Online Inventories

[Brian Henderson]

I really hate it when the online inventories at stores are so absurdly off that you make a trip to get something, only to find they never had it in the first place. So I needed to get a concrete mixing tub, I get on Lowes' website and it says they have 39 in stock in a certain aisle and bin. So off I go to Lowes and... not only do they have none, the spot where they're supposed to be is filled with something else entirely. I ask the guys at the commercial register and they're saying "I don't know the last time we had any of those, we've had concrete footers sitting right there for years."

So I run across the street to Home Depot because their website says they have 3. The shelf is empty. They don't know why their count is off either. Yes, it is possible that someone bought all of them since the counts were updated, but we know that nobody bought 39 of them today at Lowes and I kind of doubt they bought 3 of them at Home Depot. There's another store about 5 miles away that is supposed to have 50 of them. I guess I'll have to try there.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Have the store you are in contact other store to verify inventory before driving over. Be sure and get the name of the person who does the checking. When Lowes got rid of the Biesemeyer fences for $70, a near by store showed two had been sold and the third wasn't any where to be found. Wife and I went down, walked to end of insulation aisle, and on top stock was a box with BIESEMEYER written on it. Hardware guy couldn't believe me when I said I had come to buy their remaining fence, as it had been missing for several weeks. Showed him where it was, just like plan a gram said it should be. Very glad he couldn't read he plan a gram.

[Brian Henderson]

I'll call the store directly before I go. It isn't far away, but this store and the next store along both say they have a ton of them in stock. I'll believe it when I see it.

[Dave Lehnert]

I worked in retail for 25 years.
My guess is when the store did inventory, The employee from the inventory company scanned the shelf label, then counted whatever was in that spot. In your case concrete footers. There should be some kind of safeguard in their system to catch mistakes like that. We got a report at our company that listed items showing no sales for the week.
Possible someone put them out someplace crazy in the store like outdoor garden. Thought they were pond liners or ???????
My local lowe's now has an on-line pickup right by the front door. I can order online then drive to the store and get it once they confirm it is in stock.

[Brian Elfert]

Lowe's does have online pickup, but verify what you are getting if you place orders with lots of items. I placed four $50 orders the same day last year. They completely screwed up the orders. I ordered a bunch of 2" conduit and half the order was 1-1/2". I also got fittings the wrong size and some of the breakers were GE instead of Siemens along with other mix ups.

I ended up there for more than hour while the customer service manager dumped everything on the counter to inventory it and then waited while someone went back to get the right parts from electrical.

[Brian Elfert]

I used to have to deal with quarterly inventories when I worked at CompUSA. They first had an outside inventory crew go through and count everything overnight on a Saturday night. The counts were compared against the store's inventory to find shortages and overages. The regular employees then came in real early in the morning to recheck everything that didn't match store inventory before the store opened on Sunday morning. This was long before the Internet.

This wouldn't work nearly so well in today's big box stores. I actually bought a concrete mixing tub at Home Depot the other day and they had them in the store just as the website said.

[Brian Henderson]

I worked in retail for 25 years.
My guess is when the store did inventory, The employee from the inventory company scanned the shelf label, then counted whatever was in that spot. In your case concrete footers. There should be some kind of safeguard in their system to catch mistakes like that. We got a report at our company that listed items showing no sales for the week.
Possible someone put them out someplace crazy in the store like outdoor garden. Thought they were pond liners or ???????
My local lowe's now has an on-line pickup right by the front door. I can order online then drive to the store and get it once they confirm it is in stock.

I know I can do that but I honestly shouldn't have to. I mean, Lowes is especially bad at this, but their online "product locator" is always way off. It tells you where in the store something is supposed to be, but invariably I have to ask because it's usually all the way on the other side of the store. And since they have no idea what they actually have, and their online inventory is so clearly off (and they should have just done inventory at the beginning of the year anyhow), showing up expecting something and them not having it would be pretty common.

