That's shockingly stupid. I also worked for a major Walmart IT services vendor in another life, and we always had to be careful about how we handled them, because they didn't always show a lot of respect for vendors.

On another note, thanks for building some awesome stuff -- walmart.com is awesome. I have both Prime and whatever-they're-currently-calling Walmart's version and I love that Walmart doesn't appear to mix SKU's together in the same bin which seems to cause counterfeiting fraud at Amazon.

walmart.com user design sucks. My particular grudge right now is - I'm shopping to go pickup some stuff (and indicate "in store pickup) and each time I search for the next item, it resets that filter making me click on that filter for each item on my list.

Almost every physical-store-chain company's website makes it way too hard to do the thing I nearly always want out of their interface, which is to search the inventory of the X nearest locations. They all want to push online orders or 3rd-party-seller crap, it seems.

Yes, I assume they intentionally make it difficult to push third party sellers’ where they get to earn bigger profit margins and/or hide their low inventory.

Although, Amazon is the worst, then Walmart (still much better than Amazon since you can at least filter). The others are not bad in my experience.

Walmart.com, Am I the only one in the world who can't view their site on my phone? I tried it on a couple devices and couldn't get it to work. Scaling is fubar. I assumed this would be costing them millions/billions since it's impossible to buy something from my phone right now. S21+ in portrait on multiple browsers.

What's a "bin" in this context?

I believe he means a literal bin. E.g. Amazon takes products from all their sellers and chucks them in the same physical space, so they have no idea who actually sold the product when it's picked. So you could have gotten something from a dodgy 3rd party seller that repackages broken returns, etc, and Amazon doesn't maintain oversight of this.

Literally just a bin in a fulfillment warehouse.

An amazon listing doesn't guarantee a particular SKU.

Ah, whew. That's what I thought. Thanks! I asked because we make warehouse and retail management systems and every vendor or customer seems to give every word their own meanings (e.g., we use "bin" in our discounts engine to be a collection of products eligible for discounts, and "barcode" has at least three meanings depending on to whom you're speaking).

Is WalMart.com awesome?

Props to you and Walmart will never realize their loss. Unfortunately. But one day there will be headline (or even a couple of them) and you will know that if you had been there it might not have happened and that in the end it is Walmarts' customers that will pay the price for that, not their shareholders.

Stories like this are why I'm really glad I stopped talking to that Walmart Technology recruiter a few years ago. I love working for places where senior leadership constantly repeat war stories about "that time I broke the flagship product" to reinforce the importance of blameless postmortems. You can't fix the process if the people who report to you feel the need to lie about why things go wrong.

But hope you found a better place?

that's awful. You should have been promoted for that.

is it just 'ceremony' to be called out on those things? (even if it is actually a positive sum total)

> Happy now I am out of such shitty place.

Doesn't sound like it.