One corner of a pricing coordinator’s pristine office — looks so much better without the coffee pot
The weirdest aspect about Fred pitching his coffee maker is that this isn’t even close to being a pristine office. Whether you’re talking about Edgar’s own, which continues to host that mounded up shopping cart of PDAs that Todd refuses to part with, or the entire Central HQ as a whole. He’s been trying to imagine what could have possibly inspired it, but is drawing a blank. Still, if they want him to continually stroll around the corner and fire up the Keurig machine, whose cups flow freely in an endless gratis bounty, then who is he to really complain?
Yet to claim that this coffee pot was the epitome of tackiness or something, that he doesn’t get. Despite the curtained steel shelving installed in Edgar’s office, Dale continually has boxes of product scattered all over the place, which he is going through on seemingly a constant basis. Yet, at least this is work related, and justifiable. But what to make of the daily sink pileup of half empty Dr. Pepper cans and Styrofoam fast food drinks, nearly if not in actuality 100% Todd’s doing? This jumps out as one particularly glaring eyesore. There is commonly at least one other shopping cart or two left stranded in the middle room, filled with who knows what randomness, anything ranging from weird electronic equipment to maybe a bunch of wine bottles a rep left here for Vince. Speaking of electronic weirdness, that mess of cables on the wall across from Edgar, officially known as Spaghetti Junction, is screaming for a cover or a cleanup project or something, if people are going to get on some appearances kick around this place. Employees and vendors alike constantly pile up any available surface in Edgar’s office with physical products, too, typically affixing a post it note with instructions for such, although it’s debatable why this is an improvement — whatever the situation is — to just sending an email. There is also that one huge cardboard box which was originally sitting on the back wall, outside and around the corner from Edgar’s door, which has been moved around endlessly for the past six months.
“What the fuck is even in this thing?” Valerie wonders, drawing the box nearer one day, to crack this bad boy open for a closer inspection.
Much to hers and everyone else’s surprise, they discover that this is that left behind box of Barbara’s belongings. When she was fired, Barbara stormed out of here with pretty much her laptop and not much else. Maybe that snazzy electronic grounding pad thingamajiggie and her treasured tea cup, presumably her vitamins as well. Otherwise, she left her work station as is, until Dale was finally tasked with throwing it into this box. Pawing through these trinkets and half completed projects and scraps of paper now brings with it a distinct time capsule aspect, even though it’s only been not quite half a year — a thorough, well-rounded inventory which just so happens to include…yes, the infamous sheer cape.
Well, at least they can earmark this one for the dumpster. As for the rest, this will remain a work in progress. But again, at least Dale is constantly churning through this choppy sea full of product, carefully segmenting it for events, prize baskets, samples, you name it. A cause which Valerie frequently finds herself assisting, if Todd doesn’t already have her hopping with some other project. Back in the good “old” days of what Edgar is already thinking of as the Classic Era, while these two can get on some good conversational rolls of their own, it seemed as though things only really ramped up whenever Jack happened to breeze through here to join them. Sitting on the couch with his laptop, that is, but engaged alongside them in the verbal hijinks. Sometimes Vicky would have the odd quip or two, or possibly even fully commit to the fun; now that Jack’s gone, however, it’s as though she’s formally replaced him, in this regard. Of course, one key prerequisite is that Todd and Fred must be out of the office, too, and preferably Vince as well, as is the case on this fine day.
Though Edgar was in the zone, so to speak, staring at his screen and therefore missing the beginning of this conversation, Dale’s latest comment catches his attention. “Well, Todd was in the military, so we do have to kind of respect that.”
“Yeah maybe we have to respect that, but it doesn’t mean we have to respect him,” Valerie observes, which is all the more interesting coming from the person Todd basically pulled aside as his personal gopher, on day one.
“There have been serial killers who were in the military,” deli merchandiser extraordinaire Vicky Fisher observes, “do we have to respect them, too?”
“Good point,” Dale says.
“And are we convinced he’s not one?” Valerie jokes.
“Doesn’t have the follow through,” Dale retorts, “he’d forget what he was doing halfway into it.”
