Just the expected candy display, at the front of a “natural” foods store.
The big news as they arrive in Lorena on Tuesday comes from Universal Foods, as they announce that whatever it is RU Data’s attempting to do on the “EDI” ordering front, this is not going to work. According to Danielle, the liaison for such matters on their end, what RU Data is calling EDI is not really an EDI connection, and they’re going to have to figure something else out. Edgar is disappointed, but not exactly shocked at this point, and as a result takes the news more evenhandedly than some of the others, such as Dale and Katie, Megan and Vicky.
As is expected, Todd is of course framing this as Universal being some sort of patched together, hillbilly operation, despite the fact that his wife works for them. RU Data could not possibly be at fault for anything — even though Universal is the largest natural/organic operation in the country. For instance there are countless smaller and even sometimes local vendors whom Wholesome Shopper Market no longer even orders directly from anymore, because Universal has added them to its own catalog, gets a better price break, and then passes along a huge volume discount to the stores. Therefore one of the most amusing paradoxes of this retail segment — not that the average tree hugging health nut finds this quite so amusing — is that places like WSM could not exist by purchasing everything directly from most of the smaller vendors it is theoretically championing. The retails here, which are already high, would be astronomical. Without this major, major conglomerate, it’s possible the entire industry might collapse.
One of the operations in this attempted information exchange is half-baked, yes, and it sure isn’t Universal. Nobody here had ever heard of RU Data until Todd came along and, though he tries to spin it like he’s been a huge champion of theirs from day one, even he only brought them to the table as his fourth or fifth pick. So here they are at the ten month point now without a single vendor set up for ordering with this company. It’s looking increasingly likely that the Lorena location of Stable 2 Table From Wholesome Shopper Market will have to revert a few steps backwards to the clunky, archaic Scan Tree program, which they last used eight years ago. At least it works, and is better than calling in or emailing hundreds of items at a time.
Edgar, Sharon and Stephen are clustered around one of the long cafeteria type tables in the break room, discussing today’s hot potato of a topic. Whatever Edgar’s increasingly poor opinion of RU Data might be, that isn’t to say there aren’t some extremely knowledgeable people working for that company. Of which this Stephen is certainly one. He’s asking where they’re at with the non-EDI vendors, the so-called email enabled suppliers, which continue to represent a good 95% of the companies they’re ordering from.
“Explain to me again how that worked?” Stephen says.
“Okay, right, so the vendors we had — or have, I should say, since the other stores are all still doing it — for the ones set up that way, as soon as someone closes out the purchase order, Slingshot fires it off as an email attachment. You know, to whoever handles the orders on their end.”
“Right, right,” Stephen nods, “okay, so where’s Matt at with this?”
“Well he asked me to give him one vendor to test, so I told him to try it with Bellwether. But that was…over a month ago?” Edgar says, glancing sidelong at Sharon. He already knows this is true, but is just trying to involve her in the conversation.
“Yeah,” she nods and shrugs.
“Yeah, and I mean, I’ve asked for a few updates, but as far as I know it’s still not working.”
“Okay, well, let me ask him about that…,” Stephen says, trailing off as he jots a note down on his nearby legal pad. “But you know what…actually…,” he says, and sits up, asks Edgar to launch the RU Data interface on his laptop. From here, Stephen coaches him through a series of incrementally more predictable steps, as he too is now attempting the whole “save an order as a PDF” function that Matt had, when he was in town back in December. At the conclusion of which, once again, the entire system crashes.
“Hmm. That’s weird,” Stephen says, legitimately astounded by this development.
Edgar cackles and observes, “I think that is the exact same thing Matt said.”
Nonetheless, when attempted next on Sharon’s laptop, this result plays out in identical fashion. As Sharon has some other things she can do elsewhere in the building, among them helping the pricing girls and Universal hang tags, she lets Stephen borrow her laptop so he can attempt to figure out a small workaround. Even so, while it would surely be better than nothing, Edgar’s somewhat dreading even this prospect. It’s another good example of how he’s come to realize that clever workarounds are maybe not so clever. They’ve continually had major problems with the likes of Sondra claiming that “twenty percent” of her orders are “failing,” when this is all very traceable and almost always turns out a case of her forgetting to hit SEND. He can only imagine what would happen in this scenario, if she were required to save the PDF for every order and then remember to email them. Thankfully, this would theoretically only apply to Lorena and would not involve her — at least up until Todd really does pull the plug on Slingshot.
