Somewhat tangential, but I am super-impressed with Home Depot's e-commerce experience on the web side, and completely the opposite with WalMart.
As I'm standing in a Home Depot store struggling to find an item, I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is. This is an incredible consumer experience. Even when the thing I want isn't where it's supposed to be, showing that to a staffer usually gets an "Oh, yeah, we moved those to aisle Foo last week" response.
On the flipside, when I go to WalMart's site the default search behavior is showing me numerous items from 3rd-party sellers that are not and will never be available in-store. They do have inventory information but you have to specifically filter for it and I find it much less reliable and difficult to navigate than Home Depot's.
Hopefully they take pages from each others' playbooks.
> I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is. This is an incredible consumer experience.
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.
> 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.
It frustrates me that our org chooses to hide a lot of the FAQs behind the help desk. The higher ups think this is like "white glove service", but in practice, it's so much slower for anyone who has the slightest idea about the what they're looking for, and because everyone has to go through the desk, they're sometimes overwhelmed. That leads to way more escalations than there otherwise would be (which leads to the non-higher ups having to focus more on answering tickets and less on what they're paid to do).
* 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
But I could see how implementing only one or the other would be counterproductive.
I imagine there was an investment in updating the local inventory. For internal tools, it seems to be fine to have more approximate data. People seem to offer to "check in the back" (whether that exists or not). For public facing tools that's a lot less acceptable.
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.
>For internal tools, it seems to be fine to have more approximate data
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.
I don't understand how this works, but shouldn't it be as simple as NumAvailable = NumIn - NumSold - NumDamaged?
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.
If the world were a deterministic computer system, yes.
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?
A lot of stores used to do things like close for part of a day to do inventory. I assume there is still some syncing up during the night or whatever. But I also assume that, as with many things, many stores have probably been willing to trade off a degree of accuracy for reduced costs.
Wasn't there a store that was serving up a modified version of their site on in-store terminals with higher prices or something? CompUSA? Or was it Best Buy?
I hadn't noticed this and am fascinated (and confused)- mind if I ask y'all questions to get more details?
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?
They want to convince you to buy it then and there - if you're looking at a doodad at Best Buy and it's priced on the shelf at $40, and you look at it online at Best Buy and it's $50, you're gonna be like "this is a steal I best grab it now".
If their online price is lower than their in-store price, if you go to price-match at the checkout, the website will show the higher price. But at home it will show the lower price.
Lowes does this as well. They not only point you to the Isle, but they also have indicators that show you where in the Isle it is. Spent 10 minutes looking for an item before I pulled up their website and felt like the biggest idiot.
Really? I shop at Lowe's a lot. I often find isle numbers like BW. I assume that means something like "Back Wall" but, nope. There is no map that I'm aware of and no indication where it might be on an isle (save a bay number, which is almost always wrong). It is "good enough" to get me in the vicinity on some products but not others. A store map showing me where isle BW is would be a great addition.
At least in my local stores, things have frequently been rearranged to be in a different location and the online inventory didn’t get updated. So I have to find an associate and ask anyway. Home Depot seems to be much better at it.
This is a great idea in theory. Although per usual the rubber hits the road when people need to find the physical item. If the stores aren’t organized or the employees don’t know where things are - you end up with a situation where now everyone is at the mercy of what the computers tell them.
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.
Ugh, the third party seller marketplace! I loathe sites that do this: Walmart, Bestbuy, and NewEgg come to mind.
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.
It's lucrative and dramatically increases the perceived selection so nobody is going to stop, probably. On the consumer side it might be a little more mixed but at least you can deal with a big retailer if you have problems rather than some fly by night operation.
I wonder what the long term hit is to their brand? I have to think that's brought up because it happens all the time to declining brands and I don't see that digging them out of their problems. I tend to avoid those sites mentioned after being burned a few times. In the past, they were the first place I would check. It hurts when I see family members get burned.
