Blathr Wayne Lorentz

What is Blathr?
Showing blathrs with the tag “Walmart.”

See if they have any common sense

Friday, October 7th, 2022 Alive 18,791 days

The Walmart app's availability filter

The Walmart app has a filter labeled ”Show available items only.” Seriously? Why would I want a store to show me things that it doesnʼt have?

Who goes to a store, or looks at a storeʼs app and thinks to themselves, “I wonder if they donʼt have this?” “Hey, Walmart, show me all the things that you canʼt sell."

What kind of things are on Walmartʼs list of things it doesnʼt have. Fabergé eggs? The Loch Ness Monster? Maybe the Popeʼs mitre?

Walmart is far from the only store guilty of this. Amazon is among the worst offenders. Target and Walgreens, too.

How does showing things you donʼt have benefit a customer?

❖ ❖ ❖

Right purdy

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021 Alive 18,361 days

Sunset from a Walmart parking lot in Fort Stockton, Texas

Meanwhile, in West Texas.

❖ ❖ ❖

So stop shopping at Walmart

Friday, March 12th, 2021 Alive 18,217 days

An error message from WalMart

In spite of all their fancy JavaScript, and invasive telemetry, I donʼt think online stores really have any idea how much money they lose every day by making their shopping process so complicated that the web site breaks.

Simplifying the stack would save development costs, management costs, and increase sales.

But nobody in tech gets promoted for making things less complicated.

❖ ❖ ❖

Pixels arenʼt free

Thursday, March 11th, 2021 Alive 18,216 days

An error message from WalMart

Vague error messages cost less, and Walmart passes that savings on to you!

Assuming you can eventually get to the check-out portion of the web site.

❖ ❖ ❖

127 characters ought be enough for anyone

Friday, February 12th, 2021 Alive 18,189 days

A borked Walmart product listing

Somewhere, a Walmart web developer and his database manager are learning about UTF-8 and utfmb8.

❖ ❖ ❖