One key battleground in the latest choose your own pricing adventure
Progress, or what some might prefer to simply call “activity” instead, continues on other fronts, however. As they enter the month of March, Todd announces that this will be their last one occupying the offices of Central HQ. The Palmyra remodel is just about finished, and they’ve already gotten access to the warehouse out in Waxoff, to begin revamping and transferring some objects there.
Of the two new offices at Palmyra, Edgar and Sharon are splitting the second, which is roughly situated where the wine department used to be. The first, in the far corner, was set to be solely the province of Shelly and the cashiers, until Valerie issued Todd her ultimatum: either she could work out of this store, somehow, or else she would have no choice but to look for a new job. And so she was given some table space there, under the vague guise of Sharon’s assistant — an assignment all the murkier in that it hasn’t quite been clarified what Sharon’s job itself is, now that the receiver position has been eliminated. For now, her role is loosely defined as giving deliveries a quick eyeball test, hanging shelf tags for all of the departments, and possibly helping Ken get this RU Data ordering off the ground by any means necessary at this point. Valerie, for her part, seems to mostly have had only the tag hanging aspect dumped into her lap, possibly because Sharon seems to regard this as less “cool” and therefore not as worthy of her own time.
Regarding the others, Todd, Fred, Vince, Don, Dale, Buddy and Park are all granted their own offices in Waxoff. Which will exist alongside the remaining half or three quarters of the building space, where, Todd continues to blather on about daily, alongside “his” constant blueprint revisions and considerable self-congratulatory boasting, they will soon send all of their deliveries. In fact, they’ve already begun to store some of their excess backstock over there.
When nearly any employee outside of management is briefed on these particulars, though, one question almost immediately leaps to the forefront: okay, but what about Vicky? You know, your deli merchandiser? In response to this, Todd’s latest metaphorical blueprint revisions involve calling an audible, insisting that he was thinking she would work out of Palmyra in some fashion. With the dismantling of that back dock area and its makeshift office, that bay with formerly smoker dust covered desks, and the assignment of Sharon’s former space in Russell’s office to the department managers to use instead, this basically means that Vicky has been left to…get creative? Few buy Todd’s explanation, it goes without saying. Most are of the mind that, yes, he seems to have entirely forgotten about Vicky.
At least things are humming along quite nicely in Lorena, regarding Edgar and the tagging duo, their efforts to spot check the entire store. A reassigned Leslie is even able to help them, as has Sharon, during her occasional visit up that way. They have printed out a large map of the store, and slashed through every completed area with a giant red X.
This progress arrives despite the not insignificant challenges they’ve faced, on myriad fronts. The tag scanners themselves are still only halfway usable, at best, owing to the frequent internet disconnections. Most of the time, they continue sending Edgar spreadsheets from Open Office instead, which is his own preferred method just about all of the time, at this godforsaken store. This is without getting into the whole issue of their not reading the shortened barcodes at all, which makes them useless in scanning most gum packets, many of those tiny essential oil bottles, and other scattered oddball items such as this one horseradish variety. There is also one retrospectively hilarious incident where, as it turns out, MRI has sent them the complete wrong set of price update tags, on their weekly Tuesday truck.
Edgar is absolutely delighted that, in a burst of pure randomness, Todd happens to be hanging out in Lorena on this otherwise quiet late morning. Todd’s kicking back in the football field sized employee break room, the only person within it, pecking at his laptop from one of the middle tables. With the printed out manifest in hand, which came with the label batch and is one of the evidence pieces they used to sort out this mystery, Edgar enters the room and approaches Todd.
“MRI sent us the wrong tag batch this morning.”
Todd shoots a neutral expression over at Edgar, with a response to match. “Really,” he says, not even so much as a question.
“Yes. One of the cashiers noticed that a bunch of stuff seemed to be ringing up wrong. So I got to looking, and the update batch deployed correctly. But it didn’t match what tags we were sent. Then Ashley noticed that this report has the wrong store listed at the top. This was supposed to go to…some place called Vitamin Valley. In Boone.”
“Oh, so it was just vitamins?” Todd says, with either a touch of hope or optimism, as though soft-pedaling it in this manner would change the situation.
“No, these are for the whole store. That’s just their name.”
“So what are you doing about it?”
“I’m giving this back to Ashley and Amanda, here in a second,” Edgar says, holding up the manifest, “they’ve been going through it and backtracking to take down all the tags they hung this morning. I’m gonna call George here in a second and see what he has to say. I just thought you should know about it.”
“Okay…”
After drifting out to give this dot matrix looking, 1990s-esque, green and white striped report with perforated earflaps back to them, he dials George’s number, on his cell, and puts it on speaker as he returns to the break room. The point is not to bust anybody out, but rather that, as contentious as things have gotten around here, he wants proof of what happened here delivered right into Todd’s lap. Not that this would prevent their blinder wearing president from continuing to claim that this was user error or a training issue, but it was worth a shot.