Over time, probably huge. eBay started as a flea market, and so people knew what to expect. Amazon started as a reputable seller and has since turned into a flea market, so people compare against the quality guarantee that used to be there.
"Roebuck". I believe they were still putting their full name on printed labels as late as the 90s? It looks like they've tried to resurrect it as a clothing brand now.
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.
The problem is the hit to the brand is over decades. You can do a few stupid things without a brand hit so long as you see the mistake and revert back.
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.
I don’t see the point tho. It’s not like Best Buy makes laptops so they bulk purchase and sell. What is the benefit of this drip shipping nonsense. No I won’t buy a sata cable from “ePC tech” just feels shady
Yeah. That's the one awesome thing about all the not-Amazon options out there.
Walmart: All Filters => Retailer (Walmart)
Target: More Filters => Sold By (Target)
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.
Next step is for those retailers to just form a partnership with Waste Management because for a non-negligible percent of the time it’s basically garbage express.
I suppose it depends on who's being catered for by the platform. In Poland, we have an interesting situation in which most brands that operate their own stores end up selling their products on Allegro (local Amazon/eBay equivalent) anyway. I usually defaulted to brand's own stores, but my wife turned me around - you get the same products, from the same vendors, for the same price, but in case of any problems, dispute process is streamlined and extremely favorable to buyers.
From a customer POV, marketplaces make sense. No need to worry about creating yet another account with payment details on some obviously outdated Wordpress shop for ordering a cat toy or whatever small scale purchase.
I had covid 2 weeks ago, and I paid extra for a 2 hour food order from Walmart. I wanted something I forgot on an order I had made somewhere else. After 3 hours I got notice that some of the impulse buys I added were out of stock. Which is fine, but the only reason I added them was because they showed them to me. Then after 6 hours there was no word from them, and I knew the local store was closed. So I just canceled the order.
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 had an experience recently with Door Dash where after you order, their app will suggest buying additional items from 7-11. They give you a ten minute window to add items. I assume the driver will pick them up after your order. I decided to go for it and order an impulse item myself. When I got to the checkout to pay, it wouldn’t let me because I guess it was after hours, but the app was still suggesting it to me. It was incredibly frustrating as a user to have a service suggest an option that was impossible to fulfill.
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.
What might have happened is they were open while you started checkout and then closed after. I’ve had this happen many times. They need to handle this better in the UI.
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)
Sure, but this wasn't that. This was an item that was on sale that had one left that they showed me just before I checked out. If I had just picked it out, that is one thing, but to bring attention to it is just a bad experience. They could simply start by removing anything with a single item left from the last minute sales pitch. They could improve it by figuring out the probability of an item being available.
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.
Actually I'm shocked to read this because I have the opposite reaction. To each their own — you make a good point about the accuracy of their inventory information — but to me the Home Depot website is on of the worst websites I have ever used.
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.
> 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.
> As I'm standing in a Home Depot store struggling to find an item, I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is.
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 guess I use it often enough that I have their iPhone app to flag items I want to pick up. Their store maps are great (I doubt that's available on their mobile site) for finding the right shelf. Although, I don't remember having issues with their mobile site.
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.
I've found that the disappearing item thing went away on desktop when I used a private or incognito window, so I deleted my cookies and cached browser data for the site and things seemed to work correctly after that.
Somewhat similar experience here, but Walmart / Target / Macy's.
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.)
These examples make me feel that the regulations against false advertising are either insufficient. The last time I checked, in most states the only thing protected against is a monetary loss due to making a purchase that (1) wouldn't have been made otherwise, (2) resulted from provably incorrect information, and (3) that a reasonable person would have also assumed to be true. Implying falsehoods about a product without actually stating them is allowed. Outright lying is allowed, if a "reasonable person" would notice that they were lying. Only the monetary aspect is covered, and not the waste of time caused by the lying, such as your fruitless trip to Target, or needing to sift through all the lies.
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?
The old joke about the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman comes to mind. ("...the used car salesman actually knows when he is lying to you!")
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.
