Nothing a few gallons of nail polish remover won’t erase

Inventory shenanigans are not limited to towers of honey charged to the next period, however. It’s a not exactly well disguised secret that Harry often has select members of a store’s grocery team engaged on what back dock space remains, using nail polish remover to scrub off the dates on expired product, before returning these items to the shelves.

Edgar’s still not entirely sure what to think about Harry. On one hand, he’s a hard worker, but on the other, he’s got a lot of goofy, outdated ideas. But then you’ll hear something like this nail polish remover operation, and think, okay, this an admittedly crafty concept — definitely old school — which he has never heard of before. While Edgar is not looking forward at all to that day, hopefully decades down the road, when he is the old, technologically backward veteran, it’s still an occasional source of wonder, the different angle that someone like Harry can bring to the table.

And he’s got a ton of industry connections, too. Which is how they know every wrinkle of the potential impending doom, as Cost Merchant plots its own Palmyra location just up the road. Everyone realized that this was only a matter of time, as they have just cracked $100K and continue trending upward, yet have been the only game in this tiny town for years. Harry has his ear to the ground with what’s going on in that company — having worked for them himself, immediately prior to coming here — and says that, although still a couple of months away from opening, they’ve already budgeted themselves with the expectation that they are going to steal half of Palmyra’s business.

Mr. Locke and Rob Drake and the other bosses are justifiably freaking out a little bit about this forecast. To get a jump on things, hopefully drum up and retain business, they’ve decided to start running huge Customer Appreciation promotions in Palmyra, one Saturday a month. For the first of these, though it takes considerable convincing on his part, Harry has concocted a scheme that they will send out flyers stuck in the local newspaper, and stacked near the registers…but with no pricing information whatsoever, only a mention of which particular products are on sale that day. He says he’s done this a bunch in the past, and it worked like gangbusters. Although nobody else has ever encountered this tactic, they agree it’s an intriguing one, and decide to give it a shot.

This is only just barely manageable in the Orchestra software. One of its quirks is that the main database deploys to the other three stores overnight, every night, and there’s nothing that can be done to override this. Teri long ago established this, when they first installed the software, since confirmed on a couple other occasions. This is readily done because the program’s inventor, Jacques Berrere, based out of Montreal, is the guy who invented Orchestra. How Duane ever found this fellow in the first place is unknown. It’s a somewhat obscure platform, apparently intended for smaller operations, though working well enough for them up to this point — even though it’s so rarely used that some random vitamin store in Charleston, SC once cold-called Edgar, because they had somehow heard he knew quite a bit about it, and he was able to coach them through some things over the phone. But any time they need tech support here at the HSM, they contact Jacques directly, and this subject has already come up on multiple occasions just during Edgar’s tenure. They’ve even poked around on their own, to some extent, when not necessarily convinced Jacques was 100% correct with this assessment, but have thus far found no way to override that feature.

But if the stores sync to the main server every night, that still leaves one full day of wiggle room. In other words, they can enter sales to begin first thing in the morning at a specific store, and have a full day to run it there, so long as nobody manually syncs during that day. If for example adding new items — those are occasions where he manually syncs, to send them down to the stores. Yet Edgar just happens to be off on Saturdays, which is another reason it’s a great time to run these one day specials.

The day of the event arrives, and as Harry predicted, this is indeed a runaway success. The curiosity effect of not pinpointing precisely how hot these specials are, it pulls in wave after wave of bargain hunting business. Of course, once these shoppers arrive, you must back this up to some extent, or face a riot, and if the jury is somewhat still out on whether customers are blown away by these deals or not, and if it will lead to a sustained uptick or at least a steadily holding business level, there’s no denying traffic is strong on Saturday. More than one soul is found shaking his or head in wondrous admiration, Edgar included, at this left field solution Harry has pulled from his toolbelt.

So you can’t just write off the old-timers, necessarily, even ones who seriously struggle with technology. This isn’t to suggest that every idea the grocery merchandiser has is a winner, however. Even with Palmyra’s sale, they may have overstepped their zealousness in ordering reams of product to shore up inventory. Are therefore stuck in with a small mountain range of this brand new mayonnaise line, one whose expiration date swiftly arrives. Duane might have been responsible for the honey bombardment, but everything else was Harry’s call and as expected, he’s had various personnel on the back dock for days wiping out the dates on those mayo jars.

That they have a rat in the building, and that it rampages unchecked through Palmyra alone, is no longer up for debate. And if Edgar wasn’t already completely convinced that it’s not Harry, then this latest episode erases all doubt. One afternoon he’s standing in the office here, talking to Corey, when the phone rings. As Edgar is closest to it, he answers.

“Healthy Shopper Market Palmyra. This is Edgar. How can I help you?”

“Hi there! This is Scott Wickander, from Inside Scoop! I’ve received some reports that your store is allegedly removing the expiration dates from products. What can you tell me about this?”

“Uh…I think I’ll let you talk to the store manager. Hang on a second,” Edgar says, and hands the phone to Corey.