At this, all three of them laugh, and Edgar finds himself chuckling lightly at the desk. In fact, he’s attempting to forcibly will his focus into returning to the spreadsheet he was just analyzing, but is battling this mightily. It’s no wonder that Park, the only other person present in the building right now, listens to music on his headphones all day long, and even has a colorful sign taped to his (closed) door advising HEADPHONES IN USE. It’s not a bad strategy. But for the landslide majority of the time, Edgar has no troubling tuning out the world around him, and anyway, he’s already considered somewhat standoffish. Even if this is mostly just a symptom of the job — you have to sit here, and focus on the work all day, there is no other choice — he can’t imagine closing his door and insulating himself behind an additional wall of rock music would go over very well. Therefore Park is basically the only person who can somehow get away with such.
“Serial killer…or Todd…serial killer…or Todd…hmm…,” Valerie muses.
“If given a choice between the two…,” Vicky chips in.
“Right. We’ll leave it at that. We’ll leave it at that,” Dale concludes.
But they still mostly want to hold onto their faith, all of them do. There are just enough tantalizing morsels dangling out here to have them at least halfway believing that just maybe Todd Cashner and his cronies can pull this off, that these are mere road bumps and their fortunes are bound to swing back around any day. There is after all this massive store over near Waxoff, a former big box location that went belly up, which Todd has chatted about constantly and continues to show up with fresh blueprints concerning on just about a daily basis.
“This is pretty much a done deal,” he is fond of saying, unscrolling the latest highly detailed map on the conference table for all of them to see. It isn’t just that, according to him, he has talked to the village of Indian Lake about installing another traffic light on this side road beside the store, which their parking lot will feed into. Village officials are quite game for this, he says, and eager to bring Wholesome Shopper Market aboard as a tenant. He also has this grand vision for that location, wrapped around a complete company rebrand, in that they will also run an enormous restaurant style kitchen out of there, delivering to the greater Chesboro region.
“I checked into it, and chesborohealthyfoodhub.com was available, believe it or not,” Todd declares, at the latest Monday morning meeting.
“Hmm, imagine that,” Dale deadpans, which flies right over their bloviating leader’s head.
“Yeah so I already scooped that baby up! We have that name reserved now. I’m tellin ya,” Todd laughs, as though unable to believe not only the brilliance of his insights but also his uncanny good fortune as well, “you know how big the Amazon distribution center is, between here and Palmyra? Well this place is bigger!”
“Rob signed off on this?” even Vince is incredulous enough to question, eyeballing this massive scroll, the most he’s said in the last five meetings put together.
Leaning back in his chair, hands clasped over his belly, Todd nods and confirms, “Rob signed off on this. Not that it really matters, you know, because a year from now, we’ll be totally on our own anyway. But yeah, it’s pretty much a done deal…”
As sweet as this development sounds, this isn’t the only pan in the fire, either. Fred clears his throat and addresses their help situation, over which many have expressed concern. They’ve been papering over holes, for example with Chef Mike at Central now basically acting as chef and meat cutter both, to the extent this paper is getting stretched so thin that even these aloof bosses have begun to notice. The major sticking point to hiring quality help — unless perhaps you consider the company’s reputation itself — is that their wages come up mighty short when held against industry standards. A year and a half since that adorable little state of the union summit, nothing has been done to shore up the pay rates for existing help, and they can’t hardly bring in newer people at a higher wage than the current ones make. But according to Fred, they are looking into this matter, to come up with a solution.
“Can we at least institute a policy,” Dale jokes, “that we don’t have to learn anyone’s name until they make it 90 days? It’s a lot to keep up with. I’m just saying.”
“We should turn it into, like, a reality show,” Edgar suggests, chuckling as he runs away with this concept, “what we do is, we hire 10 people for every position. But you tell them at the start, okay, we’re gonna fire one person every week, until there’s just one of you left.”
A wild laugh escapes Valerie, as she covers her mouth and says, “oh my God! That’s awesome….”
“Seriously,” Vicky seems to agree, nodding in more studious fashion.
In actuality, though, while it’s certainly difficult to hire people at wages that are well below average, this alone doesn’t explain why folks leave a company in droves. As previously noted, these trends seem to flow in waves and are usually not a positive sign. However, they did have a similar mutiny on their hands right around the time they first switched to Slingshot, people who didn’t care to stick around for these “bullshit” concepts that would “never work,” so it’s possible this is another of those therapeutic weeding outs, something similar to a controlled burn.
Comfort and hope are probably the top two reasons people stick around, even when it’s obvious they could make more money elsewhere. It’s just a major upheaval to undertake, and without compelling enough reason to do so, some will remain where they are long after this makes any sort of rational sense. That’s the comfort element. But where the hope comes in is believing, when you analyze the situation, that it’s impossible to say for sure which direction this company is heading. Things still appear as though they could legitimately go either way.