Every large store has items that don't exist in the database, the question is how long they've been gone.
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.
My experience is the opposite. I get the “I don’t work in this dept. I’ll call someone”. Then I wait in plumbing for 10 minutes until someone shows up. When the person shows they start looking in the same place I have been searching for the last 1/2 hour.
It depends. Some people like the experience of learning about different things and so they if they don't know finding the answer for your makes you their favorite customer. Others just want to do their job and get back home.
Home Depot won't penalize the first type of person unlike some stores that get mad when someone isn't in their area.
I guess I'd do the same if I found the associates ever had anything where anything was... I've found even the store managers would tell me they didn't sell stuff that they did, in fact, sell.
i'll have to try the app, i'm not a huge fan of the website. However, i have both my local stores memorized so i don't know how much time it will save. ...when you buy a house you should get a $1k Home Depot gift card at closing as just part of the standard process.
The Walmart app actually has that information, but it’s got some kind of strange ‘in the store’ detection that doesn’t work most of the time. So you’ll be using the app to try to find things, there’s zero stock or aisle location information and then 10 minutes later you’ll get a screen pop that says something along the lines of welcome to store X and then you can get stock and location information for products.
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.
N50 is part of their old bin location system that told you exactly where on the shelf the item was. In your example it would be the 50th location in the 14th bay (bay N) on that isle. Here is an example of a bin location on a price label
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.
It is shocking how bad Lowes tech is compared to Home Depot. All they have to do is copy them. I frequently can’t search on Lowes website because in Safari, the search results and pictures are offset by 1.
Yeah way in the back there's not much cell phone reception. The same goes for WalMart, since people are talking about their inventory practices as well.
I was trying to do this exact thing on the Lowe's mobile website the other day and found it totally impossible. I kept thinking, "why isn't the aisle this is located in highlighted in huge text? I'm standing in the store. I know you have this information, because I've seen it on the desktop website, but I can't make it show up."
Turns out I was probably thinking of the Home Depot website, which does prominently display this info.
HD's website and app are pretty good in general, but terrible if you are looking for wood.
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.
Walmart's in-store pickup system can be very misleading too. If it's listed for in-store pickup, I expect it to be like Best Buy or Target - I get a notification a few hours later that I can go get my item. With Walmart, if an item is eligible for in-store pickup, that often meets they have to ship that item to the store and it will take 1-2 weeks
I like it in principal but their inventory is so frequently inaccurate. There’s a lot of theft or a flaw in their return system. I was told by an associate that people return items that never left the store, and thus gets added back to inventory. Admittedly, that doesn’t make total sense to me.
It makes sense to me because you can return stuff from any Home Depot to any Home Depot. Or even not even from Home Depot since the give you store credit without a receipt.
+1. I had to aisle browse to find stuff or call the store to see if something is in stock. This has been a major upgrade in experience. The inventory count is pretty accurate too (important when looking for remodels, flooring, trims etc)
YMMV. I've gone to Home Depot because their site said they had an item in stock; they did not. I bought a cheaper alternative and left. I could not shake the feeling that this was on purpose to get me there.
Walmart doesn't even classify tomatoes as vegetables in some stores. They're in their own section. Every store looks the same and none of them are laid out that way.
My experience with the Walmart app for iOS has been a nightmare and my store is 3 minutes from my house so I use it frequently for pick up orders.
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.
Maybe this makes me sound like a luddite, but I think same and next day delivery is bad for us all. I left the US 2 years ago, where I was ordering nearly everything from Amazon, and moved to a place where it's significantly difficult to get "stuff" without a long drive or a few week's wait time.
The initial lifestyle change was a little rough, but I found myself over time just accepting I didn't need all the crap I used to order. People are fast to call out amazon's treatment of workers, small businesses, etc., but here we see other companies doing their best to emulate it because people still dump money at Amazon.
Can't relate. I find it incredibly frustrating when one of my projects is delayed for a week because one component isn't available with overnight shipping. I wish every manufacturer used a shipping/logistics provider and passed on the costs to me instead of half-assing it themselves.
