Is Matel Stalinist?

[Tim May]

On Dec 11, 2003, at 1:56 AM, ken wrote:
>
>> Corporations have sales tracking software out the wazoo. If it sells, 
>> they buy more and sell them. Sounds like they're doing precisely what 
>> their owners want them to do.
>
> Yes, but, it might be that a corporation makes more money for its 
> owners by centralising and systematising and reducing the local 
> autonomy of business units. It's a lot easier to manage a thousand 
> identical stores than a hundred unique ones. So from "Tyler 
> Durden's"'s POV there might be more responsiveness from an independent 
>  store than a chain.
>
> Though like you said, that doesn't seem to apply to books.  Might to 
> food though.
>

I doubt it applies to food, either.

If my local grocery store runs low on "Spam," say, they will order 
more. This is why they track items with POS terminals and UPC labels 
(largely replacing the inventory people who used to be seen in the 
aisles counting items and entering them into a small computer or, 
earlier, onto an inventory log sheet).

It makes no sense to "lump" or "consolidate" all of the stores into one 
lump calculation and then issue order to "send more Spam in this amount 
to each store." Not only does it not make sense, but clearly this would 
cause pileups at _some_ stores (too much Spam) and shortages at _other_ 
stores (still not enough Spam, even with the latest "send more Spam to 
all stores" order. The fact that neither shortages nor pileups (that I 
can see) are apparent at any of the stores I visit, and that all of 
them use UPC and POS methods for _all_ sales of ordered products, is 
consistent with the reorder method described earlier.

I repeat: the "despised by anti-capitalists" Borders store has a deeper 
and broader inventory of books than the "cherished by Greens and 
locals" locall-owned bookstore. And they also use UPC and POS and 
reorder books dynamically.

(For another list I've been discussing lazy evaluation languages, like 
Miranda and Haskell, and like Scheme can be "forced" to do, and the 
similarities between demand-driven evaluation of partial results and 
the obviously demand-driven inventory practices of modern businesses is 
striking. There's an essay here for some political thinker, along the 
lines of Phil Salin's "Wealth of Kitchens" essay drawing parallels 
between free markets and object-oriented systems.)

--Tim May