Healthy Shopper “conference” room, though often used as a product repository

Trade show weeks have a distinct summer school vibe about them. Roughly once per quarter, Duane, the merchandisers, Corey and maybe one or two other select individuals fly out to some distant major city, for these major industry events. The whole point of this exercise is to forge connections, learn about some new products, and hopefully strike some hot deals on these as well as preexisting products. How Duane arrives at this guest list is a bit of a mystery, though, for while Corey has always been a constant presence and Karen, too, ever since she came aboard, the other two store managers — Destiny and Isabel — are not. Even as Southside remains their busiest location. So the latest, this June extravaganza in Las Vegas, finds Duane, Karen, Harry, Dale, Vince, Corey, Jake and Pat heading off into the desert, presumably to glimpse more than just mirages, while everyone else stays home.

So no, Edgar is never invited to any, either, but he’s not entirely convinced he really wants to. On the one hand, it sounds like a grand exercise in screwing off on the company’s nickel. On the other, you might be stuck hanging out with industry types and coworkers to a distressing degree. Dale relates a story about sharing a rental car with the former deli merchandiser, the wine enthusiast, that she totally bailed without warning early in the day, leaving him stranded at a distant convention center, miles upon miles from their hotel. Edgar might be a little more useful if on site, with his laptop, providing instant access to their costs, and sales history, but it’s not a huge difference — he is still just a phone call away, after all, and typically receives many such inquiries during these trade shows. But not always. They return with their tales of how huge the Foxwoods Casino is, or who drank too much and made an ass of himself attempting to dance with some Harmony Hill reps at such and such bar. Theoretically some actual hot deals are in fact arranged at these shows, though there are frequent occasions to question even this.

One especially memorable instance finds Duane returning and bringing Edgar an invoice for a mountain of potato chips he’d purchased at the show, which have just arrived. He wants Edgar to crunch the numbers and figure out what kind of sale price they can run these at, to take advantage of the bargain. Except he examines these costs every which way they can possibly be interpreted, according to this invoice, and is forced to dip next door to Duane’s office to deliver some bad news.

“I hate to break it to you, but…it looks like we paid more for these than we usually do.”

“What? Are you kidding me?” Duane remarks, from behind his desk. Yet doesn’t look or sound all that surprised, not the least bit distressed as she shakes his head and sighs, “why does this stuff have to be so confusing?”

Before the trade show week, though, summer has already brought with it a slightly looser, more familial atmosphere — at least for those who are game enough to participate. Even though this is yet another reminder that familial certainly doesn’t imply getting along, might suggest quite the opposite. First up is another company picnic, though this one is held indoors, at a facility near the largest local lake. Or at least, it’s local to those working in Palmyra. The previous year Palmyra was complaining about the one held clear down in Chesboro, now it’s Chesboro’s turn to protest this. Liberty stages the most notable holdout, in that Isabel and her family are the only ones to attend. By having just two employees show, even if one of them is Karen, Walnut readily doubles this total.

Despite the presence of children, a somber mood prevails. The sky is overcast, and it feels like almost nobody really wants to be here. These are always held on Sunday afternoons, with skeleton crews remaining at the stores, and yet even if the most feasible option outside of a nighttime picnic, you’ve still got people grousing about this as well. But hey, Edgar’s thinking, he really isn’t complaining, as his name is the first one drawn out of the hat, as winner of the best gift basket. Also, though ordinarily not something he would even bother trying, Destiny’s vegan taco salad turns out surprisingly awesome, and he can’t resist complimenting her.

Much of this goodwill is possibly wiped out by the next outing, a horse riding excursion to Johnny’s farm. His own daughter is a little too young to have much interest in hanging out with Destiny’s pair of children, which is but one reason he doesn’t know that her oldest, with somewhat cherubic features, and really long, curly hair, was in fact born and identifies as a male. Edgar receives his schooling on this topic when he innocently asks Destiny, within earshot of all, whether her “daughter” here had ridden the horses yet.

“It’s a boy!”

“Huh?”

“I said it’s a boy! Taylor is a boy!”

Yikes. But at least Edgar hasn’t shown up handing out jars of moonshine to everyone, as his parents have done, including the Hatleys. Duane in particular looks vaguely horrified, but accepts and thanks them anyway.

Things are further complicated in that some are wondering whether they should or should not offer compensation to Johnny for use of his horses, especially as his usual hired hands are working this day, just like any other. Plus, a couple weeks prior, Johnny accidentally crashed the company truck into this low, single lane railroad underpass in Walnut, was given a sobriety test, passed, yet was demoted to part-time bulk employee at Palmyra anyway. But it turns out Johnny has just taken on a part time gig as a handyman on Mr. Locke’s property, so they figure he’s doing alright.