Products seem to have a bimodal delivery time between "tomorrow" and "whenever we feel like it". Is it any wonder that we prefer the former?
I mean, everyone loves instant gratification. It's human nature.
One might ask though, if you know you need something only at the last minute, is it really a project or just something you're brute-forcing your way through?
Example, I've been rebuilding a 40 year old VW van. In the US, I'd have just started busting into it, knowing I could walk down to Rock Auto or Pep Boys and get 99% of what I find I need. Here though, I like to drive that van, and camp in it, so I am much more careful about doing repairs. I end up testing an analyzing parts before ordering them (because it can take a month to get them) and thus, end up wasting less, and building my own troubleshooting ability up more. The net result is the same, a car that works, and your way would have been faster, if not a bit more wasteful.
To your other point, I agree! I think a few days to a week would be fine for most things people want, but it's old school "Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery" or "Tomorrow, sometimes today". We know with relative surety the latter is a stress on human workers, so something in the middle which created jobs, without the down side of the high churn work style would be great.
> We know with relative surety the latter is a stress on human workers
I don't think that's necessarily true. When I order from Amazon I can pick from a small number of days when I want it delivered. I have a hard time believing that if I pick the closest day or the day furthest out that anything is substantially different to the warehouse worker. It only changes the day the system will tell them to collect an item from bin #12345 and will put it in a different shipper queue.
I once got a package in less than 24 hours from a normal online store and still remember the delivery person rushing up and down my stairs. I felt a little embarrassed and would gladly wait a day or two if people in logistics could work at a normal pace without stress.
Heh, I've held off on using Amazon's free "same day" delivery before because it felt guiltily greedy.
But the person running up your stairs is a function of throughput, not latency. Getting it a couple days later, but still ordering online, probably wouldn't change anything. I think getting it in 24 hrs just means the logistics supply chain correctly predicted the warehouse to stock your item.
Wait, how are we supposed to live without same day delivery toilet paper ? /s
People complain about the destruction of small and/or local businesses but at the same time order everything online these days. If you're a luddite I guess I'm a fucking cave man, I still can't get over the fact that people get groceries delivered.
It's aligned with our society trajectory though, instant feedback, convenience before anything, no friction, as little human contact as possible, everything as a service, &c. It doesn't matter if the whole system is run by modern day salves or if pollution is literally destroying our planet, we need our goddamn same day delivery toilet paper
ironically, it was all suppose to give us more free time. Yet, there are whole subcultures and religions dedicated to time management now. It's funny in a sad clown sort of way.
In my own life, the consumerism thing that has given me the most headaches lately is that people have figured out the easiest way to make money, a lot of money, really quickly, in the area I live, is to start a storage unit business. They're full almost immediately.
People have so much stuff they will rent multiple empty garages just to store shit no one cares about. I'm talking furniture, electronics, household white goods, clothes, all kinds of stuff. Just clutter and hoard.
Well the assumption back then was wages would keep up with productivity growth and prices wouldn't rise to gobble up what gains had been made. Both of those have proven false, first wages stagnated while productivity continued to rise and then housing prices have completely shot through the roof in most major cities from a combination of limited supply and speculative investment.
For me hoarding stuff falls into two categories: "I might need it later", and sentimentality. Your point covers 1, but not 2. However, smartphone cameras have largely solved 2 fore: I take a bunch of photos of the sentimental object so I can remember it later, then I don't feel so guilty tossing it.
I agree that they are lots of bad things about our excessive consumerism. Given human nature, I don't expect that to change at scale without a world event. There is one positive to the deliveries that is often overlooked. The energy used to drive to the store to pick something up and bring it home is generally multiple times more than all energy used to move that item previously. Having a company optimize 10 deliveries in one trip loop can greatly reduce that energy use. Of course, this could be minimized by limiting trips and going shopping when you are already near stores. However, that doesn't match our normal "want it now" patterns. Just saying that there are environmentally worse than things than same/next delivery and that is another variable in the equation.
