C J Campbell wrote:


There are some third hand accounts of Wal-Mart having a policy of not
allowing photography in their stores. Apparently the chain is
concerned
about competitors who have been sending corporate spies into the
stores to
study inventory control. Just as a guess, analysis of a series of
pictures
could tip off competitors into Wal-Mart's ordering and restocking
practices,
which would be very valuable information. Given enough study, one
could
re-engineer Wal-Mart's whole computerized inventory control system.
Considering that Wal-Mart spent a fortune on this system, I doubt
that they
would be interested in just handing it over to a competitor for free.



One of my little sisters works for a Wal-Mart vendor. To try and
decipher the stocking programs from a couple of visits would be totally
impossible. The process is store and sales dependant. What you see at
one store for product turnover does not translate to the same for any
other store. She is constantly having to go in and tweak the system for
the items she is responsible for in their system. The system is so tied
together with sales and distrubution that making an incorrect change in
one wrong place in the software can trigger a major operational
castorophe. The software is so complicated that she has had several
weeks of training on how to correctly add, update and interpret data
from the software. Even though it's now considered stable software,
their IT people are constantly working on upgrading it to match closer
and closer to actual overall performance.

Craig C.