Yeah it is giving the poor system a ministroke, but it can get worse.
Used to work in Recieivng for B&N so seen some of the shenanigans the system goes through.
With none in warehouse it can't even send out the automatic 2 copies a store should get but the system is trying to track the first 90 days of a product's release (something they came up with for sales trending and anticipating future interest in a series) but with none in stock there are no sales so that part is just sitting there twiddling virtual thumbs.
What will be really funny is if they don't get the book printed in the 3 month window, then the 90 day mark comes up and because there was no sales, it will pull the standing order at the store level and tell the store to return the books to warehouse. But there might not be a book to return so you get the command : Return 2 Stock 0. Annoying glitch but really no harm no foul..... yet.
Now go forward a week or two and bam the book finally gets printed and sent to warehouse which may still have a standing order for 2 to a store so sends them to store. So now we are at Stock 2.
But wait... the Return code is probably still up as HQ may not have reset the Trending counter and refreshed min stock count so we are Stock 2 Return 2, meaning those 2 books will probably get pulled and put on the returns wall before they even hit the shelf, unless the Receiving personnel have the presence of mind to realize this is still a new release and override the return command and put out on the shelf manually. They can not remove the return code without someone higher up the food chain adjusting the system count, but they can let the person covering sci fi section to add it to the list of no pulls so it gets a chance to be bought.
I had to do this for a few of the sci fi books/manga just to keep them on the shelf, so yeah ...