Yeah, we're in this weird transition between the now and that distant tech utopia future we all envision, except that transition isn't a transition and that utopia is actually a dystopia.
Thank Goodness. Home Depot is pretty bad at grouping boxes; Your nearby store can have excess everything, but an online order might ship 5 pieces from 5 different stores in a ridiculous amount of boxes; and you'll get one item in 2 days, and 1 item 3 weeks later (which, anecdotally, you end up going to the nearby store for because you just want to complete the project this weekend.)
For what they ship, it's pretty inefficient. Zola or Crate and Barrel might be worse; You buy people house waring gifts, but every size plate in the set comes in a different super large box with quadruple ultra thick bubble wrap, protecting the box inside.
This has been my exact experience with HD and Walmart. I hesitate to do online shopping with either as it seems so horribly wasteful. My last Walmart online order was various groceries that I assumed would be boxed together. Every item arrived from a different location. I don't ever again want someone driving to my house to deliver a big cardboard box stuffed with padding that contains a single bag of potato chips.
Walmart will literally do the same thing. I order cereal from them because it's cheaper, and they have free delivery. But they split the order into two shipments -- one from the store, one from the warehouse. Walmart is not yet good at this type of logistics.
This is assuming two shipments is "worse" from Walmart's perspective.
Fulfilling 2 of an item from a store might trigger a resupply, which takes truck space, which pushes other, higher-margins out of stock or into danger levels, etc.
Which isn't to say that Walmart's system isn't "dumb", but is to say that it's a very complex system, operating in realtime, and what look like dumb outcomes may in fact be optimized (according to whatever internal goals their logistics system has).
I made the mistake of ordering online from HD once. I found out that they assign the same SKU to different product iterations and you're gambling on whether the one you ordered is pulled from the store shelf.
It sure took Walmart a LONG time to wake up to the fact that their local stores could double as local distribution hubs.
Better late than never, I suppose.
Now if Walmart would just de-emphasize the scuzzy third party marketplace crap on their own site. If you use the Walmart App in the store it does filter all that stuff out; wish there was a way to do that on the main web site.
From what I can tell, people want "larger selection" but without "scuzzy third party marketplace crap". The 3rd party stuff is a huge reason I've started shopping less on Amazon.
I'm waiting for the day Walmart determines that they also have an ideal footprint for the nation's best low-latency edge services provider. How many Americans are more than 20ms away from their nearest supercenter? I have to imagine this is in the single-digit percentage territory.
You don't need a whole lot of racks to do damage with the density of hardware you can purchase today. Switch is doing something like this with Fedex & Dell right now.
Amazon have won with reliable and dependable next-day shipping, but often the items you get are awful quality. Yet you "have to" order from Amazon because delivery from any other website is usually "8-10 working days" or an extra £8.99 for next-day of £15.99 if tomorrow happens to be Saturday or Sunday etc, or they require a signature and won't leave it so you end up making an hour round trip to go get your parcel from some warehouse somewhere because they refused to deliver etc .. Fuck it just get something from Amazon. Sigh. I want to buy decent quality stuff from other retailers but their shipping is really spoiling it.
Strange, I find eBay when filtered to UK sellers gives me a good experience. Usually no postage charge and I get the item in a few days. I don't have Amazon Prime so the experience is about the same for me.
For anything I need immediately, I check out Argos, Screwfix or Toolstation. Sometimes I'll walk at lunchtime to the local hardware store if I want to check the item in person against say a rusted piece. But, not everyone has that option.
Yeah, I share this experience. I assist elderly relatives with some of their online purchases and any time we don't use Amazon there's a 50% chance it's a bizarre ordeal. The speed of delivery is the main selling point but for a lot of items it doesn't matter if it's one day or three days or five days. It becomes a problem when it's just not delivered at all or it takes 3-4 weeks or is delivered to the wrong address.
