Discussion 5: Sears and McDonalds; The shortcomings of bad inventory (Essay Sample)

Read two students' posts and respond , if appropriate, include personal experience in your responses. Please keep separate. I included the topic we wrote on. 
topic: think about the types of inventory systems used in business. Now select and briefly describe a business you would like to own or run and choose the best inventory system for that business. State why you made your choice as you did by stating advantages and disadvantages.
Response 1:
I have two personal experiences. When I worked at McDonald's the general manager would have a chart with all items we had in stock, she'd walk around the whole stock room with a scanner and it would tell her how many cases/individual pieces of a product we had currently. In doing that, she would prepare for the next truck order. The process took her about 2 hours.
At Sears, we had one whole day set aside for inventory. An outside company came in with scanners and went to every rack of clothes and scanned each individual item. We had a piece of paper taped to the sign above the rack and they would put the number of pieces on the rack. Then, the employees from Sears would have to count every individual item by hand to make sure the number matched. We started at 6am and finished at 5pm; the store opened at 9:30 regardless of the inventory.
Personally, I would prefer the way that inventory was recorded at McDonald's. It was orderly, accurate, and more beneficial because it's hard to mess up a barcode reading. The cons about it is that it is a little time consuming, however I'd prefer to accurately record the merchandise in the span of roughly two hours compared to almost 12 hours.
Response 2: The inventory used at my past job (whose doors closed TODAY) was through a company called SYSCO. It is a food industry inventory. We took inventory, and this company stocked it. It is done by hand, and counted three times a day, with a weekly, way more serious inventory. If and when I own my own business, inventory will be a HUGE deal. It can come to cause a lot of problems, especially in the food industry. It can cost you a lot of money with bad inventory, part of the reason i believe the restaurant I most recently worked at, went under.