As Edgar could have also predicted with a high degree of accuracy, George is not the least bit surprised nor apologetic, when he answers the phone and learns about the situation. He remains as nonplussed as ever and might as well be whistling doot dee doot right before singing a chorus of MRI is as perfect as ever/ we’re still amazing and you still suck. As far as a potential remedy, though, he says he can have Bobby drop off the correct batch of replacement tags sometime this week.
“Okay, when do you think that might be?”
“That I could not tell you.”
“Uh…so I guess I’ll just reverse the batch and wait for those to get here?”
“Yep.”
These things are going to happen, Edgar understands all that, and in the larger scheme it’s not even that huge of a deal. They are also lucky that Ashley and Amanda “only” hung about two or three hundred tags before the cashier drew his attention to this. The real point is that he thinks they are doing an excellent job, when considering this litany of factors. Failing on four items of a scan audit for a store this size — or even if you were talking about one convenience store sized, you might argue — was not an indictment, and no major cause for alarm. Yes they have found some errors in their spot checking effort since, and updated those with new signs or tags, but it hasn’t represented a huge number, and an even smaller percentage. Taken together, alongside all the mitigating factors and clever workarounds and roadblocks, he believes they have performed incredibly.
Not that you would know this from management’s response, particularly that of Don Evans. And this ridiculous tug of war finally begins pulling people into the mud pit about a week later, during another relatively ho hum midweek day at Lorena. It’s right at noon and Edgar has been plugging away without interruption, in a great groove, at his folding card table in the equipment room. At least until grocery manager Megan, who has just arrived for the day, breezes in with a look of mild horror on her face.
“What is going on out there?” she asks him.
“Mmmmm…I don’t know,” he says, looking over at her, “what do you mean?”
“Don’s got a bunch of people out there with scanners, changing all the prices.”
“What!?” Edgar says, and launches up out of his chair.
Naturally, this would have to be a rare day where the internet is cooperating with few if any hiccups. Otherwise, there’s no way he could have gone this long without hearing of this exceedingly baffling project. As it stands, he’s flying out the door to find a smug looking Don standing at the end of one grocery aisle, arms crossed while he watches people work.
“Megan tells me you’ve got all these people out here…changing the prices?”
“Mmm hmm,” Don says, smirking ever so slightly.
“Okay, well, did anyone think the pricing coordinator might need to know about this? I mean, it’s almost noon, and this is the first I’ve heard about it.”
“Well, I’ve been talking it over with Ken, and this is what we decided. This is what we’re doing.”
“But what is the point of this, even?”
“We have to pass the next scan audit,” Don states, regarding Edgar as though he might not be aware of such.
“Yeah, I know that. I mean, obviously.”
“Well, okay, so if they find a tag that’s wrong, they’re changing the price to match it.”
This could be the most brain numbing development yet, and it takes Edgar a moment to catch his breath, before he blurts out, “this isn’t how you do things!” His volume and tone both about halfway up the on ramp to screaming. “Aside from the fact that nobody told me. That’s actually the complete opposite of how things are supposed to work. You don’t change the price to match what the tag says! Not to mention that, the first time I sync this store to HQ, it completely wipes out everything you’ve done today anyway!”
“Yeah, well, you’d have to talk to Ken about that,” Don tells him.
Shaking his head, Edgar reiterates, “this isn’t how you do things,” before storming off toward the equipment room once more.
Behind him, he hears Don shout, “this wasn’t my idea, you know!”
As soon as he’s back in his makeshift office, Edgar pulls up Ken’s number and hits the Call button. Is not exactly surprised when no one picks up on the other end, though, and he is forced to leave a quick message, imploring this transcontinental puppet to return his call ASAP. And yet in a way, it’s probably a good thing that they have failed to immediately connect, in that it gives him a chance to calm down some, but also to think things through better and come up with a few additional solid points.
It’s true that he probably hasn’t been this fired up since the day Corey basically came right out and declared him a slacker and they announced that Pierre was taking over half his job. But is this not with good reason? Whether they consider his methods effective or not — and whether Don or even Ken knows enough to even make that call — nonetheless the last he checked, he was still in charge of this pricing operation. Which is a point that has nothing to do about chest pounding and marking one’s territory, but everything to do about processes that are entirely blown out of the water, like for instance his carefully maintained spreadsheets, which are still the first place he makes every update, every time, every day. They have metaphorically ripped those out of the hard drive, thrown them on the floor and pissed on them until they started smoking. But also, yes, and more importantly, the method they have chosen makes no sense whatsoever, because now this store cannot sync with the main database at HQ.
