Cigarette ads & Combos bags: just your average help desk at a natural foods store

But at least Ben’s trying, one might say. The lowest rung on this ladder concerns the tiny band of holdouts who refuse to play ball with this new regime in any fashion. Once again, it is somehow Edgar’s fault if the employees refuse to come on board, yet he is also to blame if they happen to not appreciate his attempts to get them on board. Mostly this pertains to that wing of perishable managers, wrapping around the side and back corner of the store, those running produce, deli, and meat. Yet, though Trevor refuses to submit any new items sheets, he does pass this information along to Buddy, so that Buddy can send Edgar the new items form. Even though Trevor’s whole shtick here seems to be this guy is a joke! How can these things not be in the system already? Edgar has in fact had this conversation with Buddy on a handful of occasions thus far, despite his only being with the company for a month.

“Trevor’s saying he already turned this in a few days ago, and he doesn’t understand why it’s not in the system.”

“We added a six ounce raspberry, yes. But it was a different UPC. I mean you can look at the packaging and tell this is a different item.”

“Oh…okay…”

This he knows because Buddy keeps bringing the containers directly to him, on approximately half of the occasions where new items need to be added. If it were a five alarm emergency, one could make the case for doing so, but otherwise it just sets a bad precedent. Which has spiraled out of control in the past — people bringing Edgar “just one item” to type into the system “real quick” turns into two, turns into a complete shopping cart full of them. If management has any designs on doing away with this program, then they can do away with this program, but nothing has been said on that front. Barring that, they will stick with this process they’ve had in place for over a decade. And anyway, it’s difficult to imagine how they could do anything else if Todd has these master secret plans of Ken taking over, that there would be any other way except for sticking to the current process. Unless the department mangers plan on wheeling their shopping carts all the way to St. Louis, maybe? Then again, come to think of it, that’s exactly the sort of thing that Ralph or Laurie would try to argue was more efficient than sending a computer file. Best to not even crack that joke, ever.

Then there’s Louise over in the deli. Her attitude is plainly that she will order whatever she wants, then sling it out on the shelves when it comes in. Similar to Trevor in produce, she occasionally notifies Vicky that the item is new, leaving it to her merchandiser to track down the information and submit it, but just as often not, just assume that someone else will eventually stumble onto this item and realize it’s new. As with most things, she has at least driven to the parking lot of the ballpark, as far as playing along, but has a mighty attitude about it whatever the case. She can’t quite seem to wrap her head around the concept that this is now a Stable 2 Table From Wholesome Shopper Market store, and no longer belongs to MRI.

“Can we maybe at least be thankful that we have a job?” Vicky muses to Edgar one day, after dealing with Louise. “I mean, seriously. I’m just saying. They didn’t have to bring everyone back…”

Then there are the meat guys. A duo so hostile that even Vicky, without coming right out and saying so, appears to make every effort of steering clear of them. And who can blame her? For the first few weeks, Edgar attempted to converse with the department head, Clark, in normal fashion, like explaining to him that he was supposed to send new items on this sheet, or that pertinent information would be sent in the email/Slack combo that he was theoretically supposed to pay attention to. These were met with indifferent nods.

At some point along the line, when the store went live, Clark then raised holy hell because Edgar was not strolling back and punching the weekly sale prices into the old PLU numbers as well as the new ones, on the meat scale attached to their plastic wrapping conveyor belt. Once again the bosses naturally sided with that guy’s take on the situation, even those presented with the utmost antagonism — and maybe all sides have somewhat of a point, though it’s difficult to understand where this combativeness is coming for, or why it’s required. It really all stems from Todd’s last minute cancellation of the new scales, then only halfway relenting on that decision. And maybe Todd has the tiniest understandable point in that lone instance, not wanting to plop down a huge cash outlay to replace the entire meat wrapper assembly line machine. Sure, that’s understandable and all, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet on huge expenses, that’s just the way it is — which should be no problem whatsoever for a mastermind crushing it financially in the manner Todd frequently boasts that he is.

But unfortunately it’s left them in a situation where they have a new scale out in front, on the customer service counter, which is programmable remotely…and that other machine in the back, with a completely different series of numbers, that need updated in person, if the retail changes, or to put those on weekly sales, or to take them off of the weekly sales. He’s explained to the meat cutting duo that those numbers are eventually going away — and they already have, to some extent, whenever a conflict arises between it and an existing PLU number — which they’ve also not exactly done cartwheels in the streets over. In fact, they remain mighty pissed off over the situation.

This struggle reaches a head, if one can even call it that, during Edgar’s latest visit back to that department. It’s early in the morning and he has drifted back there to enter some updates into the wrapping machine scale. Clipboard in hand, with the necessary changes written down, which is typically what he does when there are only a few changes needed. With a more substantial list, he would bring his laptop back, considering that the information first goes into his master database spreadsheet file, which is saved to his device and therefore doesn’t require an actual working internet connection.

