Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by OJFord 749 days ago
> This method also helped with inventory control. For example, if the total sales for the day ended in .56, it meant 44 (or 144) items were sold, no matter how many customers bought them.

That seems like bollocks, who cares about a technique for tracking total number of any items sold? That isn't helpful for inventory management at all? And even if you had only a single product, or you totalled sales separately for some reason (and inexplicably by sale price rather than just tallying sales), you could then just divide by the price, you don't need to coerce the total into being a tally mod 100.

1 comments

>who cares about a technique for tracking total number of any items sold?

Pre-digital calculator salesmen? Time is money and being able to do a quick mental math can be helpful before doing a more detailed inventory

>you could then just divide by the price, you don't need to coerce the total into being a tally mod 100.

That's why they gave more than one reason. Why laser focus on criticizing a single one?

> Pre-digital calculator salesmen?

For what purpose? Say you're a salesman of 7 different products/SKUs; you sold 186 products today. What do you do with that information?

You're still hyper fixating on one single point. And I'm not a businessman. I imagine businesses never do one thing for one reason like software functions.

Bankers can tell a lot from a security standpoint based on seemingly frivolous data. Maybe it's the same logic here. If you end every day swelling exactly XX0 products, something is amiss. It at least prompts a deeper investigation, since running through weeks of receipt/data takes more time pre-computer.

I'm 'hyper fixating' on the point that seemed nonsense to me, that I commented on, and that you replied to.
?? It lets me know how effective a product I'm offering is being sold? What do you mean?
I guess you can think of it as a "checksum". If your inventory count doesn't match the sales sum, something is wrong