Everything a woman needs at Target

Posted under A Geek Dad's Life, Blog Posts

My wife and I has a small chuckle over this old receipt she found from Target.  (Click to embiggen.)

Apparently, you can get everything that a woman needs at Target department stores.  Makes you wonder if someone else has a receipt that says “WIFE” or “DIVORCE.”  If so, I can guarantee that one of those cost a helluva lot more than a “HUSBAND.”

Obviously, the “HUSBAND” item was for a greeting card of some sort.  The inventory specialist responsible for entering the name, pricing, and other vendor info into the system made a choice.  There seemed to be enough room to type “HUSBAND CARD” because there is a “FAIRIES CARD” right below it.  Maybe “HUSBAND CARD” was already used, and the person opted for “HUSBAND” rather than using some other combination or abbreviation.  Maybe this was driven by a company policy to avoid abbreviations in the ‘short description’ field, or to prefer readability over specificity.  Maybe the entry came from a data import from a supplier, and that supplier only makes cards, and there was no reason on that list of greeting card items to specify that this HUSBAND card was a “CARD.”  Maybe the person who entered it was just lazy, or in a rush to get the job done.

I can totally understand how the “HUSBAND” entry might have gotten there.  The software projects that I’ve been living with for the past 8 years have presented challenges with abbreviations and ‘short descriptions.’  While web pages and user manuals offer unlimited space to print and scroll through things, the same is not true for receipts, labels, LCD panels, TVs, and other fixed-format display/output devices.  It can be a real challenge to fit names of stuff onto Avery stick-on labels, especially when there is already a crapload of other information that also has to fit.  To add to the trouble, users HATE entering information twice.  They will often give full thought to the primary ‘name’ field, and give only a passing thought to the ‘abbreviation’ field.

To add to the technical complexity of the problem, Target’s systems might support multiple languages.  (If they want to go international, their systems will need to deal with multiple languages.) 

I designed many of our name fields in [my company's] systems support multiple languages, so where the non-abbreviated name might fit in English, it often won’t fit in French or German.  It is a tricky business, and we’ve spent some time on it.  *sigh*  It can be a tedious job getting systems to do what we meat sacks take for granted.

Still, I suspect that the person that entered “HUSBAND” was just lazy or in a rush.  If so, software can’t really fix that.