Healthy Shopper wine section AFTER two significant size reductions
Wholesale changes continue unabated at Palmyra. Then again, this is the nature of the beast pretty much everywhere, which leads Edgar to wondering where this phrase even came from. He gets that the word wholesale has another meaning, a synonym for sweeping, all-encompassing. But he also thinks there’s probably a good joke to be had somewhere in there, a slogan that those in this industry might relate to. Maybe something like Wholesale Changes: Welcome To Retail! Or maybe something more like a dry quip you might read, a quote from an industry analyst interviewed in the Wall Street Journal:
“Wholesale changes are only possible in retail,” says Cost Merchant exec Ed Markowitz.
But while there’s surely a cause-and-effect with some of this at Palmyra, it can only explain away so much. Any way you slice it, there’s a staggering amount of sideways motion and outright turnover here, all the more amazing in that none of them have even been featured recently as the monthly newsletter profiles. Having determined that the effort and outrageous philosophical battles aren’t worth her pay rate, Edgar’s mom steps down to become a cashier instead. And the ripples caused by this motion are easy enough to trace, even if half might be coincidence.
About a month later, in what is surely one of the more anticlimactic conclusions any of them have ever experienced, after apparently concluding he’s pissed off just about everyone he possibly can, Jimmy Ray simply stops showing up. That’s it. There might be more to the story, but even Duane concedes that the dude essentially disappeared, skipping town on not just this job but his rent and Duane’s daughter as well.
Pierre is demoted from assistant store manager to just the Palmyra wine guy — although quite naturally this move isn’t phrased as such. Once again careful to couch his conversation in as much industry jargon laced spin doctoring as possible, Duane explains to Pierre that this category is an extremely important one, yet seriously struggling — for crying out loud, they just shrunk its square footage down yet again! — and that he’s the only man who can possibly save it. Therefore they need him to focus all of his talents upon that category alone. Sprinkle in some words like challenge and opportunity and you’re all set, send him off on his merry tannin soaked way.
With this move they’re able to slide Brian Prentiss from the deli into an assistant manager role. He’s already proven himself in just a handful of months as reliable, capable, amenable, good with customers, and perhaps most importantly of all, not insane, therefore finds himself on the fast track with this establishment. One would expect them to be down a few bodies in the deli now, in light of three consecutive desertions, but here they unexpectedly hit the jackpot on back to back hires, to a possibly unprecedented degree.
These pleasantly unexpected surprises make some of the veterans think, hmm, okay, maybe this place is getting caught up in a rising tide after all. To fill the meat cutter role vacated by Jimmy Ray, they somehow manage to land Billy McEntire, a good ol’ boy with a ton of experience, something of a talker and a comedian, whom none of them have ever worked with before. He just strolled in off the streets, responding to one of their online ads.
As far as a replacement for Edgar’s mom in the role of head honcho, they also find another winner, albeit the source is just weird enough to give it the familiar old Healthy Shopper Market patina — it’s Josey Greenberg, aka Mrs. Arnie Greenberg, the wife of their recently fired produce/bulk merchandiser. And this isn’t a secret by any means, it’s well known in advance, in fact Duane Hatley has known her for eons as well. It’s a head scratcher on that front, but not as far as the actual work is concerned, for she was running some other deli before this, brings considerable business smarts to the table, and is laidback yet able to corral an often unruly team. Her hiring also means that the part time fuckup Steve is now working for his fifth deli manager.
While Edgar trudges his way along Palmyra’s grocery department, hanging his massive tag batch by location, he receives an earful on this and many other developments. Mostly from Pierre, who finds occasion to drift past about twice per hour, with his latest machine gun round of gossip. Give the guy credit, though (or not so much, maybe, as this doesn’t actually fool anybody, not long term), Pierre does always at least lend the appearance of being in a tremendous hurry, as though speed walking through en route to somewhere else, and only stopping for a moment because he encountered you. In his maroon argyle sweater vest atop the immaculate white long sleeved dress shirt, tucked into his tight, brand new looking jeans, the black leather belt matching his shiny, black leather boots, in other words his standard uniform. That it only just occurred to him to halt in his tracks and relate the latest burst of rumors, or random, stream of consciousness bitching.
His latest series of beefs concern this briefly introduced, swiftly abandoned concept of paid employee lunches. This was something Rob Drake came up with, this notion of loading each employee’s number with a $5 credit per day, that they could spend in the store. Easy enough for Edgar to accomplish on the back end, too, and seemingly working like a charm. Except that at roughly the three week mark, Rob asked to see a sales report.
One problem with this idea was that, while you could block entire departments from working with this discount — like alcohol or health & beauty or housewares — you couldn’t really restrict an item beyond this, on grounds that it wasn’t “lunchy” enough or whatever. Thus nothing was to prevent someone from grabbing a sweet looking ribeye steak for dinner and enjoying a $5 discount on their way out the door. Or loading up on candy, or smoothies, or drinking the good premium java all day instead of the acidic junk from their breakroom coffee pots. Why this would really matter is open for conjecture, perhaps, because a $5 discount is a $5 discount. But what ultimately dooms it is that Rob’s eyes pop out of his head to see how much this has already cost him, and he decides to pull the plug.
