I love how you are not even realising that behind the oatmilk ticket is written "last oatmilk", the behind the half and half one is written "only 3 half and half" behind the foo ticket "foo down to f(frequency of foo use)", and the person now now only need to go through the tickets at the end of the week (or if more than N tickets).

I will let you ponder if you need to reticket all, or just the reordered product, wether a stack can have multiple ticket (a white one say 5 from the last and one red one two from the back know wether you need an urgent order) etc...

And whether or miracle, if you don't receive any ticket a week that you don't need to reorder !

It's amazing how if that was expressed in term of resource allocation, reference counting, tagged pointers, scaling heuristic, garbage collect... that would click in people's mind, but many are incapable at abstracting because they feel they are beyond this.

I don't understand how you consider all this complexity to be better than to just have an inventory of what have to be ordered once in a while. In a batch, at the secretary or office manager own time.

Instead of all the things to be managed, the tickets that have to be written, with somehow a kind of brain fuck logic, someone going to this person desk at any interval, might even be interrupting the office manager, the other one having to keep and manage the tickets.

Like when things are ordered, you have to let the post-it in another place like "ordered but not here yet". And maybe the day after things are ordered, another ticket will arrive but sadly the order is already done, so will have to wait for next week anyway...

And think also, like when you are using milk for your coffee, and crap, it is the last drop, so you have to drop everything to bring this stupid ticket to the board or secretary desk.

If it is such a brillant idea, I'm wondering why no one use such a strategy for managing home supplies...

I think the societal aspect of your collegues being helpful to each other, while not having that exact task assigned, is the reason you could appreciate this setup. I think putting a card on another person's desk and walking away isn't really interrupting, anyway.

Besides, visually seeing stock going low helps the one doing purchases in deciding whether said supply needs immediate restocking, or that there's ample time to collect more low-velocity stock to batch them in one order.

As mentioned elsewhere, the person purchasing may not consume (in this example) milk at all!