one grocery aisle at one small store
The eleventh column of the new items spreadsheet is an all-purpose, generic remark field, as Teri had titled this, when she created the template. She was only using this cell to make note of the original cost from certain vendors, before the discount was applied, for reference purposes alone. The actual price they paid would go into the cost field itself, obviously.
Nobody else has any use for this column, though. When Edgar started creating that Major Vendor File every month, with a different tab for each of their five biggest suppliers, he rearranged the columns in each of them to match their new items spreadsheet. All anyone would have to do is copy and paste them over. The original cost he moves over into the remark column, drags a simple formula down through the cost column itself (their 16% across-the-board volume discount from Universal Foods, for example, =k2*.84, double click the little black plus sign at the bottom of the cell, end of story), and sends everyone the file, every month. The other employees are either copy-and-pasting this, or leaving that cell blank, if typing out by hand or sending an item from any of their other hundreds of vendors.
But this is a totally inactive, user defined field, and can theoretically be used for whatever. Even he hasn’t given the matter much thought up to this point, however, until the day of the John Amos visit. Sometimes it takes a random occurrence like this to send your thoughts flying off in another, unexpected direction, which may or may not even relate to the intended project at hand.
It remains a source of endless fascination that there are always better ideas out there, means of getting progressively better at something. Even when you feel like you’ve started off on solid ground, doing an excellent job, et cetera, and are actively scouting for ways to improve the operation. You just have to keep your mind open and continue tinkering, because some of this stuff is hiding in relatively plain sight.
Not that the John Amos visit itself has anything to do with this, nor does it follow Harry’s panicked script. But that’s kind of the point. Ideas rear their head over here, leading you in wayward fashion over there, and you flail around in the dark for a little bit, and then maybe a path leads out of that black forest to somewhere substantial.
The first inkling Edgar has that anything remarkable is happening today is when Valerie charges into his office, trailed by a panting, sweating, halfway queasy looking Harry. Willie is even lurking much farther behind, in the shadows, pacing nervously around the community room, shooting an occasional quick, nervous glance this way, although it’s initially unclear whether this fact is connected. And if so, how.
“Harry’s asking me for a list of every gluten free item in the store,” Valerie explains, “wouldn’t you be the person for that, though? Can you get us that?”
Edgar chuckles and says, “I am the person for that, yes. But no. There’s no way to get you that.”
“No!?” Harry exclaims, as though bewildered, drawing up evenly at the desk beside Valerie.
“Well, no, think about it. We don’t have a specific gluten free department. Those items are scattered all over the store.”
“That’s true. Dammit,” Harry concedes, face sinking for just a moment before he revives at the next thought. Wiggling some fingers in the direction of Edgar’s computer, “but couldn’t you do a search for gluten free? In there?”
This is when Valerie at long last explains what this is all about. “John Amos is shopping here. You know, from Good Times? The dad?”
“Oh wow. No way. That’s cool,” Edgar says.
“Yeah!” Willie enthuses, drifting into the doorway at last, “he even shook my hand! I’m never washing it again…” Concluding thus, holds up said hand, begins examining it closely for what is surely the tenth or twelfth time.
Wheelchair bound and trailed by a personal assistant, John Amos rolled into this building a short while ago, apparently for the first time. Willie was so stoked he barreled his way up here to peer down from the community room’s second floor windows. But then, upon spotting Harry conversing with the famed actor, reversed course with equal haste to risk meeting him as well. Nobody knew that he lived in the area, but he must, or at the very least is staying here for an extended spell.
“Yeah, and he asked me if I could get him a list of every gluten free item we have,” Harry breathlessly explains.
“Every item in the system? Or this store specifically?” Edgar asks.
“This store specifically.”
“Well, see, now,” Edgar chuckles again, “that’s the other thing…”
This seemingly simple request finds them at this peculiar, never before arrived upon intersection. Where philosophical debates meet things which Edgar considers important though everyone else rolls their eyes in dismissal, meet things that are impossible with the current database software, meet things that are technically possible, but nobody has ever asked for up until this very second.
The philosophical debates are the metaphorical road they are arriving upon. This would be an infinitely simpler task and wouldn’t require any list whatsoever if all the gluten free items in the building were grouped together. Half of the in-house industry experts recommend this strategy and half do not. Yet as Harry himself is the grocery merchandiser and the de facto second in command around here, his view has won the day. Gluten free bread is located next to the regular bread, the crackers next to the garden variety crackers, and so on.
What is impossible right now is getting a store specific list of just about anything. They aren’t checking in items that way on the back dock, they aren’t logging inventory into this Orchestra system. The ballpark workaround is to run a sales history, which is close enough for most tasks, for example printing tags batches everywhere but Walnut (although even at the three older stores, you’ll still have employees bellyaching about new items that haven’t sold yet, being omitted, or things that they “know for a fact” have sold, but didn’t show up, either) (which could be true, actually, for if example you sold one and had one return in the same period, that would show as a zero; also if the cashier hit a generic department key and made up her own price, or if you had some argumentative numbnuts in, say, the beer department, stickering his own prices over the barcodes).
The sales history doesn’t do them much good in this instance, however, circling back to Harry’s question, wiggling some fingers at the computer and magically extracting gluten free items from the database. Yes, it is possible to do a search on pretty much whatever. Nobody has ever asked for this specific inquiry before, however, and here’s where they are forced to turn their attention down the road of arcane points which Edgar knows are important, but everyone else would consider ridiculous and akin splitting hairs…up until they have a very fine request of their own, that is.
Much the same way that you can’t exactly force a bunch of different vendors to abbreviate the brand field in exactly identical fashion — or even include it at all — the same would apply to an item description, what they would have in the name field. Within Universal Foods alone, sometimes they actually spell out the word gluten free, but not often. Therefore within the names this is alternately abbreviated as, to give but a partial list, G F, GF, G/F, Glutn Fr, Glutn Free, Glutn F, Glt F, Gln Fr. The latter of which, for all he knows, might mean it’s some kind of micro-line featuring the likeness of Eagles guitarist Glenn Frey. Kind of like the Sesame Street imprint of a certain brand in frozen foods, which is also abbreviated anywhere from Sesame St to Ses S to SS and any other combination of letters or word lengths in between.
Oh, but wait! Might Universal Foods have a gluten free category? Sadly, no. It seems they are also found on the same side of this debate floor as Harry, and have grouped their gluten free chips with the regular chips, the pasta with the pasta. Which can only mean, looking ahead, assuming you were somehow magically able to force employees to stop hand typing this stuff, to copy and paste only in the name of speed and accuracy and sanity, this would still mean a search and replace every month on the known abbreviations, in the major vendor files, before sending the thing out.
Or does it? In reality what is probably going to happen in the future is, he’s just going to decide on one abbreviation himself. Begin chipping away at the current names in their system, and keep his eye open for any new ones that are sent in. But another idea is percolating in his head, regarding that remark field, although this too will also be a work in progress and take some time.
You try explaining this to just about anyone, though, and they will zone out before you’ve finished the first sentence. Likely consider the person saying it as difficult, or weird, or ignorant. And anyway it does nothing to address their current predicament.
“Certain brands have nothing but gluten free items,” he tells Harry, as Valerie and Willie have already vacated the scene, “I can get you those. Of course, even then, we might not have all of them here at South, but…that’s probably the best we can do for now.”
“Okay,” Harry reluctantly agrees.
