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Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2023年7月2日

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  • Dude, you can make a barcode of anything with literally a Microsoft word font, and you can scan with a phone. They can keep the same item IDs for heaven’s sake - I work for a manufacturer, and we wanted to add barcodes literally just for our own internal inventory counting (no on site POSs, less structured warehouse given nature of work). Our internal item codes have letters and symbols in them, like 25WIDGET-01.

    I was able to tweak the label printing template to add an additional line of the same item code in barcode font with the right open and close symbols added (/25WIDGET-01/) and then when we do inventory, we use a really cheap app that let me put together a scanning form that lets the user scan the code, converts it back to the string, and then lets them input a quantity, and sends it back to a master excel document without needing to manually transcribe written inputs or risking employee typos or visually misidentifying the item as 26WIDGET-01 instead. We also no longer have to have one group of counters scour the entire disjointed warehouse looking for every single location one of “their” items might be and hope they found all of them while other groups chaotically do the same - your group is assigned to scan EVERYTHING in this section. If you find something without a label you report it. No more crazy margin math, no more “oops I didn’t think I’d find boxes of our hottest seller in the storage trailer”, no more 30 paper copies of a form.

    Our total organizational cost to use this system in 2 countries and half a dozen locations was about 12 man hours of my completely underpaid time and about $30 per location per inventory in app fees on existing company phones.

    We made no changes to our ERP. It reduced inventory time, recounts, and mistakes by ~50%. Employees LOVED not having to waste time trying to exactly copy longass random strings for our weirder items or the “gotcha” items. Our vendors don’t barcode for us either - we do it on receiving, because we already have to label the items with our internal code anyway.

    And we’re doing a TON of custom manufacturing - often items that literally may never be sold under that code again - with large volume orders, we’re not asking cashiers to manually enter everything for stocked items sold repeatedly at small volume. We’re literally ONLY using this for inventory and get no other benefits. Their excuses are such hot bullshit it’s crazy.

    Barcodes also literally have nothing to do with discounts - as above, they are literally just a way of storing a string visually. Not exaggerating to call them a font meant to be read by computers. If you are storing pricing in a computer anywhere, and not making cashiers enter THAT manually as well, then the only difference between barcodes and not is that with a barcode they scan the item code into the computer and without they manually type it?

    And if the only place they store pricing is on the item sticker, that is a system so fucking vulnerable to fraud both internal and external it’s CRAZY. For an organization of their size??? No way.










  • As a good faith answer to your question that I hope you read with an open mind -

    Between the tariffs and what the tariffs have done to the market (reducing options for supply makes the market less competitive and increases demand in other ways), my industry’s publicly available market costs went up a few tenths of a percentage point shy of 50% in the last two months alone.

    In my industry, to pay your bills (your rent, your taxes, your employees, your lights, your freight, marketing, R&D, liabilities, funds to replace equipment when it breaks, etc) you are targeting 25-30% “direct” margin - minimum, if you’re barely treading water - which is (sell price - material costs) / sell price. With that math, a company that was previously reporting a 40% margin (say ($100 - $60)/$100) that had a 50% increase in material costs is now making a 10% margin (($100 - $60x1.5)/$100 = (100-90)/100 = 10%). That’s bankruptcy.

    That’s not considering that costs have been increasing for more than just the last 2 months - anyone with a wallet knows that already, our industry number is 80% YOY increase in basic costs (margin math: 40% ==> negative 8%) - or that the true costs of tariffs haven’t even hit yet.

    We also cannot pass an 80% increase in costs on to our customers without literally triggering industry recession if not collapse. We can barely pass on 40% and “tightening belts” to make absorbing the other 40% possible (margin math: 40% ==> 16%, half the general target) means good guys and gals with families lose honest, hard-working jobs. Even for a highly efficient business, being told the government is going to send you an extra 25-104% bill because fuck you, that’s why is going to be a heart attack level shock.

    This is local manufacturing - the exact businesses who tariffs are supposed to be encouraging to do business in the US. A LOT of manufacturing is like this - it turns out tariffing the ever living fuck out of literally everything includes raw materials that you can’t get here that manufacturers need. This is literally just for our divisions’ own internal numbers too - no CEO pay coming out of this. Administratively, we run a skeleton crew already to make sure our costs are competitive, and it costs us hard already in turnover due to burnout.

    The number of meetings we’ve had trying to figure out how on earth we keep our doors open without crashing an industry and then closing our doors anyway has quite literally had people in tears in the board room.

    Are there companies who will use this for profiteering? Absolutely, tons of them. The companies who have the luxury of doing so are either are “inflexible demands” (ie food and medical care) or extremely large monopolies. Smaller companies, “discretionary spending”, and highly competitive markets like mine are just going to hold their breath and try not to drown, raise prices where they have to, inevitably go out of business in droves, THEN get bought up by a large monopoly who will make an 80% price increase look like child’s play because fuck you, everyone else closed.

    We don’t need to fuck ourselves, Trump is doing that for us, thank you. And yes, people without jobs or who have nothing left after groceries don’t buy a lot of luxury keyboards, especially after their costs go up significantly - something I’m sure they have considered once or twice or repeatedly at checks watch 2 in the morning when they wish they could sleep, if they’re having the sort of time we’re having here.






  • That does get audited - customs officials do have a look at a lot, and frequently check products against stated claims.

    At least this is my experience with my own company’s cross border business - labeling, valuation, documentation of sales and invoices, etc, all matter. We’ve had shipments to the US stopped and held before over what you’d consider minor issues with labeling or newer guys at the ship desk leaving i’s undotted or t’s uncrossed. I’ve had some panicked calls about costing and valuation documentation in big shipments. There were some loopholes to a few rules, but they were small and because these tariffs apply to pretty much everything from any given country, I have a hard time imagining there would be major work arounds for this.

    Smaller drop-shippers with more discreet packaging might be able to get away with reducing their numbers - or at least rolling the dice on not getting checked - but for large commercial shipments, absolutely not.




  • I literally work with ~750,000 line exports on the daily on my little Lenovo workbook. It gets a little cranky, especially if I have a few of those big ones open, but I have yet to witness my hard drive melting down over it. I’m not doing anything special, and I have the exact same business-economy tier setup 95% of our business uses. While I’m doing this, that little champion is also driving 4 large monitors because I’m actual scum like that. Still no hardware meltdowns after 3 years, but I’ll admit the cat likes how warm it gets.

    750k lines is just for the branch specific item preferences table for one of our smaller business streams, too - FORGET what our sales record tables would look like, let alone the whole database! And when we’re talking about the entirety of the social security database, which should contain at least one line each in a table somewhere for most of the hundreds of millions of people currently living in the US, PLUS any historical records for dead people??

    Your hard drive melting after 60k lines, plus the attitude that 60k lines is a lot for a major database, speaks to GLARING IT incompetence.


  • I meant to reply to you earlier and accidentally replied to the whole thread - I agree with the sentiment below. Honestly, using AI as a coding partner when learning is actually a pretty great use for it, if you’re reviewing it properly, testing, and know its limits. This initiative is much more focused on the same sorts of low quality content farms and c-suite “cost cutting” initiatives that have been making gaming suck since long before AI. If you’re the sort of developer doing game jams, focusing on learning rather than volume, and taking pride in your work the quality will show through regardless.