“Todd is at least willing to spring for some new equipment around this place,” Edgar remarks to Valerie, a few days later, as she has drifted in to grab yet another clutch of documents from the printer.
The reason they’ve gotten on this topic is because Valerie was cursing under her breath about this latest ream of documents, cranked out at Todd’s request. And she is over here at the printer quite a bit, it’s true, as in typically multiple times daily, dealing with his latest mildly panicked request. One recent afternoon, for reasons unknown, Todd actually sent a print job over himself, a full color, 300 page plus manual for RU Data…then left for the day. All the more hilarious in that, merely par for the course considering their glitchy internet, it would only crank out about one page a minute. All the way up through page 78, when Valerie marched in to put a stop to this madness.
“And…done,” she declared, hitting the cancel button. “Enough already. I mean, how many rain forests are we decimating with this horseshit, anyway?” She was merely clearing this one lane highway for still other print jobs, setting the 78 pages off to the side. Where they continue to sit, to this day.
To Edgar’s point, though, upon observing that the laptop he was toting around looked a few years old, Todd went ahead and ordered him a brand new one. Which he appreciates, to be sure. On another occasion, though, this huge, slick, double monitor setup showed up in his office, similar to the one Valerie has. Up until a whopping three whole days went by, after which Edgar hadn’t quite gotten around to unpacking the box yet, and a miffed, possibly offended Todd took it back to give Vicky instead. But then at a still later date, a brand new Windows 10 desktop computer did show up with his name on it, which he has gotten to keep.
“He’s willing to buy the new equipment, yes,” Valerie agrees, in a near whisper, “but here’s something I’ve noticed: he’s actually kind of a technophobe himself.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Well, okay, maybe technophobe isn’t quite the right word. But he doesn’t use the shit, doesn’t know how to use the shit. I mean think about it.”
“Hmm…interesting…,” Edgar says, nodding, “maybe you’re right. Although he does have those surveillance cameras feeding into his office…”
“Yes, he does have those. But that’s just weird, and Felix set that up anyway. Or Felix and Jack, whatever. But I’m saying, like, you ever notice he wants to print out every email, or at least the ones he reads. Who does that? Do you know anybody else who does that, in this day and age?”
“Um, yeah,” Edgar laughs, as a picture of Arcadia’s vitamins manager fills his head, “I can think of one other guy who does that.”
“Well, yeah, but anyway…” Valerie nods, collecting her thoughts before continuing. “And that’s without even getting into all the other crazy shit he’s constantly having me print out. Also, did you ever notice that he always shows up with these elaborate blueprints that he’s quote unquote been working on himself?”
“Hmm. No, I can’t say I ever dedicated much thought to that topic.”
“Okay, but think about it. He always shows up with those fucking things, every morning. But do you ever see him actually working on them? Hey, yo, look at me, everybody! Check out my awesome new blueprint I drew up! Aren’t I amazing? Um, by drew up, do you mean you paid somebody else to draw it up? Because that’s what I think is actually happening. He really is like a little kid. That’s what he really reminds me of. Some easily distracted little kid. Ooh, bright lights! Shiny objects!”
As she shakes her head and exits the room, Edgar takes a moment to reflect on the recent pluses and minuses. On the topic of technology, it remains just about impossible to get a handle on what’s really going on around this place. He feels like either a Corey or a Felix or someone similar has declared, every six months for the past ten years, that Palmyra’s internet problems have been “finally fixed.” And yet those wheels continue to sputter, if not move in reverse.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the longstanding, steady if outdated ScaleMonster program simply stopped sending new data down to the deli scales, up there at Palmyra. Those things are hardwired through the ceiling to a server in the front office, and as the connection to the produce scale does continue to work, this would seem to indicate it’s something to do with the phone cords running out to the deli alone. However, Felix wasn’t even about to crawl around up there and figure it out — and Edgar doesn’t blame him — and their lone old timer who could coach them on these matters, that Andy dude up at the Hobart office in Ohio, has finally eased into the sunset himself.
As such, in a manner suggesting he is finally beginning to grasp the urgency and importance of these things, Felix is as adamant as Edgar in pestering Todd for a replacement program and some new scales that will accommodate it. It’s the same ChefAssist application that Felix finally got around to installing at Central, thirteen months after that store opened. This time around he has pulled no punches, however, in requesting that the company rep personally come here and download the database from their old scales, install it into the new.