Also for the first time ever, Rob has this idea that it might be a good idea to let the HSM employees tour Bellwether Snacks’ production facilities, so they can see how things are made, how the process in general flows over there. Five of them ride over together from Southside, although they are staged in a meeting room just beyond the front entrance, and broken up into groups of five based on a first come, first served basis. This means that Edgar, Valerie, and this new kid from the deli are thrown in with Shelly and some unfamiliar Palmyra cashier.

Edgar’s actually mighty surprised to see Shelly here, and even vaguely impressed. She never comes to any of their company parties, for example, declaring that she has way better things to do with her time. It almost certainly has something to do with the fact that they’re being paid for this outing, though, that’s the difference maker. Also that someone else was willing to drive a huge mob down from Palmyra, considering that she’s never gotten her driver’s license, instead taking a moped to and from work every day. She cites an all consuming terror of driving a car, as the reason behind this, although as Edgar and others have said to her, it sure seems like puttering around on a moped has to be a lot more dangerous.

He attempts making some small talk with her, briefly, considering that they’re trailing this tour guide around for the better part of an hour. For the majority of this meandering voyage through this factory slash warehouse, though, he and Valerie hang farthest back, and find this excursion mildly entertaining but not especially useful. Everyone snickers each time their guide says the word “nuts,” to the extent that even he starts giggling before doing so, in anticipation of their response.

This convivial goofball also unknowingly trails off, leaving his charges behind as he rambles away, when all five of them become distracted by this wrapping robot type machine. They stand stupefied, rooted in place as they watch this modern engineering marvel, dispensing clear plastic sheets as an entire wooden pallet full of Bellwether Snacks cases spins around and around on a motorized spindle. Then detects when the pallet is secure, and cleanly cuts the sheet with its other arm. Finally, once their curator discovers they have stopped, and returns for them, they are led into the last exhibit, a tiny room near where they began, otherwise devoid of humans, though packed to the gills with various large spice containers.

“This is where we fill our spice orders,” their guide explains, beaming broadly at this treasured, timeworn punchline, expecting that it will slay them, “this entire department is all women, so we call them the Spice Girls.”

“There used to be five, but now there are only four,” Edgar jokes. And maybe everyone thinks he’s serious, or maybe it’s just not funny, but nobody laughs.

Still, these diversions, arriving rapid-fire and bringing a little variety to their days, if nothing else, are not quite the same as a nice, long, three day stretch of letting their hair down at work, during this trade show week. This is more of an atmospheric lightness, possibly self-fulfilled by merely thinking about how mellow things are, without any of the bosses around. After all, it isn’t as though they are hanging from the rafters and popping champagne bottles everywhere, or hiring a stripper to jump out of a cake.

But has someone brought a boombox up to the community room, to crank an old NWA album on compact disc, this fine afternoon? Yes. Take that, Felix. The quote unquote ghetto blaster in question belongs to the bulk department, is normally used to gently stream their own personally handpicked music (including a veritable mountain of those dreadful new age instrumental CDs, formally on a spinning rack near the incense, since thankfully discontinued), while working in their partitioned closet of a backstock room. There’s a thin paisley blanket hanging to cover what should be an open doorway there, between the beer case and the dairy section, which is where they keep their leftover spice shakers and paperwork and not much else — most everything else for bulk is either staged or permanently stored in the nearby freezer, to cut down on bugs, which is something they don’t exactly advertise to their freakout prone customers. Valerie was telling Wayne, the still teenage yet second-in-command bulk employee, that he should listen to more 1990s rap music, which led to this scene. Wayne had went down and grabbed his boombox, while Valerie supplied the tunes.

“Wayne doesn’t like the NWA CD,” Valerie tells Edgar, as the named, potential convert drifts into the room. Wayne, who looks to Edgar like he probably listens to boy bands most of all, merely shrugs, and keeps on moving into the merchandisers’ office.

The reason these other two are standing in the community room, however, has to do with 2600 tags Edgar has just printed out for Palmyra. He has them in precise order, as part of this grand location coding project. Trudy up there is one of the more frequent complainers, albeit in the guise of good natured but exasperated grumbling, about the hassles involved with their monthly price updates. Yet she had sighed and laughed and shook her head violently, repeatedly, when he asked her about going through with walkie-talkies to help out with this location code project. He feels like most of the people around here just don’t get it, with a great many concepts like these. They’ve actually got it made, relatively speaking, in comparison to how Teri was handling those monthly updates: printed out in one giant clump, no department separation, no filtering by sales history. Here ya go, entire store, have fun with that. And yet still most continue grumbling, on a spectrum ranging anywhere from Trudy’s more benign variation, up to Ralph’s bitterness or Zaire’s downright hostility. But then you mention something like this, how a little bit of work up front would benefit them tremendously down the road, and they have no interest.

