looking for.

The app made some insanely confusing UX decisions, such as forcing users to go to 2 separate parts of the app depending on if you are searching for products on Walmart.com vs local Walmart store, instead of one seamless UX flow of adding your local store and searching for items in stock locally on top of suggesting to ship it to you as a secondary channel.

After I somehow navigate the maze of getting to the local store search section of the app after wasting time searching their Walmart.com commingled section of the app, I enter my zip code and the store 3 mins away never shows up and I have to do some hacky workaround to get the store to show.

Finally after ordering for pickup, I have to navigate a maze to get to the local store orders page to see the order details.

Walmart labs really needs to do some solid UX research on their in-app end to end customer journey and copy how Hone Depot does it. Don’t get my started on how frustrating it is to find an item in their maze of alphabetical ordered aisles that often doesn’t match the item location aisle details in the app.

Ugh thinking about the app makes my blood pressure increase.

TL;DR The Home Depot in-app experience and UX for browsing, purchasing, and locating in-store items is a dream to use and is arguably best practice for e-commerce and retail commingled UX compared to Walmart.