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Ah. There's a reasons for that, as told to me by a supply sergeant in the military. A lot of suppliers had a BEL (Basic Equipment List), which says all stock must have a minimum and a maximum of XYZ in order to meet government spec. Some large items, like diesel generators, have a BEL minimum of 2, but also because of their size and storage complexity, have a maximum of 2. So it order to get a new one, you must get rid of one of the old ones. But if you get rid of the old one, you are below minimum BEL, and could fail inspection or an inventory check, if it takes a while to get a new one. Large items don't always "hang around," but they get manufactured on demand, so the only way to get a new one is to be without one for a very long period of time. Thus, you risk failing inspection. The best way to avoid that is to keep two and never order any.
Military logic.
Reminds me of my buddy’s story from his time as a warehouse manager for Blockbuster (yeah, we’re old…) Blockbuster’s management did loss prevention and breakage based on item count, not item value. If a new hire shoved a $30 DVD down their pants and walked out with it every week, corporate wouldn’t care. After all, it was only 1 DVD each week. And 1 is an acceptably low number. But if that same hire shoved a $5 box of 100 pencils down their pants, corporate would lose their fucking minds. Because each pencil was counted as 1 item, so they were suddenly 100 items short.
It was sort of an open secret in the warehouse that if you were going to steal something, you should only go for the high value shit. And only do it if nobody else had already done so recently. So if the system said you had 5 in stock and there were 5 in the bin, it was open season. Because as long as you only stole one of them, corporate wouldn’t care. But if you pocketed a dozen 50¢ “impulse buy next to the register” toys, loss prevention would be patting people down as they clocked out.
On top of that, everything is ordered by article number. So it happened on a boat that they needed two replacement bolts for the engine. The engineer wrote the order, and the captain signed it and sent it to HQ.
They were informed the order would take (a long time). When they finally got the word that the order was in, they were astonished that two heavy load trucks were waiting for them. Each containing a turbine nearly as big as their boat. Which had nearly the same inventory number as the bolts. With two digits switched.
E4 mafia could probably fix that and a few other issues.
While I get the joke, I feel obliged to point out that the military is one of the very few places this could potentially makes sense (not saying it does in this case): You can basically decide that the warehouse is responsible for holding emergency stock, not ordering materiel that is produced on-demand for daily use. Essentially, if it's produced on-demand, why would you want to go via to warehouse to get it? There are plenty of reasons you could want that of course, but if we ignore those, then the rationale can make sense.