Terms Governing Cart Quantity Correction
The correction was made. The original quantity was correct. These facts are not contradictory under the terms described herein.
APPLICATION FOR CART QUANTITY CORRECTION Filed under: Retail Interface Behavior, Section 4(b): Quantity Adjustment Incidents Status: Resolved. Outcome disputed.
Statement of the Incident
The applicant approached the cart with the intention of adjusting the quantity of one item from two to one. The item was laundry detergent. The adjustment was made using the minus button. The resulting quantity was zero.
The minus button was pressed once. The resulting quantity was zero. A second press was required to confirm that zero was not the intended outcome.
This is the incident.
Background
The applicant had added two units of detergent during a previous session, operating under the belief that buying in bulk reduces per-unit cost. This belief is accurate. However, a subsequent calculation revealed that the storage space available for detergent accommodates one unit comfortably and two units with some rearrangement that the applicant did not wish to perform.
The correction from two to one was the intended result of the minus button press. One minus one is one. This arithmetic is not disputed.
The Alarm
The alarm arose when the quantity reached zero without passing through one in a way that felt intentional. Technically it passed through one. The UI rendered the transition from two to zero as a continuous action, which is not how the applicant experienced it.
There was a brief period in which the applicant believed they had removed the item entirely. The item was still in the cart. The quantity was zero, which is functionally equivalent to removal, but the visual representation still showed the item, which created a situation in which the cart contained something in a quantity of zero, which is a category the applicant found difficult to reason about in real time.
The Correction of the Correction
The plus button was pressed once. The quantity returned to one. This was the intended quantity from the beginning. The total time spent on this interaction was forty-five seconds, which is thirty-eight seconds more than the interaction warranted.
The Terms
Under the terms governing cart quantity correction, the applicant accepts that the minus button operates on the current quantity without regard for the intended final state. The button does not know that one was the target. It knows that two was the current state and that minus means less.
The applicant also accepts that the alarm was disproportionate to the stakes. The detergent was available. The cart was recoverable. No purchase had been made.
The correction stands. The corrected correction also stands. The quantity is one.