curious trouble pointing a laser at a barcode in this region
“Hey, thanks for Fitzgerald!” Will cackles from afar, the next time Edgar is in Central. “You shouldn’t have dropped him the first week of the season!”
“Did I really?” Edgar says, with a rueful grin, as he closes the gap between them, “I don’t even remember that.”
“Yep, and I’m glad you did.”
He will take all the advice he can get, during this maiden voyage, and likely well beyond. Following this latest Monday night debacle, Edgar has fallen to 0–4 on the season. His only ray of sunshine is to look at the points and realize that if he were in the much weaker Western Division instead with that total, he would sit comfortably in second place. Everyone seems to agree that a couple of his losses were bizarre, fluky ones, and he should probably at least have an even record.
This is little consolation, however, and time is swiftly evaporating on the season. He will probably have to win out in this division to even have a shot. While there is some luck involved, there’s definitely a large degree of skill, too, and a couple of these guys seemed to have cracked the code. Except that flying in the face of this is the notion that there can’t possibly be one definitive strategy, because everyone keeps offering radically different advice on what he should do. These suggestions are often hilarious, occasionally even hinting at a larger, overarching worldview — but he files the tips away and sometimes deploys them, because, who knows, these cats might be onto something.
“Pick up whoever’s playing Chicago, every week. I’m serious. It doesn’t even matter who they are,” is Will’s latest golden nugget. And as he stands atop their Eastern conference at 4–0, he presumably knows his stuff. A somewhat younger black dude who looks to be in game-ready shape himself, he also wears a no-nonsense expression while dispensing this take and appears serious enough to suit up right now. Edgar’s actually rooting for Will to win every week, aside from their head-to-head matches, because it would increase his own chances of squeaking into the playoffs.
Five or ten minutes later, Edgar’s back over at HQ. In passing Brian’s office, the occupant can’t resist offering his condolences and deliver the equivalent of a head coach pep talk. Edgar pauses to drift inside the doorway and compare notes. He was projected for 105 points but wound up with just 53, losing to a mediocre Craig squad that was missing one of its starters, because he’d forgotten to fill it. Meanwhile this random running back that nobody ever heard of, Freeman, puts up 32 points for him.
“Is there any way Craig was that much on top of things, scouting out Freeman?” Edgar marvels, halfway steamed all over again as he reconsiders this week.
“No, he just got lucky,” a dismissive Brian scoffs.
Still, Brian is himself very lucky to be 3–1, even though he’s so obsessed he got up at 4:30am this past Wednesday morning to begin making moves, a half hour earlier than usual. But then the thing is, Edgar went into the Monday night game two weeks ago down just 87–86 to Brian, with his number one pick, Lacy, only needing to post a scant two points, as Brian had nobody playing in that game. Except Lacy went down with an injury in the first quarter and contributed a nice fat zero. Nonetheless, Brian is considered the in-house guru on this mesmerizing pastime, and Edgar can’t resist picking his brain for additional insights — or maybe it’s just pure unfiltered venting.
“I’m dropping Hyde,” he seethes, “Actually, I watched that game and Kaepernick’s got a bunch of guys wide open all the time, but insists on running the ball himself. What a joke.”
“Yeah…,” Brian concurs, nodding, advises, “I wouldn’t have anybody from that team…or Washington.”
One potential strategy Edgar recently stumbled onto on his own, though, which nobody else has mentioned, concerns a week where you’re already ahead of the guy you’re playing. Assuming this ever happens, that is. But in that scenario, it would seem to make sense to load up on correlated players from the same team that your opponent is holding, as a form of insulation. If you’re playing a guy whose running back goes berserk out of nowhere, then holding that quarterback would hook you up in similar fashion. If your QB posts a stinkbomb, meanwhile, then his wide receiver most likely will as well.
He is forced to wait until his next Palmyra visit to get a full recap from their fourth division rival, Michael. Edgar was already aware that this dude might be the most unlucky of all, in third place at 1–3 despite having accumulated more points than Brian. The problem is that he keeps having these monster weeks at the same time his opponent also happened to post a fluky even higher total out of nowhere, despite never doing so before or since. The first chance that they have to compare notes, Edgar’s working on something in the bread section and Michael approaches, smirking and shaking his head. Funny but Edgar already has a pretty good idea what he’s going to say.
