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.
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.