There’s also one other consideration, which was totally lost on him up until this moment, a revelation heavy enough to send his jaw dropping. Ordinarily, there would be no way for any old random employee to pick up a tag scanner and use that to start changing prices. That is an instant recipe for disaster if not outright fraud. No, that function requires admin access, which not even Todd has, which only Edgar, Felix and more recently Ken are able to claim, the only three people with this capability in the entire company. Furthermore, to lessen any kind of scenario of leaving oneself accidentally logged in somewhere, a user is only permitted to log into one device at a time, which boots him off after a certain period of inactivity. So this can only mean one thing, which is that someone, most obviously Ken, went ahead and gave admin credentials to all of those people on the floor, at least seven of them that Edgar saw out there.
They can change this back, obviously, but that’s really not the point. The point is what kind of havoc those people can wreak, right now, storewide. For it isn’t too long before he begins hearing reports of people not just changing the retail should they discover an error, which isn’t even happening all that often, but going ahead and revamping the prices to what they think something should be on occasion, if they don’t like the current price, and cranking out a tag to match if necessary. In other words a blazing wildfire that is just about impossible to contain or even determine the source of, considering that almost nobody will admit to doing so, despite clear evidence of such, and they are handing off the scan guns to whomever often, the devices are frequently changing hands.
The thought of some of these flunkies, more than a handful of which might take delight in sabotaging everything to begin with, being given this access, this is a rightly horrifying prospect. It also irks him to no end that Sharon is out there right now, having somehow wheedled her way into this project — which means this was obviously planned out days ago — and that she too said nothing to Edgar. But it’s another chance to maybe grab some more power, so of course she’s right on board with this. Somewhat balancing these matters out, though, despite Megan and Katie effectively throwing up their hands and declaring this a messed up idea themselves, therefore staying out of it, despite Amanda enjoying a rare day off today, is knowing that Ashley at least has one of the scan guns. He doesn’t worry about her in the slightest, although it’s touching that she’s disturbed enough now to come into the equipment room and apologize.
“I’m sorry! Megan told me you had no idea this was happening?”
“Yeah…,” he confirms, chuckling and shaking his head.
“That’s fucked up. When I got here this morning, Don just told us to start doing this, so I’m like, okay, I guess we’re doing this,” she explains, “but I thought you knew about it! I did think this was weird, though…”
“Eh, it’s alright, it’s not your fault. Don’t worry about it,” he tells her, waving off her concern, “I’m sure everything will be fine.”
As she leaves and Edgar returns to composing this message, he considers that, once again, though Don allegedly possesses tons of experience, he is acting very much like someone who has never gone through this before. And it could very well be that these audits weren’t a policy out in Missouri or whatever. But there’s no way Ken never has experienced such — he is far too knowledgeable, he clearly knows his stuff. Beyond anything to do with these scan audits whatsoever: there’s a 0% chance that Ken wouldn’t know that the methods undertaken here today were a horrible idea, that these were completely backwards and that they now can’t sync Lorena to HQ. Which can only mean that he undertook this route specifically because it was the one course of action that would allow him to circumvent Edgar completely. That was the entire reason behind it.
Not that he would accuse Ken of such in his email (and should he have sent this via Microsoft Teams instead? Edgar does consider this with a rueful chuckle, shortly after hitting the send button. What’s the protocol here? Todd didn’t quite cover that specific angle, a message intended for Ken alone). And really, so long as they pass this audit, he ultimately doesn’t care how this has to play out — provided that nobody ever thinks this is a good idea and attempts this same stunt again. But yes, that’s the bottom line. Even so, however, it seems pretty obvious that certain figures are attempting to strip various responsibilities right out from under him, with no justification whatsoever other than angling for more power themselves.
So wow, hopefully that works out for them. In the meantime, he does get a fairly swift email response from Ken, a concession that I probably should have told you about this. And this is another motive for remaining calm, refraining from launching a bunch of accusatory arrows at someone: you draw them in slowly, with one admission, and the next thing you know you’re extracting another point from them, and another, because they can’t exactly backtrack now. Each leads inexorably to the one beyond, all of it only bolstering your case, as the two of you collaborate on a solution.
The crux of the dilemma is what happens now, since these wheels are obviously long since in motion. Yes, Ken concedes, he gave everybody out there some temporary admin credentials this morning, including Don. Until the state inspector guy returns, however, what does this mean? Reverting these people back to their former clearance levels, of course, as soon as this outrageous project is completed. And yes, Ken recognizes, with a sigh, as by now, following the email, and then some texts, before finally speaking on the phone at last, this means they can’t sync this store again, or at least should not, before that transpires. And they are able to go in and forcibly disconnect the two for now, which prevents any slip ups on that front. Even though this creates another headache, for example, in that the sales batches will require uploading individually, a second time, at the Lorena store’s own RU Data interface.
