Not sure if this will help you or not, but I think it is just a matter of the wording being unfortunate in some situations. My "shops" are not shops at at but different bars in a nightclub. The bars are set up as shops so that I can use different pricelists for them. The "warehouse" attached to each shop/bar is the set of shelves that belongs to that bar.

It ends up sounding weird, but if it works it works. If your shop "warehouse" runs out of stock, you can transfer from your actual warehouse.

It just goes to show that OpenERP is not perfect. There are a number of things I need to do that I cannot figure out at all, or I have to make creative use of certain modules and/or functionalities. In several cases these are scenarios that I would have thought were common enough that there should be simple solutions available.

OpenERP can improve over time if users (a) make feature requests that help the developers understand what the users need or (b) contribute modules. If you don't know how to develop a module you can always pay somebody else to do it for you.