This is actually the thing that makes me wonder about all the data mining Walmart is supposed to be doing. If I buy a lot of something, shouldn't that mean that they'll be more likely to have it in stock, all else equal? Assuming that their data mining is actually working, I mean. With croissants, I can see where there might be physical issues (not enough capacity for baking them in the store or something), and not enough lost sales to justify the additional cost of rectifying it. However, for things like 2-liter bottles or 12-packs of cans, it's hard for me to understand why their software would allow them to routinely run out, every week, at about the same time. It seems like multiplying a single value in a database somewhere by just over one would fix this problem, but it just keeps happening, week after week, for years.