“Craig is killing it with that Freeman!” Michael bellyaches.
“Is there any way he was that on top of things, or did he just get lucky?” Edgar asks, reiterating his question to Brian, and pretty much everyone else.
“Please. His first two picks were Cam Newton and Steve Smith. Come on,” Michael says.
In the other division, Craig is bashing their heads in with this lone success story. Sharon solidly holds her own in second place despite basically being in the exact same position as Edgar — has never done this before, but is having fun with the geekier aspects of it — and has accumulated a very similar points total. Jack on the other hand reveals he is actually playing multiple leagues, and does so every year, but is possibly spread too thin as a result and isn’t paying enough attention to any of them. As for Valerie, well, it’s puzzling why she ever bothered to plonk down $20 in the first place, apart from the bonding aspect. She lets her roster ride as is from week to week and also finds herself winless.
Apart from its uses in that rapport building capacity, though, a fun pursuit to share with one’s coworkers, Edgar notices another interesting aspect about the eight of them who have signed up for this fantasy football league. For months now, as some have whispered among themselves, it seems obvious that Healthy Shopper Market has separated and squared off as a battle between two distant camps. There is a large body in the middle who are more passive, sure, whom you might just term civilians or something, just doing their work and gliding along and not getting much involved either way. But as far as the combatants, you have the complainers at the one extreme; at the other, you have those who get it. Not everyone who gets it signed up for the fantasy football league, but all eight of them are on that team. There must exist a salient correlation here of some sort.
Within the Central office, the ratio is shaping up as a very favorable 6:2…and even then, the pair of holdouts which are generally considered not to get it (Vince, Barbara) are found in the civilian squad, they are if nothing else certainly not complainers. Really about the only hostile element found within this building would be the freaking foot massage lady. Dale, for example, who waved off entreaties to join the fantasy league by claiming, “I don’t have time for that junk,” without a doubt most definitely gets it and not only that, is probably the most vocal person railing against those who don’t. His latest tirade, as he pops into Edgar’s office, concerns the vitamins/HBA staff who continue to balk at using the Slingshot guns for ordering.
“I had Sondra show me how to place an order, because I’m like, okay, let me see once and for all how fucking hard this really is,” Dale says.
“Oh yeah? You’d never done it before?” Edgar replies.
“Well, you know, I’ve gone through and added stuff to orders they already had going, but not, like, start to finish. But yeah, so anyway, I had her show me, and I swear that was literally about the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m talking opening, scanning, and sending the thing, it was a…pretty good sized order, and it took maybe fifteen minutes, tops.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t get it.”
It’s probably not a coincidence that Sondra is also the person with which Edgar battles the most. Her constant gripe to him concerns the allegedly high percentage of orders that are “failing” when placed via Slingshot. Even though, as he is constantly telling her, a good 99% of the time that he investigates these mysteries, it turns out that order is still open. Nobody had ever closed and sent it.
“I don’t know who’s worse,” Dale quips, “it’s between her and…that whole crew over there at Arcadia…”
Edgar laughs and tells him, “I wasn’t gonna say anything, but now that you’ve mentioned it…”
“What?”
“…last time I was over there, Marian stopped me when I was walking past to complain about something, I forget what. But anyway, I happen to look at what she’s holding and it’s an order sheet for Green Basket.”
“An order board?”
“Oh, okay, is that what you call it? Yeah, well, she was going through with this order sheet, order board, whatever, on a clipboard, filling it out with a pencil. I started to say something but then just thought, you know what, I don’t feel like getting into it today.”
“You know how many times I’ve told them to stop doing that? But then they wanna turn around and, their whole thing over there is complaining that they don’t have enough time. I’m like, Ralph, if you compare sales versus labor hours, you actually have the most help out of anybody.”
“It would be one thing if walking around with a pencil and paper were faster, but it’s not. There’s no way,” Edgar says, “so that would be more of a reason to use the scanner, if you were short on time. And that’s without even getting into the whole Auto Ordering thing, which they should be doing by now anyway.”