He has already entered the handful of changes into that scale, but is walking the packaged meat case looking for anything new that might need added. This is when a number of the prices catch his eye, as significantly lower than what it seems like they should be. Well, okay, he thinks, maybe these were close dated or something, and were reduced without anyone actually marking them as such. Except then he drifts over to the customer service counter, and sees that a good three quarters of the theoretically fresh offerings here have the same lower than expected pricing.

Just to be sure he’s not losing his mind, he hustles back up front, to the computer room, grabs his laptop and returns to the meat department. With that spreadsheet pulled up, he can see that these prices are indeed off the mark, in many cases by quite a few dollars. All are lower than what he shows they should be, which means there’s almost no chance this is accidental or some other form of randomness, and instead without question indicates these guys are intentionally altering them. Based upon the packages out there on the floor, it’s obvious that they are changing everything back in that wrapper scale, but the question is what they are doing out here on the service case. They don’t have access to changing prices there, on the new scale, which means they must be…taking just about everything back to that wrapper scale, to weigh it?

Edgar pops around, behind the counter, for a better look. Here he can see that the backs of the signs mostly all have the old PLU numbers on them, even though none of those would work up here in the new scale. Which is a thoroughly baffling and disturbing series of revelations, and can only mean they’re doing an insane amount of extra work just to skirt the Wholesome Shopper Market pricing structure. Fortunately, someone drifts out of the cutting room at this very instant. The head honcho, Clark, isn’t here this morning, but his second in command Eric is. Both display the expected brazen surliness which is somehow inherent to that profession, but whereas Clark is more of the late middle aged, crusty, sawed off, mustachioed variety, Eric is much younger, younger than Edgar even, and more of the tall, breezy jackass sort. At least these are his impressions, based upon their brief interactions.

“Hey, I happened to notice that a bunch of these prices are wrong. Why do you guys still have all the old numbers on these signs?” Edgar questions, and then, as the barren strip of metal directly below the scale catches his eye, the divider between two sections of case, he adds, “I actually even hung a list of the new numbers there at one point, but I see it’s gone.”

“We can’t get your prices on this stuff. This is what we charge,” Eric declares.

“Okay but these numbers are going away sooner or later. And this is a Wholesome Shopper Market store now.”

“We’re not doing this,” Eric says, and swirls a finger around in the general direction of the new scale, parked atop the case.

“So when you’re waiting on a customer, you guys take…just about every package back there to weigh it?” Edgar asks, jerking a thumb behind him, at that cutting room on the other side of the Plexiglass.

“Yep. We sure do,” Eric replies, and breezes back that way, through the swinging door, effectively ending this conversation.

Edgar’s first thought is that he could just ignore this, let Vicky or the store manager Shane or somebody else tackle this quandary. But is this not his concern? The sign on his office door after all does say PRICING. When people are not hitting their profit margins, the bellyaching and the finger pointing are quite often aimed in his direction. He would take this matter seriously even without management sniffing around, but if they do, he wants a solid, provable case supporting him, that he is doing his job as thoroughly as humanly possible. And he wouldn’t be surprised on some of those beef and seafood offerings if these guys were selling things at below cost.

Plus, if he’s being honest, this latest conversation and the meat duo’s blatant disregard for anything he’s saying, it does rankle his feathers just a smidgen. Therefore, entrenched safely within this makeshift office full of humming and buzzing and beeping equipment, he takes his time to craft a carefully composed, angled, and measured email. He decides that the thing to do is to send this — as well as an identical Slack message, too, of course, one mustn’t forget that — to Todd, Fred, and Shane. But then to copy Vicky on this message as well. Though she wasn’t involved with this morning’s dustup, they have discussed some of these points before (reluctance to switch numbers, total refusal to submit a new items form, etc), and therefore he leaves just enough vagueness here by mentioning that he and Vicky have talked about “some” of these points and were wondering what to do about this situation. It’s important to rally around one’s allies, and he knows she would agree with all of this. Yet by copying her, and phrasing it as such, he’s sending the ball into management’s court, not hers. Because in truth they are the ones that need to get a handle on these jokers anyway. So he mentions every aspect of this dilemma, from the made up prices, to the old numbers in use, and asks if he should just delete those, or attempt to figure out how to lock that back scale even, and if they are going to approach these guys or if he and/or Vicky should.

As one might expect at this point, however, the sum total of a response from Todd, Fred, and Shane is…crickets. Total silence. Not a word said, either verbally or in typed and transmitted form. In the past, of course, Fred has remarked to Edgar on at least one occasion that the problem with including multiple people on a message is that everybody thinks somebody else is going to respond, so nobody does. But this really just sounds like a convenient excuse from a guy who likes to brag about having 700 unread emails. Meanwhile, Todd is surely hiding behind his own cocky wisecracks and saying something somewhere to these others guys about it being user error or it’s because Edgar doesn’t know what he’s doing, or something else along those lines, anything that would allow him to maintain his illusion of knowledge and control. Shane he’s sure is just shell shocked, ducking in a bunker somewhere, and wondering what he got himself into by signing up with this nightmarish regime.

