[j2kun]

> Amazon, everything is on fire. you are not fooling anyone

Fun story, when I was an intern at Amazon there was actually a warehouse fire. The result was a lot of manual database entry updating as products were determined to be destroyed or still fit for sale.

[wildmusings]

I'm curious about what happened to products that were no longer fit for sale, but still fit for use. Do you recall?

[robaato]

In the military, a warehouse fire or equivalent suddenly generates a ton of "backdated transfer requests" showing that various stock had been sent to the warehouse just previously!

[dTal]

This sounds like rank corruption. Surely such a thing is rare in the military?

[wildmusings]

To be fair, there's a plausible explanation for what robaato describes that doesn't involve corruption. Suppose it's standard or common to move things first and then file such "backdated transfer requests". After a fire that destroys everything in a warehouse, there would be a flurry of activity to quickly account for everything that was destroyed, so paperwork that would otherwise have trickled in over a month or two might suddenly be hurriedly filed in a few days.

[dragonwriter]

It could just be lackadaisical administration that only gets urgently addressed when there is something perceived as a particular problem.

The military is not exactly known for being great at keeping track of things that aren't nuclear weapons, and sometimes falls short even on those.

[hobofan]

There is "Amazon Warehouse Deals", Amazon itself acting as a used products seller on Amazon. This is usually used for returns etc., but I wouldn't be surprised if they also handle something like this.

[greglindahl]

There are businesses that specialize in remaindering fire-damaged goods -- mostly stuff that smells like smoke.

They showed up in my town in the early 1980s after one of our local malls had a smokey fire. They sold a bunch of stuff that came from other places, too, including a ton of 15mm miniature soldiers.