Meanwhile, regarding Wholesome Shopper Market’s own IT team, Felix and Teri, it does maybe redeem them to some extent that even a clearly advanced tech person like Stephen is confounded by his own program’s bugs. Not that Edgar has ever doubted for a second that Teri is extremely capable, and also quite open right off the bat if she doesn’t know something. But the same is not quite true with Felix. In all these years he still can’t quite get a handle on Felix, who remains as cagey and elusive as ever. It’s extremely hard to pin him down with an answer, right up until the moment something might blessedly work. As such, though MRI left behind those two somewhat basic tag printers, which they are using here in Lorena to crank out the basic white and yellow shelf tags for now, Felix can’t seem to get the one in the equipment room up front to function. Therefore everyone continues piling into poor Leslie’s little office in the back, where the lone operational printer is located.
Also, though this would certainly appear far more attributable to the type of wacky devices Todd bought, still nobody can figure out how to get the infamous slammer2020 tablet unlocked. The identify of slammer2020 remains unconfirmed, probably because this person doesn’t wish to admit being such — even though it’s not that big of a deal at all and would represent their best bet for regaining access. Or was that an act of willful sabotage? If so, this is a scary prospect as it could poten inflict all twenty tablets, if he or she really got on a roll. Whatever the case, Teri took her first stab at it today and, conceding defeat, brings it up front to where Edgar and Stephen are seated.
At this point, they are no longer in the employee break room. For whatever reason, it is halfway through their fifth day in the building that Todd has announced he wants to form a battle station of sorts in the store’s entrance area, of three cafeteria tables pushed together in a U formation, so that everyone can “compare notes” and “be on the same page,” whatever that means. So Stephen, Edgar and Sharon are relocated out here as well, and it’s to these coordinates that Teri brings the tablet.
“Well, okay, this might be a long shot, but…see if maybe you can figure anything out with this bad boy,” Teri says, with a rueful chuckle, handing the device to Edgar.
He agrees to give it a whirl, but is admittedly semi-distracted, only briefly glancing up from his laptop to accept this from her. Right before he casually sets it down in the center of the table. Which leads to an unfortunate moment of misplaced exuberance when he reaches for the nearest tablet, maybe half an hour later, and gleefully declares that he somehow just managed to log into the thing.
“What!?” Stephen shouts, disbelieving and astonished as he peers over his own laptop, over at Edgar.
And with good reason. Because it turns out that Edgar didn’t have the right device at all. The locked out tablet still sits an arm’s length away. At the end of the night, Felix will wind up taking slammer2020 with him, to study in greater detail down in his Chesboro office, which is of course the last they ever see of the gadget.
But there are clearly much greater issues afoot. So much so that Todd commands everyone’s attention for a mid-afternoon announcement, delivered not from the U shaped command center but rather up front by the deserted customer service desk area. The main thrust of this speech is that, owing to the time crunch, anyone who can possibly stay over and work until at least eight if not nine o’clock, not just tonight but for the next few nights, then that is basically not just appreciated but in essence their duty as dedicated employees of this company.
A speech he caps by firing up — which is all the more jarring in that everyone has returned to work and is no longer paying attention to him — a Spotify playlist from whatever device is sitting up there, at ear shattering volume, one which kicks off with the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And then stands there nodding and grinning, one hand on its matching hip, casting his eyes around until he can verify that most are on him once more, that everyone can gauge his impeccably retro yet humorous yet cool yet unexpected yet clever choice.
It’s hard to say which is more disturbing: either this or the “funky” dance that follows, as his exit from this scene. Then again, Edgar’s thinking, it’s oddly somewhat relieving to see that this dude who is a couple years younger than him has no rhythm whatsoever. Yet more awkward still is the moment an hour or two later, who can really say at this point, when an obviously gleeful Todd, feeling exceptionally chummy, uplifted by the majesty of how amazing he clearly is by pulling this Lorena enterprise together, is strolling around, from one person to the next, seemingly whomever he happens to cross paths with, as he then plays for them a YouTube clip he is busting a gut over. Which is the infamous scene from Office Space where those three guys administer a beatdown to their printer in a field, as soundtracked by the Geto Boys and Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta.
