The same items at my local Ralphs (Kroger) are constantly (like 4+ years) out of stock because they just face over the holes. Whoever is putting inventory into the computer must absolutely suck too because this shouldn’t even be happening; but having worked at Walmart I’ve seen firsthand how people roll their eyes when the numbers are off.

I’ve been told that it’s mostly automated. IE the Point Of Sale tells the system what items were sold and it subtracts from whatever total it has. The produce guys have said that because of this system some things like bananas are almost always screwed up, cause the barcode and the PLU (the numbers) aren’t actually the same item. Namely sometimes when the banana suppler changes they don’t get automatically ordered cause the system thinks we’re selling the old ones which “don’t exist anymore”. I’d expect similar things happen to grocery and home but to a much less extent, probably from people just tossing stuff out instead of scanning it out and then still just tossing it. Yay food waste.

They do quarter, semi annually, or anual inventories to true up the numbers