“I don’t know, but…I can’t anymore, with these people,” Dale mutters, shaking his head as he walks away.
another of these highly divisive war zones
At least Edgar only sees Ralph about once per month, and maybe not even then. When visiting Arcadia, assuming he hasn’t hit the jackpot and picked a day that the vitamins manager happens to be off, he basically just attempts staying out of sight while weaving his way through the aisles, while performing a scan audit or adding things to their scale in the hallway or bringing new labels for the bulk bins and jars. While Ralph is constantly calling and leaving longwinded messages on Edgar’s voicemail (he apparently hasn’t figured out that Edgar can readily see ARCADIA VITAMINS flashing on his caller ID, and isn’t about to answer that puppy, ever) to which, during the 99.99% of the occasions where this transmission isn’t exactly a five alarm fire of a crisis, Edgar responds via email anyway, Ralph is thankfully not the type to physically track someone down within his own store. Assuming he can just remain out of sight, there’s little chance of a ghastly encounter with the old chap.
Unfortunately, Edgar can’t quite dodge the Central complainers in a similar manner. He’s over there more often, there are far more customers — which increases the likelihood of a sneak attack — and most aisles are of the conventional long, tall, perpendicular variety, with no escape hatch if you do see someone coming. Plus, they could just march across the parking lot to his office anyway. But, while over here the landslide majority of the complaints stem from just a pair of individuals — Sondra and Laurie — if he’s being truthful, he kind of likes arguing with them anyway. Sure, he has that write-up in his file from years ago, stating that he cannot accost anybody, and he does not. They are always the ones bringing the bitching to his doorstep, so to speak. Yet when they do, he does get a kick out of shooting down this nonsense.
Sondra’s grousing is a lot more one dimensional and predictable, about the “failing” orders (read: never closed, never sent) and little else. If she ever asked for a department-wide tutorial on how to use a paper cutter, then yeah, sure, he’d be game for that, but he’s not about to broach this topic or any others himself. With Laurie, though, it’s more of an all consuming hatred for anything technology related, most of Edgar’s methods, and the retail business in general. Therefore he’s got to be that much more on this toes, ready with the concise yet detailed explanations of why things are done this way. In this respect, he supposes you could view these constant Shanghai attacks as terrific exercises, for defending what you’re doing under the gun.
The Auto Ordering thing he has just about given up on mentioning to anyone. None of the store managers are enforcing it, and without that support, that concept is just never going to take off. He remains astounded that nobody ever ran with it, in all their stores combined, and is sure that Rob still holds him accountable for failing to make this happen, but he’s not sure how he was supposed to get the troops in line, exactly, with zero authority and meanwhile a direct order in his file to never confront anyone ever again. The only exception to this, though, is when someone starts bellyaching about their lack of time, in which case he is just about duty bound to mention it.
Laurie’s latest beef comes flying at him in shades highly reminiscent of his past battles with Zaire. This time around he’s on the back dock at Central, having just discussed something with Sarah, when the grocery manager sails around the corner at him. She launches into a tirade, railing against the fact that this one line of health products for pets has Apex listed on the shelf tags, as their primary supplier, instead of Universal Foods. The reason Edgar has them earmarked as such, of course, is because they are a buck or two cheaper, across the board, than Universal is — no small consideration for this expensive but low margin category.
“I don’t even use Apex!”
“Well, be that as it may, I mean…they are the cheapest supplier. So…”
“Why can’t you just switch these over to say Universal!?”
“The other stores are ordering them from Apex,” he shrugs, “anyway, I’m just doing what I’m supposed to be doing. The cheapest supplier goes on the shelf tag.”
“Yeah but then my people skip over them entirely when they’re ordering, because they’re making a Universal order and these don’t say Universal.”
“Well that’s…there’s nothing I can do about that. I know Universal’s on the guns as a secondary supplier, so they can still order from there if they really want to. It’s just something they’ll have to remember.”
“This is sooooo stupid…,” Laurie seethes, shaking her head.
“What’s the big deal with ordering from Apex anyway? They’re a totally normal supplier. We’ve been using them for years. If you don’t want to make out your own order, you can even just add your stuff to vitamins’. That’s what Arcadia does most of the time. Cuts down on the shipping costs that way, too, really…”
“I’ve never dealt with Apex. I have no plans on dealing with Apex. I don’t have time to be memorizing a hundred different companies that I’m supposed to be ordering from!”
