product shipment optimized for foot traffic
One significant inflection point arrives during Edgar’s next trip up to Lorena. Like many other spark inducing events, this one begins by Don Evans drifting into the equipment room without warning. Even though one potential source of conflict was already inspected and crossed off the list — it’s not a Wednesday, but there’s a sizable, random sale batch going into effect anyway. Edgar never quite got around to bringing that Windows 7 computer up here, for instead, one evening after he’d arrived home and needed to look something up on that device, he’d lugged the gear into his house and fired it up in his living room. Where it has remained ever since, with that as one of its primary uses — he leaves the various programs open around the clock, and can pop in to look at them at any time. During one amusing, atypically late night, he did indeed just so happen to be up and could see that an overnight batch had failed to deploy. More commonly, however, it plays out just as it has this morning, with him rising around 6:30 or so, making sure the file hasn’t kicked out to the error folder, and proceeding to get ready before leaving for work. This setup has worked well, and in fact, ever since Aziz identified the cure for that tri-level MRI file, that hasn’t presented a problem, either.
So no, this particularly encounter has nothing to do with their standard semi-antagonistic interactions. Instead, Don has drifted through to share the latest brain numbing development — although he can’t quite resist implying that Edgar’s incompetence is partially to blame, obviously.
“Well, we’ve decided: we’re doing away with the receiver’s position,” Don says, a conversation already off to a strange start, beyond the content, in that he seems to be halfway suggesting that this was a known topic, which was up in the air for quite some time or something.
“WHAT!?” Edgar shrieks.
“Oh yeah,” Don says, nodding, “I mean, think about it. Inventory’s completely screwed up. There’s no point in even checking this stuff in anymore.”
“Well yeah, inventory’s screwed up! It’s screwed up because we didn’t enter starting counts anywhere, when we switched to RU Data! And haven’t taken any spot counts since…”
“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. But yeah, it’s totally pointless to be entering all these invoices, with the inventory as bad as it is, in that system right now,” he nods in the direction of Edgar’s card table, the laptop open upon it, “whoever’s checking a shipment in can take a physical count and check the dates, that’s about the extent of it.”
“Okay but what happens to the receivers we already have?”
“They’re gonna be moved somewhere else. We’ll figure it out,” Don concludes, and exits the room.
Not for the first nor the final occasion, Edgar’s mind inevitably drifts to Rob Drake, and wondering how much he could possibly know about any of what’s going on, and if so what he thinks about all this. Or has even he mentally checked out by now? It’s completely inconceivable some of these recent developments, scaled down to even 1/8 of this size, would have flown uncontested just a couple of years ago. Is there any way Rob could possibly have this much resounding faith at this late stage, in Todd and his cronies? They’ve gone from upgrading out of Orchestra to a much more comprehensive and expensive program in Slingshot, which produced an extremely tight operation there for a while (even if they never did quite get everyone on board with all of its potential), to what everyone else except Todd seems to agree has to be an even costlier conglomeration of RU Data-Hupp-HSX-et al programs where nothing is even remotely tight, and nobody seems to care. Now they’re back to not even entering their inventory at all.
If Edgar had to guess, he thinks Rob is steering clear of this mess because he desperately wants to believe in it. Kind of like someone who considers himself extremely sharp, but was taken in by a fairly obvious swindler. His ego winces at the thought of being so readily duped. Best to just play along, and hope everything continues to float above the water line, and pretend as though you knew it would work out all along.
Here and there, as Edgar’s feet wear a path around this massive store, he does keep himself passively entertained en route, by daydreaming about blowing the whistle. At what point is it justifiable to approach an owner about what you consider extremely shoddy management? It’s just really hard to pull the trigger on something like that. First off, the owner himself, while pleasant and all, is somewhat intimidating, as a standalone fact of its own. They don’t exactly meet up to play racquetball after work. Aside from all that, though, anyone coming from anything even remotely resembling a corporate background would have a hard time making this move, as it’s considered subordination in those circles. The idea that you would approach some, say, district manager, and complain about the performance of the person running your own store, and expect results, is a laughable scenario. In fact all that would happen here is that you would wind up in hot water yourself.
One final factor is that, if they’re being real, Rob would have little recourse for sorting out what he’s talking about, anyway, because he doesn’t know the finer workings either. At best all that would likely happen is that he would approach Todd, to ask Todd if Todd really does suck at this retail president thing. I.e. a total waste of time, analogous with how filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau results in the BBB contacting the business in question and asking them if anything shady is going on. Nope, you say? Well, case closed, then!
