Scaling

Technical executives in retail face a persistent challenge: balancing loss prevention while reducing friction in the customer experience. Recent implementations of computer vision systems at Sam’s Club demonstrate the potential for technology to meet both goals. At Groceryshop 2024, the CEO of Sam’s Club described their new exit verification system and reported a 14% improvement in the Net Promoter Score—a metric that validates the investment in advanced technological solutions.

Computer Vision

My local Sam’s Club has two arches that you push the buggy through after checking out (on the app or at the registers). About 25 feet past the arches is an employee who will wave you through or check your receipt. Most of the time these days, I’m waved through. Combine this with the scan-to-go app, and I can be in and out of Sam’s Club in about 15 minutes. Compare this to the experience at Costco, which is more like a social event, because I will have enough time to make friends in line!

Have you ever ordered milk online only to receive that dreaded out-of-stock notification after placing your order? You’re not alone. After years of ordering groceries online, I’ve learned a secret: ordering through a store’s app right after closing time often yields the best results. Why? I suspect it’s because my order gets fulfilled before in-store shoppers arrive the next morning. But this workaround hints at a deeper problem in retail inventory management—one that affects nearly half of consumers who rate out-of-stock items as their highest shopping frustration according to a survey by Dynata.

I’ve added a new feature to the day 2 ops tool.

With the diagram command, you can create a map of your Yugabyte cluster overlaid on a map of the world. Here’s an example:

The Plotly library is very powerful, with a lot of options. I used the network map option, which allows you to define nodes and the edges between the nodes. In this case, the nodes are an abstraction of the database instances in a YugabyteDB cluster, and the edges represent the network connections between them.

Today’s global and distributed applications often need to serve user requests from a single data source across different regions. While providing data scaling and protection against network outages, ensuring low-latency access to data is critical for providing a seamless user experience. YugabyteDB, a distributed SQL database, is designed to handle global data workloads efficiently. In this blog post, I’ll share some techniques to optimize read and write latency in a multi-region YugabyteDB cluster.

Timing of seasonal demand depends on the industry, but a cyclical increase in traffic applies to all industries. Maybe your cycle is shorter than a full year. Or maybe it’s related to things like weather patterns or fashion.

You know when your business gets the most traffic.

• Retail? Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
• Health and fitness? New Year’s Day.
• Pizza restaurant? Halloween and Thanksgiving, surprisingly.

You do know your business well. But do you know how to make sure your database infrastructure can keep up with traffic during these busy periods?