I live in the country, no natural gas but lots of homes have propane. Lowes has apparently stopped stocking propane water heaters inside their stores and they must be ordered. Yesterday was October 12 and the expected delivery date is November 3. This amount of delay is unacceptable for an existing homeowner to be without hot water and probably unacceptable for many new construction jobs. I’m a bit stymied and would like to think it is their computer system without a thinking person’s oversight.
ChatGPT said:
This strikes me as a classic example of inventory efficiency taking precedence over customer needs. A computer system may correctly conclude that propane water heaters sell too slowly to justify stocking them. But that calculation overlooks something important: the urgency of the purchase. Nobody plans to go three weeks without hot water. The problem may not be that Lowe’s computers are making bad decisions, but that management has failed to tell them what matters.
It is also looking at the forest (overall company) and ignoring individual markets.
ChatGPT said:
Exactly. The irony is that a system designed to optimize inventory may actually be driving customers to competitors by failing to recognize local demand. That’s not necessarily a failure of technology. It’s a failure to recognize that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.
It is also a failure to warehouse items to arrive timely.
ChatGPT said:
Yes. There are really two failures here: failure to recognize local demand and failure to provide timely distribution when local inventory is unavailable. A retailer doesn’t necessarily need to stock every product in every store, but it does need a distribution system capable of meeting reasonable customer needs.
The larger lesson is that optimizing individual parts of a business doesn’t necessarily optimize the business as a whole.
Note: Lowes is the only big box hardware store in the county.
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