bgavin wrote: Dunno why RS ditched 'em... they even recycle the part number for something else.
I have the original boxes for them, and the part number points to something totally different today.
Take it from an ex-manager, RS is little better than Pyle in that respect (in other words, way behind the times). They buy in huge lots, repackage (and sometimes relabel) them in their own facility, then when the lot runs out, they buy something else. In the case of some of the electronics parts, those lots can last decades. When they change products, they change SKUs. Sometimes, if they feel like it today. And they're not horribly consistent ont the packaging either, look closely in almost any store and you'll find a hook with at least 3 generations of packaging of the same SKU, and sometimes two packages of the same general style but in different sizes. You'll also note that many of the packages are quite damaged, which comes from the warehouses cramming them into boxes to save shipping.
As far as the catalog numbers go, that's a remnant of a veeery old PC system. You may or may not remember the old Tandy 2000? Those were the very first in-store terminals years ago, and not all stores had them. They ran customized software on Xenix. RS at some point fired the company that actually
wrote that software, and now pays another company to revise it as needed. The current revision now runs in a VM on Server 03, and all of the cashlanes are terminal emulation. From an IT standpoint, it's a pretty respectable cluster. Anyway, the original software was only set up to use an SE-ITE (Series/Item) numbering system. Even though the system now supports SER-ITEM numbering system, many of those SKUs are dedicated to RS' internal supplies, and other ventures (Sam's Club Kiosks, Sprint Kiosks, etc). Additionally, each series can only have a theoretical maximum of 9999 items, and a series covers a lot of things, so there has to be some SKU recycling at some point. Still doesn't explain it, right? Well, what we were told at some point or the other, is that instead of 9,999,999 possible SKUs (the theoretical maximum, based on the SER-ITEM system) the system is really only capable of handling about 20,000 SKUs or so, and only about 250 per series. Those numbers aren't definite, but apparently the performance of the old NIX system is directly related to the number of SKUs in the system, so they keep it down as much as they can. Basically, after a product is cleared from the warehouses, it starts to cost-devalue. This happens for an indeterminate, somewhat flexible period of time until the cost is valued at 0, and then is removed from the store systems about 3 months later. Anywhere from 3 to 12 months after
that it may be recycled. The parts system, however, is entirely seperate, and entering some SKUs into it (computers particularly) will bring up random parts for several different computers, making it lots of fun to select the right one.
Oh, and just for shiggles, the inventory in the stores isn't 100% synced to the perpetuals in Fort Worth, and sometimes they get out of sync pretty bad. This is partially caused by the store systems (the old Nix software) only feeding an inventory update once daily to the (slightly) more modern warehouse system in Texas. For instance, Fort Worth used to think that my old store had 6 32" TVs that we didn't actually have, and nobody knew how to fix the problem. Same thing happens with at least 5% of the SKUs in the store every 6 months, you never know what, how many, or when. These things just kind of happen, quite randomly. If you call IT support about it, they just shrug it off and say "Have your DM adjust it, you won't be billed on your P&L for errors like that, so don't worry about it." Most DMs won't be bothered with adjusting something small, so it's usually not worth the manager's time to ask, but if you
don't ask, you'll get ripped a new one if they find an inventory error in your store. And, to cap it off, during inventory, some of those SKUs that fell off the deck months ago? They still show up, and sometimes they'll show up after being gone for over a year. Sometimes, you'll have a darn-near-new (not DISC or DVL) product that's NOT on your inventory at all! Interestingly, they don't tell you when things actually DO fall off the inventory, so sometimes you could go to sell something, and it not be in the system.
You'd think that a store pretending to be a technology leader would at least have a modern inventory system, wouldn't you?
That's my Shack-Rant for the day. Thank you all for joining, and we now return you to your regularly scheduled thread....
