Okay, but surely this is rare? I’ve used online stock checks for retail stores and found them to be accurate the overwhelming majority of the time. Obviously it’s going to occasionally happen that someone stole an item or has an item in their cart when you check, but that hardly means that inventory databases are useless.
That's not my experience. Last month I tried to buy a specific vacuum cleaner at Lowes. Online said it's in stock. It wasn't. Another nearby Lowes said it was in stock. It wasn't. I finally got smart enough to call the third Lowes instead of driving there. The guy said "it shows as in stock but let me check". They know. It wasn't.
This has been roughly par for the course in my experience, and not particularly with Lowes.
When you say accurate, do you count the number of available items on the shelf, or are you just looking for at least 1 of something?
It seems to matter more when there are only 1 or 2 ‘available’, but I have seen at Lowes where the packet has been ripped open and a piece of the assembly is gone, or it looks like it was returned, but with the wrong item in place.
It's much, much, much more common than "database owner falsifies records, leaving no trace behind, but is otherwise completely trustworthy" which is the issue with real world inventory management blockchain purports to solve
Nah, I’ve been doing inventory counts where I’ve been counting nuts and bolts for the sole purpose to update the inventory databases. These were nuts and bolts for trains but the inventory database were not correct for different reasons.
Microcenter deliberately lies about the stock of graphics cards on their website by saying that there are none in stock - even if they have some at the physical store itself - because, as overheard from a long term employee: "Just imagine what would happen if we said we had a graphics card online. It would be pandemonium. We set the stock at zero. If they come in, they'll be sold anyway."
Not sure where you're shopping, but I've found them to be highly inaccurate the majority of the time. Useful for telling me where something is located, but generally useless for actual quantity accuracy. This is for stores like Home Depot, Lowes, and Target.
