I had to check what the gold standard McMaster-Carr does: their torque wrench drive size widget is sorted 1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1 1/2". Glorious. https://www.mcmaster.com/products/torque-wrenches/

I'd expect nothing less from them. The right thing to do here is to implement a sorting key for different categories here. Since McMaster-Carr seems to be going to a category when you search, they seem to have better control over the available filters.

I've found that on a site like Amazon or Walmart that'll let you do a more freeform sort, the filter options becomes absolutely god awful.

Well done by McMaster-Carr. I assume they control their inventory a bit more than a marketplace like Home Depot, Walmart, or Amazon, so that's also an advantage.

The schemas for Amazon and Walmart's product information are absolutely bonkers and constantly missing features that they demand be provided.

Here's the XML Schema Definition for "Product" on Amazon [1]

This is joined on each of the linked category schemas included at the type, of which each has unique properties that ultimately drive the metadata on a particular listing for the SKU. Its wrought with inconsistency, duplicated fields, and oftentimes not up-to-date with required information.

Ultimately, this product catalog information gets provided to Amazon, Walmart, Target, and any other large 3rd party marketplace site as a feed file from a vendor to drive what product they can then list pricing and inventory against (through similar feeds).

You are right that the control McMaster-Carr has on their catalog is the strategic and technological advantage.

[1]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/rainier/...

Very interesting how nearly half the list is (assumedly) every single chemical listed under California Prop 65. Do they really need to specify exactly which chemical it is? I've seen thousands of prop 65 warnings in my life but I've literally never seen it tell me what chemical its warning me about. I just commented to a friends a couple weeks ago i wished they'd tell me what so i could look it up myself!

McMaster-Carr's website is actually pretty impressive given how unassuming it is. It does a ton of pre-loading on hover and caching to make it feel like you're just navigating a static site. I didn't even realize that the page had a loading state until I enabled throttling from my network tab and immediately clicked on a link as soon as I hovered over it.

Even more impressive is that it's something like 20 years old, and was basically the way it is now 20 years ago.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32976978

Mouser et al also do it right for mixed unit lists, eg. component dimensions are shown in their specified units but sorted as: 11mm, 12mm, 0.5in, 13mm, ...

Is it weird that I kinda want to work there?

No. You are likely and automatically extrapolating the attention to detail seen in the outcome into believing that it is a reflection of the attention , thought and method of their internal workings.

Which is a good indicator, but you can’t be sure of. Additionally you may imagine liking it but not enjoy it in life, even if true.

Now look up impact wrenches.

  1/2 in
  1 in
  1/4 in
  3/8 in
  3/4 in
  7/16 in

> 7/16 in

I had a major WTF moment there, until I realized that's probably for a hex driver (and thus something totally different than what I think of when someone says "impact wrench").

It's probably a default ordering or an ordering by an unshown database ID value. It's a small enough set that it doesn't really matter for practical purposes, but I guess it does betray a lack of attention to detail.

It’s simple alphabetic.

Is "slash" (/) before or after "space" ( ) ... or both... before and after it?

Is 8 before or after 4 in the alphabet?

No, there's no reasonable ordering going on.

If it were ordered by ordinal values, "/" is 47 and " " is 32, so "1 in" would come before "1/2 in".

It's not alphabetized by letter word. Because while "Eight" comes before "Four", "Specialty" would come before "Three".

No matter which way you attempt to order it, something is out of order.

Softtalker probably got it right. This is some default or id sort.

Before. _E_ight vs _F_our.

But _T_wo is also before _F_our

The sorting briefly switches to reverse order there, so no contradiction.

3/8 doesn’t come before 3/4 alphabetically.

SELECT ... ORDER BY RAND()

This is sorted mostly alphabetically with an allowance for people being bad with fractions. That's my guess.