A new crop of shopping tools aims to help consumers beat the supply chain crunch and the bots
CNN
A small but dedicated community of programmers, journalists and social media content creators has sprung up to announce whenever a big retailer has restocked more product.
Fearing they may have contracted Covid-19 over the holidays, Worley, a 32-year-old quality assurance tester from Las Vegas, joined millions of other Americans in a desperate search — "rush mode," he called it — for rapid test kits that were evaporating from store shelves. Every place he tried was sold out.
Then Worley looked at his Twitter (TWTR) feed. An account he followed known as Wario64, which normally focuses on restocks and deals on video game consoles, had just blasted out a link to Walmart's website, where an undetermined number of Covid tests were now back in stock for around $20 apiece. Clicking the link, Worley rushed to place an order in hopes of beating out the masses — and was rewarded moments later by a Walmart confirmation email. Winning the supply-chain lottery felt surreal, Worley said, even if Walmart (WMT) later had to cancel his shipment due to other inventory issues.