Regardless, though, it’s too important, and something that must be done anyway. They’ve already seen this concept work wonders at Southside. The first time through was like diving into cold lake water or something, as breathtaking as they expected. If a tag was printed and no longer existed in that section, Craig would just bring it up, and either have Edgar enter the new location, or delete the location reference completely, if Southside no longer had it, mark this item as gone. Any new items that came in and should have had a tag printed for that section, this is also extremely easy to identify. This was far, far easier than printing out thousands of tags and then sorting them out.

So he now has this batch of 2600 strung out from his printer, clear into the community room. This is done because there’s room to breathe, with so many people out of town, and because it’s a quiet Wednesday anyhow. But also because these tag batches tend to bunch up if not come apart should you let them accumulate in a pile on the floor, and he wants to keep the entire roll intact, if possible, before folding it back up — accordion style 5 x 5 is his preferred method — and stuffing them into a large manila envelope for the trip up to Palmyra, which he plans on hitting tomorrow.

He’s not even really sure how Valerie became involved with this mess. Really he supposes she was just walking past and it looked like an irresistible project. With the batch printed, it’s a simple matter of folding up this endless highway of white road with blank barcoded ink. She starts at one end and he at the other, as they slowly fold their way toward the middle.

“Hey, I wanted to tell you,” he thinks to mention, after a few mesmerized moments where neither is saying much, “I overheard Duane and Mr. Locke talking about you the other day.”

“Oh god…,” she groans.

“No, it was actually good. They were talking about what a great job you’re doing.”

“Really? Wow. That’s awesome,” she says, smiling and chuckling as she momentarily glances up, and they briefly make eye contact before falling once more under the spell of this task. Another silent measure follows, before Valerie offers the seeming non sequitur, “this reminds me of spaghetti.”

“What, like Lady and the Tramp?” Edgar questions.

Valerie laughs and replies, “that’s exactly what I was thinking of!”

With the task completed, coming together as close as they can without touching, she hands him her half and he stuffs the entirety of them into the envelope. Then Valerie meanders over to the merchandisers’ office, and back to her desk, while Edgar returns to his.

This has been a week of tremendous revelations, coincidentally arriving — it could have happened at any juncture, really — while most of the important people are away. Yesterday morning he arrived here promptly at 8, as is his custom, and for the next six plus hours, did literally nothing else but plow through his emails. It was after 2pm before he came up for air, from reading, replying, and dealing with whatever projects these messages presented. And this still left his standard last minute daily task of entering the new items sent to him and accumulated throughout.

It’s as he’s glancing at the time on the bottom right of his computer screen, unable to comprehend how the better part of the day has already evaporated, when the thought first hits him at how unnecessary and even borderline stupid this is. Why is he commuting an hour each way, every day, to spend this much time responding to emails? You could seriously do this from just about anywhere. While admittedly this particular day is a bit extreme, the most extreme that he can recall, it’s by no means uncommon to spend a good half of his day in this fashion. Really, if you consider that, in conjunction with the factor of how many ridiculous interruptions there are around this place, a series of constantly arriving nonsense, it’s not a stretch to suggest a person could get far more done by working from anywhere but at his actual workplace. You could for example pencil in a solid hour per week on average wasted in complaints about internet outages, which any number of people still can’t seem to comprehend has nothing to do with his job whatsoever. Gripes about sale prices “not working” any longer eat up possibly even more time, though these have a thus far 100% perfect unbroken streak of the end date having already passed, while the sign has continued to remain in place, as the culprit.

So that was yesterday’s flash of insight. Today’s is equally abrupt, and illuminating, if arriving from an altogether different category. It’s just past 3 in the afternoon and Valerie breezes into his office, grinning, with a pair of tall cardboard cups in hand, black plastic lids atop them and with the words Southside Coffee stamped on the side. Okay, he’s been meaning to check that place out, a local cafe that recently opened just up the road, so this is pretty sweet.

Except she wordlessly hands one cup to him, while sipping at hers, smiling still atop the tilted lid. And he raises his, is thrown for a loop to discover that what he anticipated as a piping hot beverage is…not only cold…but also, hmm, yes, quite a bit on the hoppy side, no doubt about it. The question of where she might have snagged these cups will wait for another day, however, along with what went in them, and anything else he might be wondering about. As Valerie raises an index finger, placing it against her closed, smiling lips, and exits the room.