His thoughts do gradually evolve, though, into thinking about anonymous tips, which in turn leads him into considering those copier/scanners, at the three oldest stores. This isn’t any more likely to happen either, it goes without saying, and almost assuredly will not. But it sure is fun to think about — how anything faxed or emailed from those is anonymous, as it only shows the device name as the sender. Images of typing up a letter detailing everything that has gone haywire around here, and scanning it to Rob’s email address. Maybe copying everyone with an address whatsoever for good measure. The problem with that is you would have to be extremely careful, to avoid tipping your hand, not just in sending the thing when positively no one was around, but also in its composition itself, crafting it as neutrally as possible both from a style standpoint and a content one, spreading the love around throughout the different departments. Come to think of it, he considers with a wry chuckle, maybe one of those serial killer type random note letters would be better, with characters cut and pasted from various newspaper or magazine articles:
tHE PresiDent iS A DERanged nUtjob
TAKe stOrE bacK At onCe OR else
U wiLL haVE No BiZness
As always, the actual work itself provides plenty of entertainment, too, enough to make him forget about this for the time being. The only difference is, you wouldn’t necessarily term most of this comedy, at least not if directly involved in it. But it certainly is engrossing, whatever label one cares to apply, which is all that a person can ask for. He and the tagging tag team, Ashley and Amanda, have made great progress in spot checking the entire store, as they prepare for the inevitable next visit from the scan auditor. Felix’s new assistant, this redheaded, heavily bearded, suspenders and jeans wearing middle aged dude named Rusty, has been around and met everyone at all the stores, and while the guy comes off as more of an equipment repair type individual rather than someone up to date on the latest technology, who knows, maybe this is just what Felix needs. At the very least it’s surely an improvement over not having the assistant around. And Ken even called Edgar this morning, as he attempts to make progress getting the email vendors set up via RU Data.
“Now they’re saying they need account numbers,” Ken tells him, “for every department and every vendor. Is this something that would be in Slingshot?”
“For the most part? No. Not actually attached to the vendors, if you looked them up in there,” Edgar tells him, explains, “we haven’t needed them, so there was no point in going in and adding all those. Slingshot just didn’t need them for the emailed orders.”
“Ah ha…I see.”
“Now, you could pull them off of an invoice, either going in there to look one up, or off of our paper copies. If they even have account numbers, that is. A lot of the small time local vendors don’t even use them. Plus, like, I’ve got a small list of some account numbers saved on my own computer, if you need those. Although those are mostly for the EDI vendors.”
“Well, okay, let me see what they actually need, and I’ll get back to you,” Ken concludes, before hanging up.
Sometimes things are actually complicated…but sometimes you get the feeling that people are purposefully obfuscating things as a stall tactic. And when it comes to RU Data, he knows which way he’s leaning on this topic. There’s no way it has taken them two months to figure out that they absolutely must have account numbers to fire off a PDF email attachment. Or if it has, then that’s some serious incompetence. Perhaps instead of downplaying and blowing Edgar off from March through December, they maybe should have jumped into this ordering situation right away. Although it still doesn’t explain quite how they have some legitimately large grocery stores using their program — such as, yes, to touch upon this once again, the largest single grocery store in the world — which are theoretically using RU Data to order their product, and why this would represent such a colossal, complex quandary, to simply copy what some of those people are doing. What any of those people are doing.
Other situations are a little less clear. In reality, it’s clear which direction he tilts on this subject, too, but attempts to remain as neutral as possible anyhow. Felix is friendly enough — at least to his face — so he’s still willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, even at this late stage of the game. But he’s guessing there are reasons why those HSX printers continue gathering dust at all four of the stores, and Felix being swamped is only a small part of them.
At a point where Rusty has now worked with this company for a couple of weeks, Edgar is completely dumbfounded by a phone call he receives from the guy, one afternoon up in Lorena. Not that he doubts the content of what Rusty is saying, only that Edgar can’t believe Rusty’s boss would actually attempt spinning this HSX business off in this manner, sending his new recruit down this dark alley.
“Hey, Felix told me to call you. He said you could tell me how to set up these, uh, whatcha call, I think, is it…HXS printers?”
“What!? Are you serious?” Edgar replies.
“Yeah, that’s what he said.”
“Um…I don’t know why he would tell you that. I don’t really know anything about that.”
“That’s what he said. He said to call you, you could tell me how to set ’em up.”
“Well, sorry but…no. I mean, I can tell you, yes, it’s working; no, it’s not working. That’s about the extent of what I know. See, I’m the guy who enters the information in our system that would go on the shelf tags.”
“Right….”
“Okay, well, like I said, that’s about all I know. I can tell you if the tags are printing correctly or not, that’s about it. I don’t know anything about setting up the printers themselves. Apparently they have to go on the server down at Bellwether somehow? And then our system remotely connects to them?”
“Yeah, I knew that,” Rusty says.
“Well, that’s pretty much all I can tell you.”
“Yeah but Felix told me to call you, that you could help me.”
“Sorry but I’m not sure what else to tell you. You’re gonna have to get with him on that. Or somebody from HSX, maybe.”
“Oh…okay…,” Rusty reluctantly says, with a sigh, before hanging up.
So there’s that. If nothing else this is theoretically progress, however, as that ball is served back over to their side of the court. Moving right along, however, there is this category of problems known as willful obstruction, about which no doubt exists whatsoever. Mostly because people throwing up roadblocks in this category make no bones about it at all, are quite vocal about the fact that they are doing so. Whether or not anything can be done about these folks remains to be seen, however, mostly because it seems like management is inexplicably siding with them, and refuses to do anything beyond that.
