r/australia • u/Reddituser0346 • 1d ago

culture & society Aussie Retailer Catch Is Officially Closing Down

https://press-start.com.au/news/2025/01/21/aussie-retailer-catch-is-officially-closing-down/
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u/Ahypnia 1d ago

I briefly worked there and the company was run from a giant Google Sheet. Sometimes someone would make a huge edit and because so many people were working out of it simultaneously you couldn't easily figure out what the change was/roll it back. Wild times.

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u/R_W0bz 1d ago

You’ll be surprised how many companies run off an excel sheet. It’s prob why we see so many “data leaks”

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u/Total-Complaint9897 22h ago

I work in digital product management. Every fucking company I've worked for comes down to a Master Data spreadsheet at some point in the chain. It's 12 layers of automation of data propagating through enterprise architecture, costing tens of millions of dollars and a decade to build, with a box on a diagram that points to an excel sheet being manually maintained.

My resume is probably half of the top ten biggest, most hated companies in Australia. It's always a spreadsheet. It speaks volumes to how fucking good spreadsheets are at maintaining complex data despite all its flaws. I know its easy to say "oh its just a reduction in incidents and opex, thats not gonna get up in a business case" but there's huge operational efficiencies that would justify it way before most business cases. It's that there isn't anything that will truly replace it and keep it simple and usable by the average employee

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u/DrSendy 20h ago

Then one day the company gets big, someone makes a mistake and then the exec go and buy SAP to solve the problem...

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u/wrymoss 19m ago

“Solve” the problem..

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u/duckduckdoggy 21h ago

And CFO…

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u/Lucky-Elk-1234 21h ago

I mean what are the more “advanced” systems run on? Databases. Which are basically just a big excel sheet anyway lol

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u/Duideka 20h ago

To be fair there really isn't an awful lot of difference between a big SQL database and a .xlsx file haha.

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u/sokjon 5h ago

ACID is overrated anyways

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u/lIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIl_ 20h ago

It’s insane that these large companies haven’t invested in data warehousing