Though Edgar externally reacts pretty much the same way as everyone else — peering up at Todd, then over at the phone thrust in his face, watching the clip, politely chuckling and then smiling back up at Todd again — the internal process is markedly different. This is more of a three pronged reaction, a nuclear chain from one to the next. First, that this is plainly the first time Todd has ever seen that clip. The second is that he is clueless enough to somehow believe none of them are familiar with this clip. But lastly, and most pertinent of all, is the thought that, no, dude, you might think this is funny, and that’s okay. Yet you are not on this side of that clip. You are on the other side of that clip. You are one of the invisible, out to lunch bosses who are not depicted whatsoever in this clip. Granted, it would be impossible to deduce the context based on just this passage, without having seen the movie. Nonetheless, while Edgar has certainly had bosses who could realistically claim that they were in on the joke, Todd would never be at the top of that list. Or for that matter the bottom.
Like, how did he even stumble onto that miniature work of genius tonight? Did somebody call him Lumbergh, and did this inspire a nervous laugh as he then sneaked off to look up what they meant? Did he consider it a compliment anyway? And does he listen to Michael Bolton? A boss with a sense of humor is without question better than a boss with no sense of humor. However, there are some grumblings that for a guy to declare everyone must stick around until 8 or 9pm, then have nothing better to do himself but stroll around and distract people with twenty year old comedy clips, that this is actually not so hilarious, this is in fact a douche move. Edgar doesn’t come right out and either agree or disagree with this assessment. But you certainly can’t just wave it away as a trivial one.
Regarding Edgar’s most pressing task, as it’s now early evening on Tuesday, he’s wrapping up entering all the sales batches for Wednesday, the beginning of their weekly flyer. This is a semi-dry run on the new structure, with the two separate ads for the two groups of stores, though Lorena doesn’t open until Friday. Of course, all the expected parties have been sending him sale batches earmarked for Lorena alone, as well, but this is as straightforward as anything else. This dual approach moving forward should prove interesting, though, apart from all the usual reasons.
For Central and Arcadia, it’s the same old routine. He makes it a point to get his mitts on a forthcoming ad as soon as he can rustle up a copy of one. The three (now four) merchandisers and typically Todd will all send him their sales batches, most of which is stuff in the flyer, along with a few other items thrown into the mix. Dale and Vicky are extremely comprehensive with their files, and he doesn’t really have any worries with those. Vince and Todd are not quite so thorough. Typically with Vince, if there are, say, eight flavors in the product line, Edgar can count on a list missing two of them, meaning he has to go look up the product line and drop in the missing ones anyway, i.e. there’s not much reason for Vince to even bother sending the file.
There’s something of a high stakes game of chicken going on here as a result. Does he dare tell Vince to not even trouble himself, since it’s really not saving any of his time and is wasting pretty much all of that guy’s? Or is this what Vince has been angling for all along, and would that be playing right into his hands? Granted, he thinks this is far more likely an inattentiveness/indifference situation, that there’s no way the old man is that calculating, but who knows. Does he dare summon up the courage to venture forth with a surely pointless confrontation of some sort? Or just pretend that Vince’s files have all the necessary information, and upload them as is, play dumb when the inevitable fallout begins raining from the sky? After all, everyone knows this is the procedure they have in place, for years upon years now. He could try that tack as a calculated effort of his own, pray that it winds up making Vince look bad and leads to some lasting, positive change.
To him, though, this is one of those situations where you must ask yourself what is more important, and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. The bottom line is the items in the sales flyer have to ring up correctly. So he just fixes what needs fixing, says nothing and moves on. Where he draws the line is at the extra products they’ve shoehorned in here, which are not in the sales flyer, which would be some of what Vince sends him and pretty much anything that Todd does. Those get added as-is. If someone subsequently complains about some missing flavors, then he just shrugs and says that this is all that was sent to him. Teri would have considered all of this “babysitting,” justifiably so, and there’s only so much hand holding one can entertain. He has no way of knowing what this person intended. It could be they are extremely heavy on just a few varieties of something. His favorite scenario is when one of those two guys is bellyaching about a sale price being “wrong” on something they made up themselves and sent to him, even though he entered it correctly, just as it shows in the file.