This isn’t really about the new items file, even, which is mostly working at Lorena. Here, the department managers slot into a few basic categories — the same as everywhere else — as this topic, for whatever reason, always offers a great distillation of how they make things happen overall, at the store in question. Edgar likes using this as an example of having a specific objective they are all trying to reach, and an ideal for how that’s supposed to happen, but then how they will cobble together an approach that works for those who fall short of the ideal.
At the top of the list, you have those who are up to date with modern office applications and consider it no big deal to pull off the ideal, who are copying and pasting from the major vendors file that Edgar rearranges, cleans up, puts together and sends out every month. This category includes the likes of Katie, Megan, and her sub-department leaders, like in frozen and dairy, whose mindset from about the first minute of day one was a thumbs up as they said, yep, got it, this is pretty basic. As an added bonus, these are the two largest departments anyway, so it’s great to have them aboard.
In the next category you have Ben, the bulk manager, who to his credit is attempting to get on board. A friendly but not exactly tech savvy, country bumpkin type, he’s basically the new Johnny, and as such it’s no big deal to cut him some slack. However, it’s not exactly helping that Vince is his theoretical merchandiser. Or that Don Evans, for whatever reason, has to get involved and start throwing his weight around. It’s marvelous that he wants to pitch in and all, but Edgar’s still not sure why everything has to be so belligerent with this guy, and why he reserves most of his belligerence for Edgar in particular.
Like for example the day Don’s calling him to complain there are a bunch of bulk bins and spice jars out in Lorena that don’t have any label on them. Edgar’s response is that he’s already explained to Ben how this is supposed to work, that the bulk manager must track down the number himself, in whatever fashion, and get a label and a price on there, whomever he needs to get involved to make this happen.
“Yeah, I mean, I already mentioned this to him. I have no way of knowing when he puts something new out on the floor unless I’m walking the store constantly, or Ashley or Amanda notice it or something. He either needs to figure out the PLU somehow, or if it’s new new, if it’s a totally new item, then he has to get the information to me.” Edgar wants to add that this phenomenon is only going to get ten times worse, everywhere, now that they’ve decided to stop checking deliveries in, but feels it unwise to antagonize the guy further. It’s best just to stick to the bare bones of this argument, and get out of the conversation as swiftly as possible.
“Well, I’ll tell ya what he’s doing, he’s constantly going up and asking the cashiers to look up numbers for him. They don’t have time for this!”
“Okay and that’s the other thing, I did mention this to Ben and even Vince, too: anyone can look up anything in RU Data. Either on the desktop program or The Cloud. They’ve got access. They’ve always had access. Also, those numbers are all on the shared drive. We’ve got all the labels saved in a folder on there.”
“Yeah, well, I actually asked Vince about that and he said he had no idea. As far as he knew these were not saved anywhere.”
Despite the somewhat heated texture of this conversation, Edgar busts out laughing and says, “are you serious? We’ve had those saved on there for over four years now! That was the whole point of putting those on the shared drive, so anyone can print them out from anywhere. I’ve mentioned this to him I don’t know how many times. All you have to do is open that folder and pull up the search box and…”
“Listen, okay, we’re not getting into all that. Here’s what I need from you: I need you to print out a list of every bulk number. Make two copies. This way I can keep one copy, and I can give Ben one copy. And then we won’t have to bother you any more.”
Well, this is something, anyway, Edgar thinks as he quickly cranks out this request. Testy exchange or not, at least it’s progress. And yet, in perhaps quite predictable fashion, it seems that Don’s bold if flippant assertion about never bothering Edgar was not exactly correct, for not even half an hour has gone by, after Edgar has printed these puppies out, before the angriest of the three headed management beast is in the equipment room again, demanding that he redo these.
“Can you not print these out in number order instead?”
“Number order? But I’ve got those in alphabetical. That seemed to make more sense, if you’re trying to look something up.”
“Okay, but we’re just trying to cross check what’s already out there against…look, can you just do it?”
This isn’t a totally unprecedented request. There was one woman working in the Palmyra deli years ago who also wanted to constantly have him print out PLU lists, but in number order instead of alphabetical. His frequent semi-joke about but if you knew the number, then you wouldn’t have to look it up also fell on deaf ears there. Aside from all this, though, he recognizes that these requests will never end, because that will be the new thing, every time Ben adds a single new item: Edgar’s going to have a belligerent Don in his face half an hour later, asking why that number is not on the most recent printed out list. And it’s okay for the cashiers to say they don’t have time to look things up, and Vince to continue playing dumb about how to do anything whatsoever, yet if Edgar however mildly, calmly, and rationally suggests showing someone how to do something, then he has clearly stepped over the line. Yes he can continue cranking out these lists, and even printing the bin labels out for these people, but would anyone claim this is the most efficient method available to them?