[Brian Henderson]

And I stopped into another Lowes today, since I was just driving by with my wife and they were supposed to have 52 of these stupid things in stock... not a darn thing on the shelf. Once again asked the guys at the commercial desk since they're sitting 50 feet away and they have no idea. How much do you want to bet that these things are sitting in the back room gathering dust?

[Lee DeRaud]

And I stopped into another Lowes today, since I was just driving by with my wife and they were supposed to have 52 of these stupid things in stock... not a darn thing on the shelf. Once again asked the guys at the commercial desk since they're sitting 50 feet away and they have no idea. How much do you want to bet that these things are sitting in the back room gathering dust?

More likely 12' up on top of a shelf in a completely different department.

The layout of the stores doesn't help either. My Home Depot has paving bricks with the building materials and edging bricks in the garden department, on the opposite corner of the building, near enough 1/4-mile away. Not to mention oddities like having hoses in the garden department and hose repair parts in the plumbing department.

[Bill Dufour]

There are three HDs within five miles of my house. They are laid out different, one is a mirror image of the other, the third is just different. they have slightly different inventories.
All are flat basic city lots with no special reason to be laid out the way they are not designed to fit the lot in any special way. no relation to compass directions etc.
Bill D.

[Carlos Alvarez]

I have never, not once, looked at a product on Rockler's web site that showed correct inventory. Every single one says "call store to verify availability." It has driven me to ignore Rockler's site.

I've found Lowes and HD to be accurate unless it says there are 1-2 left, because in many cases that means a floor demo model, or they just "lost" one or whatever.

[Lee DeRaud]

I have never, not once, looked at a product on Rockler's web site that showed correct inventory. Every single one says "call store to verify availability." It has driven me to ignore Rockler's site.

They changed their system quite awhile ago, maybe 6-7 years, so the individual stores don't report back sales to corporate in real-time. But the in-store computer tends to be very accurate for quantity-on-hand.

At least the website gives you the item number for the guy to look up, rather than trying to describe some obscure router bit shape over the phone.

[Carlos Alvarez]

They changed their system quite awhile ago, maybe 6-7 years, so the individual stores don't report back sales to corporate in real-time. But the in-store computer tends to be very accurate for quantity-on-hand.

At least the website gives you the item number for the guy to look up, rather than trying to describe some obscure router bit shape over the phone.

The end result is that I look everywhere else first and Rockler is my last resort.

Doing an online order from Lowes right now for the wife to pick up...hope this thread didn't jinx me...

[Brian Henderson]

I have never, not once, looked at a product on Rockler's web site that showed correct inventory. Every single one says "call store to verify availability." It has driven me to ignore Rockler's site.

I've found Lowes and HD to be accurate unless it says there are 1-2 left, because in many cases that means a floor demo model, or they just "lost" one or whatever.

Which would be fine if they'd actually go look, but I know they don't. I was in a HD quite a while ago, loading up some things down by the contractor desk when they got a call, I assume, asking if there was something in stock. And the guy put the phone down, just stood there for a minute, then got on the phone again and said they had it. He never looked it up on the computer and he certainly never went to check the aisle. It gets the person into the store and if the shelves are empty, then they can say it sold out between the time he called and the time he showed up. So there's no point in calling either.

[glenn bradley]

As it has been since the earliest days . . . Garbage In = Garbage Out. Like websites that get abandoned or any sort of data base function that loses its sparkle. Poor care and feeding result in misinformation. At work we try to purge poorly cared for data. Our position is that no data is better than bad data; no data makes you reverse engineer or seek things out . . . bad data specifically misguides you. We prefer the former.

As a defense against the "wasted trip" syndrome, I use "buy online, pick up in store". They email when it is at the service desk which around here generally takes an hour or two. Either that or they report the item as unavailable via the same email system. I may still lose some time but, I can be productive while I'm waiting for the verdict.