But again, this is all very expected, with those two stores, and a handful of extraneous items they’re adding to Lorena and Palmyra as well. The only real drama on that front is seeing which camp the new produce merchandiser, Buddy, will fall into, although typically produce is pretty straightforward and there’s not a ton that can go haywire. This sale batch for the Stable 2 Table stores is something new, however, so Edgar’s quite curious on how this flows and its eventual outcome.
He can see what Todd’s going for here, and if it works out, that’s cool. The Stable 2 Table ads tie in 100% with what MRI is sending down, from that crazy file that must feed into Filezilla. You can open the thing, but it’s nothing that anyone would be able to make much sense out of, visually, by doing so. Just one long run-on jumble of information, akin to what would happen if you copied and pasted an entire novel into Notepad, except with a ton of crazy symbols interspersed as well.
So you just have to trust that this MRI file is correct. It is sorted into three levels, increasing in importance, which RU Data is supposed to automatically sort, after this thing is wrung through Filezilla. The first level consists of regular old price changes. This could be the trickiest piece of the puzzle, but as long as you stay organized, it’s not too terrible to pull off. The system should only trip to print a new shelf tag if the retail changes and if MRI is set as their primary distributor on that item. The second level is for the weekly sales flyer, which should match 100%. The third and highest priority level is for TPRs, temporary price reductions, which is really just a catch all phrase for exceptionally hot deals that are not tied to this Wednesday-Tuesday sales flyer scheme, are typically earmarked for a longer time period. As a result, Park is already working on a third sales sign and tag format, one with an icy blue outline, which will help distinguish these, so that everyone doesn’t just rip through and yank these down at the end of every sales flyer week. Truthfully, though, as long as RU Data interprets these files correctly, then it’s probably a lot less crazy than dealing with the in-house batches everyone is sending Edgar every week.
So this is why he almost always hunts down a flyer as soon as one is made available to him. Uses that to search for and enter all the sale prices himself. Then compares it against the files that the people are sending him just to double check and make sure that nothing is missed. He’s never quite insane enough to tell anyone this, however, because their next thought would surely be to ask why bother sending the files at all. But his thinking is that if he’s pretty much forced to do both of these steps anyway, then this order makes the most sense — for example not wasting his time with instances where people who insist upon typing out UPCs themselves (say, Vince, perchance) transpose a couple digits. If Edgar’s already entered this himself, then when he compares the two, it’s immediately obvious what happened; otherwise, it might get missed and at the very least requires more detective work which might or might not surface until after the sale has already started.
Well, what happens of course is that Wednesday morning arrives, and these scenarios are not exactly overwhelming successes. The regular old sales batch, as has been happening roughly half the time, fails to deploy at Central, which means it kicks out into that special error folder that RU Data created. While Edgar has at this point gotten in the habit of logging in remotely from his own damn house on Wednesday mornings, before even leaving, to check out this very scenario, Don Evans typically arrives at about 6am anyway. Checks this first thing himself, then quite naturally can’t resist calling Edgar on his cell somewhere around 8 to once again tersely insinuate that this was somehow Edgar’s fault and he should have known that this overnight file had failed to deploy.
“Well, I had to deploy the sales batch for you at Central once again this morning.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks for checking that.”
“Yep. Mmm hmm. Sure did. So…yeah! Just thought maybe you might want to know. But don’t you worry! I handled it…”
Click. Well, whatever. This is apparently the best RU Data can do, and he’s not about to set his alarm for one in the morning every Wednesday just to check these batches at every store. For something which he would have caught if Don hadn’t, anyway, somewhere around 7. Bottom line, though, is that if things are working, by whatever cobbled together fashion, then he can just ignore this guy’s attitude problem. It’s totally irrelevant. Not only that, but it’s funny how you can receive very stern warnings about not working from home, not working off the clock, et cetera, until it would be clearly advantageous for the company to have you do so (for example, uploading a new items file once per day even when you’re on vacation) in which case they want to hint around that you’re some kind of uncommitted loafer if you resist. Plus, not to bust that dude’s chops, because this would maybe imply that he dedicates spare brain power to thinking about Don Evans, but…it doesn’t exactly appear that Don’s cup overfloweth with actual work. Unless stomping around and acting pissed and spouting off about whatever idea pops into his head counts as work. At least this Wednesday morning ritual is some tangible task that he is performing.
