[cpher]

Not related to Square, per se, but to give you an example from a completely different domain-- car sales.

My wife and I were researching minivans in our metro area. We got calls from the dealership asking if we're still interested in the vehicle. We said 'yes'. One hour before we drove to the 'burbs' to check it out, I called to confirm the availability of said vehicle. They said 'yes, it's still here.' We get to the dealership only to find out that the vehicle was sold THE DAY BEFORE. A major car dealership didn't have a system in place to know their inventory at any given point in time. They're a part of a weird "sharing" system between dealerships that can borrow/trade/steal vehicles from their partner dealerships-- all within the same "family" company. But they clearly had no way to track this activity.

It seems that inventory control/management spans many domains. Needless to say, they lost our business and we bought from someone else.

[eli]

Maybe they wanted to get you on the lot even if the car you wanted was gone.

[awor]

That is definitely not unheard of. The dealers will do whatever they can do to get you to show up.

[cpher]

It's possible, especially given the research available to anyone with a smartphone. They were a big dealership, but the whole experience smelled of a shady used car salesman.

[jusben1369]

Yes sadly the sales guy thinks like this i) Tell him the car is not here they don't come chance of sale = 0%. ii) Tell them the car is here then it's not here but maybe sell them something else = 10%.

[tomkarlo]

Car dealerships are apparently still pretty primitive in terms of inventory management - which I guess is unsurprising given that they're mostly small businesses. NPR recently did a piece on one of the top Jeep dealerships on Long Island and they had issues like selling the same car twice, or selling a car that was no longer on the lot, because they were literally using a whiteboard to track what had been sold (and even more informal methods for tracking cars that had been "put on hold".)

[apayan]

I think you're referencing an episode of This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/513/1...

It was a very informative episode, and did a great job highlighting the financial difficulties faced by car dealerships. It made me sympathetic to their plight, but it's an old business model and I still prefer the direct sales method being championed by Tesla.

[tomkarlo]

Yeah, that piece. It was great, but it also seemed like they're all doing business the same as in the 60's, at least from an operations standpoint.

[VLM]

In 1997, I bought a new car. Look at that dot matrix printer in the finance office. Bet I'll never see one of those again for the rest of my life.

I got into my financial situation by not wasting money, and it seems a properly maintained 90s car could last 16 years..

You guessed it, October of 2014 and there's still a dot matrix printer in the financial office.

I've worked with cheap lasers and I've worked with expensive lasers and from a labor cost perspective it would take several thousand dollars to get a new laser as fast as the dot matrix, so I can't blame them. The latency of completely printing a form was perhaps 1/4 the time it takes a typical laser to warm the fuser, and surely the energy cost is lower...