this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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I wonder if there are some good practical reasons though. Like if they were to do this with real towels it could potentially be heavy and dangerous. If a bunch of towels did fall, it would be significant work to put them back, and now they'd be dirty from the floor the public has been walking all over.
Also, the fluorescent lights fade stuff pretty quick so if they didn't cycle inventory fast enough you'd see fading, and they'd fade at different rates due to being exposed for different lengths of time and look weird.
but whats the point of pretending to be a dangerously overstocked warehouse? they would have done better with just a gigantic poster of ferris bueller in a towel.
It demonstrates they have stacks and stacks of towels and that they are to be fully trusted as your local towel authority.
Honestly, it did kind of psychologically have that effect. I remember thinking "Damn, these people have a shit load of towels. People must be buying a lot more towels than I do. Maybe I should be replacing my towels more often."
Fuck towel authoritarians!
I have seen a doc about Home Depot (not the pictured store) some time ago. Apparently the overstocked facade was a big deal because those big stores want you to think they have everything that can possibly exist in their inventory so you only always go there and make no further stops.
Of course, it's smoke and mirror and a lot of stores adopted the big warehouse style for the same reasons. Some stores have legit empty boxes filled with crap all over. If you ever went into one of those store looking for something very specific tho, it is pretty apparent that they only overstock a few profitable items and the rest is no better, or worse than smaller locally-owned shops inventory-wise. Only exception around here would be Costco, which is a.legit warehouse.
I would say that they're worse than local hardware stores. Not only is it really difficult to get help in a Home Depot, but they rarely have any even remotely specialized. Lets say you need a specialized gasket to fix your bidet. Home Depot probably doesn't have it, and if they do, they'll make you search for it for an hour, and then make you buy 12 of them for $10. The local hardware store will have a little white haired dude who knows exactly what you need, exactly where it is, will explain how to prevent it from going bad again, and will sell you one gasket for 37 cents.
At least near me, I've found ACE Hardware to still be like this, despite being a big name chain.
I think they are all locally owned though. Every ACE in my area is like this, smaller but with helpful knowledgeable staff who either take care of you or tell you where to go if they don’t have it.
ACE hardware is definitely a lot better than Home Depot.
It really depends on who is working when you go, so of the younger guys just known where stuff is, not every arcane solution ever used in home repair.
My guess is that you never had the (dis)pleasure of shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond or Linens & Things.
Both stores featured stuff like this. A relatively small footprint for a "superstore", that did a lot by drawing your attention upwards to generate a sense of space. Every "department" had stuff like this, showing inventory 10-20 feet off the floor on very high shelves. Meanwhile the floorplan was rather claustrophobic and not somewhere you want to be on a busy shopping day. But if you needed to outfit a kitchen, bathroom, and a bedroom all on one trip, it was the the place to go.
Anyway, it's no surprise that there was stuff like this going on purely for show. Makes sense, actually. You wouldn't want staff restocking on ladders half the time.
You are a marketing genius!
But also, I think it's just a trend in the U.S. For a while there, and kinda still, warehouse stores are in style; I think because of the reputation for good deals from places like Costco and Ikea, I think other companies thought if they pretend to be a bit of a warehouse people will think they're getting low prices because money was saved on decor. 'Muricans are easy to fool this way.
IKEA does this trick with the furniture they sell you. You think you're getting a wooden desk, but really it's two sheets of super thin wood glued into a cardboard box, or some foam.
or three stools in a trenchcoat
Yuck.
It's probably just marketing, the super high stack is visible from far away and advertisers many available colors. If one catches your eye, you then have to walk through a bunch of other aisles to actually get to the towels. It's like putting the milk at the back of the grocery store.
Ah ya, I could see that.
I could see this be a way to show how the towels look like when neatly stacked. And to show what belongs into that shelf if it were empty.