Yet the truth is, they probably have no idea what he is talking about, for the most part. You’re not going to get that out of anybody, though. They’re not going to admit you maybe lost them with a couple of points here, but that the part about the meat guys lowering all the prices disturbs them, so can you please elaborate on this a bit? Possibly bring it up at the next otherwise pointless Monday morning meeting.

Well, he did his part, is the way he sees this now. Although it does make him wonder, how does a person get on the other side of the fence, to where what he’s saying is taken seriously? He is not an old St. Louis crony, nor a hot female, therefore Todd is highly unlikely to register any points he makes. But there are a handful who manage to wade across that channel anyway, like Felix, or Sharon, or Ralph. Aside from the curiously bulletproof and untouchable Vince, what most of those figures have in common is that they merely complain the most. Vince he thinks pulls this off by being what these other guys aspire to be, some sort of legacy don, in Mafia parlance, who commands a ton of respect despite saying and doing nothing, merely by being old and making serious facial expressions. Yet you need to clock in at 60+ in order to swing that, at the very youngest. Otherwise, you must complain a ton, and play a bunch of political games behind the scenes, maneuver things around by bitching about various subsets of people to all the other subsets of people.

But, for example, take this internet. It’s atrocious, not just at Lorena, but almost everywhere. The question is, how do you get results without selling Felix out, ratting on him to management? Or rather, that would be the question, if it weren’t a case that this has gone on for years upon years now. If management doesn’t consider this a problem, which they apparently don’t, then nobody else around here should, either. This is what Edgar tells himself, anyway. The only problem with that approach is it seems half of the workforce, including all of management, seems to still believe he has something do with the internet around here.

The general sentiment now is that everyone gets to be as shitty to him as they like, but he is not permitted to speak, whether in typed or audible form. Even when most of this has nothing to do with him whatsoever. Fred has both admired aloud about how blunt and minimalist Darren’s responses are, his curt replies with almost no explanation given, but also favorably compared Sharon to a bulldog, “going right after people,” with reams of context and explanation given, at the exact opposite end. Which can only lead Edgar to wonder where exactly he is allowed to exist on this spectrum, as they come flying at him with their complaints, which he is not permitted to respond to.

People are miserable around here, he gets it, but again this has almost nothing to do with him. The next thing he knows, attempting to get some work done in the equipment room, someone is paging him over the intercom, to pick up line one of the nearest phone. This is a clever if obnoxious stunt that certain individuals like Ralph Hedges have begun pulling, if they know what store he’s in (or for that matter, feel like trying all of them) and have figured out that if they call his cell, it’s going straight to voicemail, until he can listen to a message and figure out if this is a crisis or not. Except this time, it’s the somewhat unexpected voice of Destiny Davis, sounding cranky and halfway panicked, because she’s claiming that Candace is working at Central today and does not have a manager’s log-in.

Since he would have to return to the equipment room anyway in order to retrieve his laptop, he tells her he’ll call back in a minute from his cell. Before he does, however, seated once more at his trusty folding card table, he attempts connecting into Central. And is amused but not exactly surprised to see that the connection between here and there is down at the moment. But then does of course call Destiny back just the same, to deliver the news.

“Unfortunately, it looks like the remote connection to your store is down right now anyway…” he tells her, tacking on a chuckle at the end.

“Okay, well?”

“Well okay so Hupp still has it to where we have to set up these log-ins at each specific location. Although I was just thinking…does Candace need a new log-in, or does she just need me to reset her password? Because it seems like she already had me set up a manager’s log-in for her at…”

“Hang on,” Destiny grumbles, and then he can hear some muffled conversation, as she evidently speaks to the person in question. Although why Candace wouldn’t just call him herself isn’t exactly clear. “She needs her password reset.”

“Okay, that’s what I was thinking. If I remember right, she had me create a log-in for every manager, at every location. But did she try Wholesome123? That’s the default I usually start with, which she might not have even changed.”

“She already tried that! She needs a new password! Are you gonna do this or not?”

“Uh…,” Edgar mutters, unable to comprehend where this latest wave of nastiness is even coming from, “yeah, I’ll change it as soon as I can, back to Wholesome123. But like I said the connection is down right now.”

“Okay,” Destiny says. Click.

The following morning, he arrives at Lorena to discover that there is no internet whatsoever. And aside from brief bursts, lasting no more than a handful of seconds, this trend will continue for the next hour and a half. At which point he packs everything into his laptop bag and makes to exit the store. Although, comically enough, it’s right here, at the sliding doors of the entrance, just beyond them, that he bumps into Sharon. She was summoned up here today for unknown purposes, and has just arrived, making it as far as this sidewalk.

“The internet’s down,” he tells her.

“What?”

“Oh yeah. It’s been down all morning. At least for the hour and a half that I’ve been here.”

“Great…,” she groans, and shakes her head. Turns her head back toward the parking lot and says, “I wonder if I should just turn around right now, not even bother.”

“I don’t know, but…if anyone’s looking for me, tell them that I’m down at Taco Bell.”