So this is the somewhat expected and ultimately not all that major glitch for the two Chesboro stores. Regarding the deployment of this MRI Filezilla monster, though, for the Stable 2 Table operations, they determine early on that this beast isn’t behaving as expected. At least they have a couple of days to sort this out, perhaps, before the Lorena store opens. But as far as Palmyra is concerned, there are numerous instances where the prices aren’t ringing in the manner that this file is alleged to make automatic. Edgar, Ken and Stephen combine their mental energies studying the situation, but this is unfamiliar to all of them, so they’ve had no choice but to call George at MRI and ask him to double check that this file is correct.
“There’s nothing wrong with the file,” is George’s nonplussed response, calling them back shortly thereafter.
And from his end George, of course, has no way of accessing their RU Data system, and wouldn’t know what to do with it even if he did. Edgar opens the file, which does allow to search by UPC, and while these numbers are visible in a couple different places — one of which looks like a regular retail, one of which is the expected sale price — that’s the extent of what sense he or anyone else here can glean from this endless information stream. They have no choice but to forward this to the RU Data home office, to see if they can make heads or tails of why this file isn’t sorting correctly.
It’s oddly reassuring to see that even a highly competent figure like Stephen has no idea what’s wrong with this. Regarding Ken, Edgar would say that he is on roughly equal footing with the guy, as far as overall knowledge is concerned, specific to this data coordinator job and this industry, though Edgar has the edge here considering his extensive head start in dealing with these people, programs, and processes. Nobody has all the answers, however, and it’s always especially fascinating to Edgar that even when you’ve technically advanced beyond a certain point, there are still often some really basic tricks that you somehow blew right on past without ever learning. Like when John Arthur told him to format the entire UPC column in Excel as twelve zeroes, and he would never have to worry about it dropping the leading zero, or giving that weird 7.5247E+11 error ever again — there’s nothing complicated about that hack, and it works like a charm. But it’s not something you’d stumble upon accidentally in a million years on your own, and he’d never been peeved enough to look this up online. His previous solution was to right click and change the formatting on the number(s), whenever they cropped up.
This concept rears its head again on this particular morning. It’s the leading zero quandary once more, though this time involving a file a vendor had sent him. These people, Green Gardens, are obviously in the same boat he used to be. They’re stuck with thousands of UPCs that begin with a zero, and threw some weird formatting on there in order to preserve it. Hence the green flag in the upper left corner of every cell. Oddly enough, though it’s one thing to be assigned a bunch of UPCs like this, which you have no control over, there are at least a dozen companies who’ve set up their own in-house SKU number scheme which also involves numbers that begins with a zero. He’s never been sure why you would willingly do this to yourself, when the possibilities for your own SKU numbers are endless.
As for the UPCs, unfortunately when someone throws this kind of formatting on here, it is no longer technically considered a number, as far as Excel is concerned, and many of the programs you might upload the file to. So they have to be modified again to get rid of this formatting. In either instance, though, the best solution Edgar has found is to highlight all of the numbers, click on the yellow caution flag that appears, and select “Convert to Number.” The only problem with this is that it clicks through every cell in the column, one at a time, and can often take an eternity on a huge file such as this one.
“Oh my god…convert to number…,” he groans under this breath, moving onto something else as he waits for this process to finish.
“Wait a second — what are you trying to do?” Stephen asks, glancing up from his laptop.
“It’s this column of UPCs they’ve formatted to protect the leading zero.”
“Right…”
“I have to convert to number before I can upload it. But it’s a huge file and is taking forever.”
“Okay, yeah, try Text to Columns instead,” Stephen suggests, before returning to his own work.
“Text to Columns?” Edgar questions.
But as it turns out, as if Stephen’s nonchalant confidence wasn’t all the proof needed, this does indeed do the trick. Even though such a conversion has absolutely nothing to do with Text To Columns’ intended purpose, that of splitting out one large jumble of information — for example, if someone’s first, middle, and last name were all in one column — into separate columns for each. For whatever reason, it “splits” this UPC into a column of non-formatted digits that are now reading as numbers. So here again this becomes a very basic but all-time favorite trick of his, thanks to Stephen, which works for all kinds of unexpected purposes, like dates that also don’t wish to properly behave. And it happens in an instant.