So there’s this, which is awesome. But then during this same befuddling stretch, Sharon’s up in arms because she asked Todd to purchase a program for converting documents to PDF, and he told her they had no budget for this, refused to pay for such. After she vented to him on this topic, Edgar was at least able to steer her to a website he uses that offers five free conversions a month. Which is something, anyway, though she’s still mighty ticked off. Also, as one could just about predict, given the snowballing effects of karma, and this company’s overall track record of cheapness, but most of all Palmyra’s known internet struggles, within two weeks of Todd pulling the plug on a service contract with Slingshot, the main server at Central stopped communicating with its sister store to the north.
Edgar dedicates considerable time and effort into repairing this connection, using whatever limited knowledge he might have. And Felix gives it a pass as well. After hitting Slingshot up on a quote for a one-time service call, this fee is considered far beyond what Todd’s willing to pay, and he nixes this concept, too. Edgar’s pulling his hair out because he feels like he can’t seem to get their president to grasp that, despite whatever lofty projections he has for this RU Data program which is still not yet live, Slingshot remains the current backbone of their business. As such, it also remains, you know, kind of important.
But then Edgar has an epiphany, which is a desperation move that just so happens to work. Since the updates from the main server have suddenly stopped transmitting to Palmyra, Edgar has already been forced to remotely connect into that store alone, to upload the same files, in essence doubling his work. But then after a few days of this, he realizes that updates from Palmyra are still sending down to the main server, for example sales and inventory history. But would this work for adding new items, and price updates? Even though this isn’t the “main” server?
As it turns out, this does indeed. Though functioning completely backwards as far as what’s intended — and he feels like this hack, this creative workaround, might also stop working at some point, that Slingshot themselves would certainly not advise it — if he merely treats Palmyra as the “main” server and uploads everything there first, it will dump down to HQ. Once it does, he can hit the Transmit button and send this data out to the other two stores. This is not nearly as simple as the normal process, but better than doubling his work and far better than just effectively shrugging, as Todd has done, and saying oh well, it looks like Palmyra doesn’t get any updates.
There are a few problems with creative workarounds, however. For one, though he does mention this to Todd and Fred, they have no idea what he’s talking about anyway. If they did, however, the response would surely instead only be something along the lines of a smug gloat, insisting that this is why they didn’t want to pay for the new service contract, because they knew he would figure it out. Aside from all that, though, the main dilemma with clever workarounds is that they are intended to be just that — a temporary workaround. But instead, they become the new normal. Unless you mention them constantly, people forget that this was only a duct taped solution. And then when the workaround inevitably begins going haywire, you are twice as screwed.
But this is all mostly expected. You instinctively understand that those high above you will probably not grasp the finer points of your job. That is, after all, why they have you in place as a specialist. To just put these people in place and let them rip. The main issues here stem, as always, then, from either the bosses tinkering in matters they don’t understand, or blowing off issues that the specialist is telling them are huge ones. Unfortunately, both continue happening to a disturbing degree, not just here but everywhere.
You say that, though, and it lets them off the hook: oh, well, it’s an industry-wide problem, therefore that means we don’t suck. Except, no, it’s becoming a catastrophic plague around this place. Made all the more apparent by the latest thoroughly brain numbing episode, the kind which finds many of them questioning how much of this alleged industry knowledge the star trio of Todd, Fred, and Don can possibly possess. An episode that isn’t anything it would take a specialist to grasp, but rather is the kind that your average entry level person, brought in new to retail fresh off the streets, would understand is simply not the way that a business would typically operate.
It all starts with a panicked phone call he receives from Shelly, blood pressure palpably off the charts even by her standards. “Hey…okay…uh…I just wanted to let you know…none of the price updates…I mean none of the price updates…they’re not…they’re not working!”
“Price updates?”
“Yes! There are literally hundreds if not thousands that we’ve found already so far today, they’re ringing, they’re ringing up wrong.”
“Okay but do you know any specifics? I mean, do you know which updates these were? I haven’t even done any major…”
“The ones Todd’s people are up here hanging.”
“Wait a second, Todd’s people? What people? This is the first I’m hearing about this.”
“I don’t know. He’s just got a bunch of people up here hanging new shelf tags.”