“I mean, what did he expect?” Pierre grouses, holding out both arms, palms up for emphasis. “How hard is it to multiply every employee by five dollars per day? That is what it will cost you. If you give your employees five free dollars, they will pretty much always take it. What was he thinking?”
“Eh, well, I guess it was good while it lasted,” Edgar says with a laugh.
These responses are possibly emblematic stand-ins for their worldviews in general. Then again, one might argue that everything is a metaphor for something else. Most responses seem to fall somewhere in between, or really, standing very near to Edgar’s — it was a great run while it lasted — while leaning ever so slightly toward Pierre’s. Meaning that this is often held up as evidence, and will continue to be for years, of how “cheap” this company is, that they yanked the $5 lunch credit after three weeks, that this is a bad look and Rob would have been better off never introducing it in the first place.
But these are minor blips, because it’s already early fall, somehow, and they’ve collectively come out of the summer swinging. Edgar personally feels like he’s been on a roll, too, here lately. It started with this location code business which, once again as a roundabout, accidental boon — not that you should go around patting her on the back for this — Trudy’s refusal to tag team on this project via walkie-talkie led to another breakthrough. He had started out up here scanning one four foot section, retrieving the tags, scanning another, repeat, but this soon grew tiresome, particularly as the manager’s office is locked, he doesn’t have keys, and continually must track down someone to gain access up there.
At some point the thought occurs to him that it would be really cool if he could scan these batches and store them on his laptop instead somehow, then print them off at leisure. And these crazy off-brand tag scanners have no charger port that he’s ever seen before, and they certainly don’t have any USB compatible converters on hand, so that rules these puppies out. However, back down at Southside, he’s had from day one that desktop model, which he uses to scan items at his desk, with Orchestra pulled up, to see if something’s in the system or not. But if that thing can scan barcodes and convert them to numbers, can it not just drop those numbers in anywhere?
After this thought first crosses his mind, in retrospect it all seems completely obvious. But even Teri had never thought to do so, and she’s the only one who’s come anywhere near some of these crazy projects he has subsequently tackled. It’s yet another example that no matter how you might be crushing something, there are always better methods floating around out there. Even if you’ve maxed out on the possible improvements in one tiny area, itself not all that likely, approaching something from a fresh angle might still open up mind-blowing possibilities.
So testing this out at his desk is the big eureka moment. He pulls up an Excel sheet, scans the nearest random UPC, and watches as it drops that barcode into the first cell. Hell yes. Now he’s off to the races, and it’s this method he will use to fly through a few aisles at Palmyra the next time he’s up there, alone, to generate these 2600 tags. Best of all, you don’t even need to rely on the perpetually spotty internet connection, just zip along with this gadget and an Excel sheet open on a laptop. When reaching the end of a four foot section, type in the location in the second column, double click to drag it down, start on the next. He just prints these off the first chance he has, and returns to hang them days later.
Edgar suffers weird looks and double takes from a good half dozen coworkers, asking what this crazy new gadget might be. To which he laughs and replies these are actually a couple of his oldest gadgets. It’s just that he never thought to use them in this particular combination before.
It’s nothing stranger than some of the other concepts floating around, anyway. Besides, as they’ve already discovered on more than one occasion, just because something looks odd doesn’t mean it’s not a great idea. Inspired to some degree by that broad stroke of moving all the packaged deli stuff over to meat, Dale decides to run with something similar in his departments.
For years now all the vitamin/health & beauty invoices have been broken out by hand, his employees using nothing more elaborate than their eyes and a calculator. Some vendors will separate these two sub-departments, but most do not, and it’s typically the larger suppliers who fall into this latter category. They have their own invoicing from Universal Foods, for example, but it’s all just a jumbled up mess as far as placement within the invoice. Typically the department manager will go through with a highlighter and mark all the HBA items, yet the math is often understandably askew anyway — the discounts applied to a Universal invoice are also not the easiest thing to decipher — and Edgar will typically stumble upon a couple dozen corrections needed per week, adjusting what amounts were applied to which sub-department.
The whole theory behind this is that vitamins are supposed to pull a 50% margin and HBA a 40. But Dale has effectively said, screw this, as far as this coding madness is concerned. Especially with a fifth store on the horizon, one that figures to be at least their third busiest, right out of the gate, now’s a terrific time to make this change. As far as adding new items, nothing has changed, Edgar can continue plugging these things into the 10001 sub-department for vitamins and 10002 for HBA. Which is a necessary split at the registers for tax reasons anyway. But Dale at least talks Duane and Rob into signing off on a 45% margin for vitamins alone, coding every invoice to same, and effectively wiping the HBA numbers off the map.
So the associated employees are rejoicing in the streets over this one, from the vitamin new hires clear up to Kathy Ames in Accounts Receivable. But other concepts are going to take a bit more selling. At the top of the list might be Duane’s decision to hand the reigns for opening this fifth store over to Harry Redcrow.