Still, while you can never have too many arrows in your quiver to fire at potential problems like these, there’s only so much you can do leading up to the roadblocks raised by your end destinations themselves, these infinitely idiosyncratic computer programs. None of them behave the same, and it’s not as though there’s some international convention that will ever force them to. This particular detour remains a huge nuisance, which would drive just about anybody insane, he expects, but which he’s accustomed to at this point and doesn’t even stop to think about anymore. In this case, it’s regarding the last digit in these UPCs, the check digit.
To wit, the Slingshot program requires the check digit; the RU Data program requires you to delete it; roughly 75% of the vendors send their files with the check digit included; the other 25%, then, do not. So now there’s a whole other level of mayhem involved with maintaining his master database, then uploading the files to both places. If he had known this he might not have volunteered to continue doing so, in light of the fact that RU Data was never able to establish a connection from Slingshot. Then again, he had assumed this was going to be temporary, either that they would have long since gotten away from Slingshot, or RU Data would eventually get around to figuring that automated connection out. Then again, it’s not a huge issue, just something he must remember to do, now that he has formulas set up in his master spreadsheet to automatically populate the next fields over, depending on whether this UPC was sent with or without the check digit. And then uploading the correct one to the correct place.
Elsewhere, though many employees continually bombard him with gripes and questions about the internet in this place, or more specifically that these tablets and tag scanners don’t want to work because of the internet in this place — this despite the presence of Felix and Teri in the building, i.e. the actual people who would handle this — a pin spot of light begins to emerge at the end of the tunnel. The influx of new items has finally begun to lessen, just enough to where he can see that as far as his portion of the work is concerned, he is looking to be in great shape for a Friday opening.
The biggest headache still is adding all these new Lorena creations to their existing deli scale database. But at least he has Sharon here today, whom Todd has already told him to sic on this task, which Edgar is more than happy to do. Ken has investigated the situation thoroughly and can’t find any information out about those existing scales back in the deli and elsewhere, either, and certainly not any info for transferring the data out of those, then over into their existing database. Which neatly matches Edgar’s own experience with the same, in the spare moments where he’s been able to research the matter. Todd has steadfastly refused to pay a specialist to come here and transfer the information out of all those scales. This has left them with little choice but to continue manually inputting the recipes, so, while Ken continues walking the store to “investigate” the situation in person, Edgar and Sharon get cracking.
She has never worked with this deli scale program before, but there’s not a whole lot to it and she’s naturally able to catch on right away: shelf life, tare, retail price, ingredients. Done. They split the list in half and, after he establishes a VNC connection for her, she begins working on her own laptop, right beside his. By far the greatest challenge is a time and effort one, manually typing in these ingredients. At least in this regard it’s slightly easier to use than the old ScaleMonster program, like for example with the ability to look up some of the staple items (bread, mayonnaise, cheese, et cetera) and drop in the individual sub-ingredient breakdowns on those. Even so, despite splitting the list in half and dedicating about the last four hours of their day to this task, without interruption, 8pm arrives and they’re still only about…halfway through this colossal project.
They are putting on their coats and stowing their gear away while discussing the progress made, as well as what lies ahead. At the conclusion of which, Sharon says to Edgar, “whenever it comes up, I always tell people, I feel sorry for the guy, I really do. That’s why I want to help. I want to help.”
It’s a very weird speech, though it doesn’t quite register how weird this is until he has the hour drive home to think about it. This is exactly the kind of comment where it’s obvious that a huge chunk of the conversation has been willfully left out — and not only that, but she wants him to know that she’s leaving out much of the conversation. She’s making a concerted effort to insinuate there’s plenty more being said which he doesn’t know about, but she does, because she’s on the inside of these discussions.
Well, whatever. He’s never been any good at playing politics, mostly because he doesn’t care about any of that crap. One of his rallying cries has always been that reality exists exactly as it is — putting spins on things and playing angles and so on doesn’t change that. Although it is maybe one of the cruel ironies of being extremely bogged down by your work, that you wouldn’t have time to come up for air and play these games anyway. Those doing the most work are the ones least likely to walk around talking about how they are doing the most work. Only those with less on their plates have time for that nonsense.