A lot of it seems to be management of third party delivery firms. I don't remember ever having to interact with a courier directly with an Amazon order (even for the orders not delivered by Amazon Logistics). It's frustratingly frequent with most other retailers.
At least in the UK, we have Argos and ScrewFix and that covers most of the things Amazon would need to deliver next day for me but I can pick it up same day instead.
Please let this not be the beginning of the end of the Home Depot website experience, which currently meets my needs quite well. Every other store that has played around with this same day delivery gigwork scheme has eventually made their shipping option worse to push customers towards subscription services.
In general "same day delivery" seems like a solution in search of a problem - if you need something ASAP, it's much more straightforward to just run to the store than to be waiting around for it to be delivered on someone else's schedule. And if you're not near a store, then it's not like a gigworker can magically conjure it either.
Also never mind that half the stuff at Home Depot won't easily fit in the average car. I had a Walmart order for some shelving units that got converted to local delivery. The online status just said "delivered" with a blank picture. I found out later the driver had seen the large boxes, decided it wasn't worth it, and refused the pickup. I finally had to go to the store during their asinine online pickup hours to sort it out.
> In general "same day delivery" seems like a solution in search of a problem - if you need something ASAP, it's much more straightforward to just run to the store than to be waiting around for it to be delivered on someone else's schedule.
I would preface that with "For your particular situation,". There are a lot of situations where it can be very valuable to have something come "today," where you don't necessarily care when today. Notably, a QoS of "today" is a guarantee that you can start using it tomorrow morning. If you actually need it tomorrow, you can save the hour or whatever entailed in a round-trip to the store. Depending on your situation, that hour can be worth a meaningful amount of money. If you're doing a larger project, the time (money) savings could add up fast.
Same day delivery is not for the stuff you need ASAP in my opinion. It's for the stuff you'll need on the *next day*. Like buying a specific tool on Saturday for a Sunday home repair project, which could be a big business for Home Depot.
I have two queues, soon (store pickup) and eventually (shipping). I generally have enough errands queued up that if I need something the next day, I'll do an in store pickup in the evening/night, and get a few other things done with the same trip.
I don't begrudge people who can benefit from gigwork delivery having that option. My problem is with the stores who seem to be running an unsustainable operation (either they're getting supremely awesome freight and packaging rates, or more likely taking a loss on many items that they ship), and choosing to change to a different and less convenient unsustainable operation rather than actually sorting out their inefficiencies (like figuring out how to avoid sending so many boxes with a single item in each).
I’m not sure about the “via gig work” portion of it, but they do in fact do tool rental delivery and pickup. I rented a Dingo last month (a small digging and leveling machine that you ride behind on a platform) and this was provided as an option. It was not really clear when I looked whether HD employees took it or whether they subcontracted the service out using something like gig work. IIRC the fee was $100 USD each way. That was prohibitively expensive for me and was nearly the price of the 24h rental itself which was around $280 if I remember correctly.
I fortunately own a truck with a hitch (the Dingo came with its own flatbed trailer) but I could theoretically see it as an option for those who didn’t own one. Though at that price you might as well pay the $300 to $400 or so to have a hitch installed on your car instead provided you own one that could tow the Dingo (which most cars could, it’s pretty light).
At least with Amazon Prime, if you’re up late past midnight, “today” often means you can order something at 1am and have it that afternoon, especially if you’re fairly close to Amazon fulfillment centers.
My Walmart will deliver groceries and basic electronics (USB cables, SD cards, etc.) together within two hours.
Lowe’s has a similar UI that is pretty competitive IMO. What I love even more about both is that the sites are nearly always correct in both count and location. If a store says 15 in stock on Aisle 27 Bin 9 I can walk into that Lowe’s or Home Depot with an extremely high level of confidence that I am going to find that item at the listed location with the correct amount listed on the site or only one or two count off. It’s very nearly magical how good they have gotten at inventory.
