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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 3283473" data-attributes="member: 1645">Having a large number of SKUs (stock keeping units or product numbers) causes terrible, terrible inventory problems that are hard to appreciate if you've never had to manage inventory.  In addition to the obvious work of tracking more products, there's the problem of having to stock more inventory because you never quite know how much you need of any one SKU.Let me put this in gamer terms.  Imagine our Evil Overlord summons an army, and he expects to assemble 1d20 goblin scouts, 1d20 hobgoblin heavy infantry, 1d20 human barbarians, 1d20 skeletons with scimitars, 1d20 zombies, and 1d20 wraiths.  If he goes to the hobby shop to buy miniatures for his army, he might naturally buy 10 of each kind (SKU) of figure -- but then he'll have too many of each type half the time and too few half the time, and he might be off by a large margin in each case.  To have a 95% chance of having enough figures of each type, and to avoid another trip to the store, he needs to buy 19 of each.If he uses generic figures (chess pawns?), he needs enough to represent 6d20 figures.  He can have a 95% chance of having enough by buying a few more than his estimated need (of 33).  He doesn't need to order 95% of 120, because he can pool the randomness.  He's not likely to need lots of everything.And that's the quandry faced by the hobby shop, which doesn't know which figures will end up popular (with its customers, when the figures come out).  With hundreds of different SKUs, it ends up buying much, much more inventory than it can justify, or it skips the product line entirely, knowing it can't make the money back (at least not in a timely manner).</blockquote>

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