Compare to say, Tractor Supply Co. which is a chain of pet supply stores in the States. TSC purports to show stock but it’s a complete dice roll on whether the numbers are actually correct or not for any given location. In their case I would prefer them to not show any inventory online at all because of how wrong it is all the time.
Lowes website is pretty bad in my Safari MacOS experience. They don’t show you inventory at all the Lowes around you quickly in one screen like Home Depot does, and the search/pictures are broken for me since they do not match up. They are staggered and off by one. Also, Home Depot tracks all my purchases and I can see them online just by using same credit card number, and I can use my Pro Extra ID on the self checkout terminals. Lowes does not have that option unless you go to a staffed checkout and ask them to use your MyLowes number.
Home Depot's web site is pretty awful besides the other issues in that post. Its search function is near worthless. You have to look in 5 different places to find the weight of an item and sometimes it's not there at all (but you can usually find it on amazon). Tons of crap waiting to load, the usual.
My HD curbside (parking lot) pickup experience has so far been pretty good, but I didn't go during the worst of things.
I find it average. My gold standard is Digikey, everything else has its own flaws. FWIW I have more problems with Amazon hiding straightforward matches than Home Depot or many other places for that matter. Amazon seems to always want to distract me with gensym brands.
FWIW Home Depot loads in half the time with NoScript only allowing what's essential. Otherwise they seem to be backhauling every single mouse movement, at least the last time I checked.
I was going to mention them, but I've never had the occasion to order from there. Their parametric seems equally awesome! A bit daunting, but I guess that's how non-EE's see Digikey.
For home improvement stuff I often order from Zoro and end up looking through manufacturers' catalogs. It's a burden, but awesome in its own way.
I hate Digikey's too (tons of script dependence even in the checkout page, including a recaptcha iirc). Really by now, I'd rather bypass the web site altogether and just use an ordering API instead. Digikey actually has that, but they only offer it to large customers. Seems lame.
While I agree with you completely, I find that ship has sailed. Most web stores pop up recaptchas, and have extremely heavy javascript. I find it utterly unprofessional, but somehow it's acceptable in this new age.
I'd love for APIs, especially common APIs, where consumer-agent software could create one cart that would optimize between vendors on price/shipping minimum/etc. But that's not in webstores' interest for the obvious reason of decommodification.
> In general "same day delivery" seems like a solution in search of a problem
There's a very good use case for this: If I want the item after work. A trip to-and-from the store during rush hour is a decent chunk of time, when I could have the item waiting for me instead.
I think same day delivery is stupid, but unfortunately Amazon has set the bar there, no matter how many people get harmed in the process.
Companies like Home Depot need to find a way to compete for the service level consumers expect if they want to remain in business... not that Walmart is the ideal partner to avoid human suffering.
Unless you're paying for Amazon's sunk cost fallacy, their standard is to hold your order several days before shipping. Brick and mortar stores plus Fedex often deliver faster than Amazon does!
And if you are paying for Amazon's sunk cost fallacy, that doesn't mean you want to automatically sign up for additional sunk cost fallacies at more stores. Which is eventually what these gigwork delivery options always turn into (eg Target "shipt"), because paying people to perform ad-hoc shopping and delivery isn't cheap either.
Here in the US I had good experience curbside with Home Depot. Walmart, on the other hand, never seems to have enough staff in a store to manage get a product in any way in a reasonable amount of time.
My online experience with both is pretty good. Walmart can't quite figure out how to pack anything, and their website's inventory management looks like an excel spreadsheet uploaded by an intern, but it comes on time and usually isn't broken.
I'm a bit confounded by this one. Walmart has been seemingly directly aiming for HDs business. They introduced Hart, a tool brand that is for all intents and purposes a Ryobi clone, made by the same company, and expanded their general tool offerings.
This makes me wonder if WM couldn't move tools, so decided to get money in a different way.
> We slap different labels on two identical products with a 50-100% price difference all the time.
This may be true for some companies but not for all. For example, TTI owns both Milwaukee and Ryobi. The Ryobi stuff almost always performs at the bottom of any test you see people on youtube doing, and Milwaukee is almost always at the top.
I look at that as a microcosm of the modern world. Pretty much every brand has been bought, strip mined for profit, and is effectively only differentiated by some QA tolerance the parent enforces, but which we can never know.
That's really interesting, and something I didn't realize. I know in the case of Ryobi and Hart power tools, both are made by TTI. Are you saying in that instance they subcontract out the work, or are you referring to a different class of tools?
TTI probably makes Ryobi and Hart on the same assembly line. 80% of the parts will be the same. They will put a different case on as they come down the line. They might also have other differences inside, like a different set of gears (which match the case so you can't always mix and match). It costs more to support different products on the assembly line, so there are trade offs. It is quite likely that they started with the design for one to make the other.
Note that I don't have any insight into TTI, just that the above is the normal way companies operate.
I'm surprised by a lot of the comments praising Home Depot's web site. I feel like every time I've intended to buy from them recently I'm befuddled by the variety of different ways to obtain things - "ship to store", "ship to home" or "scheduled delivery" (on top of browsing what's in stock in stores). I always seem to find a frustrating mix of things - "oh, my store has that part, but the other part is only in the store a few miles away, and this other thing I can have shipped, but shipping is only free over a certain threshold, which I might be able to reach if I shift these in-store items to be shipped, although not everything is eligible to be shipped....".
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has given up on a purchase due to frustration like this. If Home Depot can find ways to handle these logistics themselves rather than make the customer do so, they could likely increase conversions. I'm not sure what that would look like - maybe having runners between stores could be part of it? Regardless, if I could just go to one Home Depot and pick up my entire order a day or so after ordering online, that'd be great.
FWIW the shipping minimum applies to the whole order, not just the products that are shipping. So $10 of items to be shipped along with $40 of items for in store pickup is fine. "Scheduled delivery" is the same inventory/process as store pickup, but paying someone to pick it up for you. "Ship to store" is the same process as ship to home, but might be handy in some rare situations.
The two options represent two parallel logistics chains, and are quite similar to other brick and mortar stores. Once you know this, it's actually beneficial because you can choose whether to get the items soon by picking up, or choose from a much larger selection that can be shipped (possibly drop shipped). Although as you mention, it would be nice if they had a middleground option that would bring a medium selection to your local store for pickup within a fixed day or two, especially from other local stores.
I'm glad to hear this. My experience with Home Depot online ordering and pickup has been really good. My experience with Lowe's on the same has been absolutely horrible. Lowe's is so close to my house I don't even need to get on a highway, Home Depot is 20-25 minutes away. We don't shop at Lowe's because of how bad the experience has been on several projects.
One thing in particular that has been a major problem is how common shoplifting / shrinkage is at home stores and how you can order items at Lowe's that show 10+ in stock on the website/app for pickup and they'll wait hours before finally cancelling your order, often long enough it's now impossible to order and pickup same day anywhere else. The smaller the item is physically in dimensions, the more likely this is. Home Depot doesn't seem to have this problem, because it seems they do a better job of tracking their inventory (or maybe at loss prevention).
Neither store has anyone working there that knows anything, except maybe one dude who's semi-retired working in the electrical or plumbing sections. That's not usually an issue, but another mark against either store.
Walmart white-labels Doordash afaik. Target owns Shipt and I would assume is one of Walmart's biggest competitors so definitely don't see that happening.
As I'm standing in a Home Depot store struggling to find an item, I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is. This is an incredible consumer experience. Even when the thing I want isn't where it's supposed to be, showing that to a staffer usually gets an "Oh, yeah, we moved those to aisle Foo last week" response.
On the flipside, when I go to WalMart's site the default search behavior is showing me numerous items from 3rd-party sellers that are not and will never be available in-store. They do have inventory information but you have to specifically filter for it and I find it much less reliable and difficult to navigate than Home Depot's.
Hopefully they take pages from each others' playbooks.