“Well, you know…if you had your Auto Ordering set up, they would just order themselves. Rob expects everyone to be using Auto Ordering at this point anyway.”
“Rob doesn’t have to use Slingshot,” she scoffs.
“No, but I’m sure he’s done something similar,” Edgar replies. This point is actually debatable, but she has no way of knowing that. “I mean, this isn’t, like, cutting edge technology. I was making out CAO orders almost twenty years ago.”
“Just forget it,” she says, and stomps off.
There are so many different angles crammed into even a relatively small argument such as this that it would take hours, if not days, to unpack them all. Getting down to just the specifics of his last point, though, yeah, Kroger busted out CAO on them in the late 1990s. You had your hardliners complaining even then, of course, but compliance was not optional. They certainly wouldn’t have entertained a year’s worth of arguments about doing such. Not only that, but as Dale alluded to, this Slingshot setup is in fact far easier than what they were doing back then. Back in that ancient, distant decade, it was a somewhat convoluted process which required going to a central computer to jump through various hoops before sending. Here, the scan gun touchscreens show nothing but a handful of large grey oval buttons that are plainly marked. You can review and adjust, add items and send directly from those. Or even go back to the receivers’ computer if you prefer the larger screen, and do the same there.
Even so, expanding outward and examining the situation from there is probably of far greater importance. For one thing, he’s not sure how so many people can complain endlessly about something they haven’t even attempted. That alone defies common sense. On occasion he even daydreams himself about what it would be like to step down from this position, take some random department manager post, and show everyone how it’s done. The only problem with that concept is that, knowing this place, they wouldn’t use his example as a tool for enforcing CAO elsewhere — they would instead most likely say, sweet, since you’re saving so much time, can you just place orders for everyone, then? This way we don’t even have to learn it! Which, awesome and hilarious as even that might be, a fun challenge…the only problem is that then, the types of complaints he would be getting would have shifted, you wouldn’t have eliminated them. Instead he’d have the Ralph Hedges types coming up to him with every delivery, moaning and groaning about one extra bottle of shampoo they didn’t really need, out of the 3000 or so items received.
A still larger point concerns the very nature of complaining, as a phenomenon unto itself. Someone picking apart Laurie’s most recent argument would find almost or exactly zero specifics to even justify her stance. Just the usual garden variety vagueness, typically employing the phrase that something “is bullshit” or that it “sucks,” which are then defended by the likes of a Destiny Davis as a perfectly valid explanation. But forgetting for a moment that if you’re just vaguely lashing out in this manner, without specifics, then you’re not focusing on a solution, there’s a still greater problem for anyone supporting them. You’re just enabling the complainers by doing so. When someone like Destiny rationalizes, “I don’t know, Laurie just says it sucks. So…yeah….,” and supports her, or else you’ve even got someone like a Corey flying at you with, “well, Trudy says it sucks so you better look into it!” this is establishing a horrific precedent. Because you’re not really placating the complainers — they will just move onto something else. Furthermore, you’ve already demonstrated they will get results, in their favor, by continuing to do so.
These points dominate his thoughts while he’s back at the office, behind his desk. This is also another of these industry-wide issues that’s difficult to tackle, because there are so many layers of insulation walling it in. Without a full chain of support up the ladder, about the best someone could possibly hope for would be to go directly to a Rob Drake figure and start ratting people out. Except this always just feels wrong, and anyway he’s not the type. Really, like so many others, he consoles himself with the thought that some of these people are going to hit a ceiling someday, and maybe they already have. It’s like the other day, not so long ago, when Laurie was again complaining about her lack of available hours (countered again by him with the suggestion that just maybe she think about trying a CAO order instead) and she’s bitching that the problem is their pets category is selling too well, and they need to raise the margin, because she can’t keep up. Though arguing with her that this was a good thing, selling products, that getting to a place where they’re twiddling their thumbs was really not the reason HSM opened its doors in the morning and that anyway Rob decides the margins, not Edgar, what he was mostly thinking was…you have probably received your last ever promotion with this company. I would be shocked if you climbed any higher than this.
Not that he has any say in this, either. For all he knows Rob might appoint Destiny as the next company president tomorrow, and Laurie her right-hand woman. But he seriously doubts this. To employ another sports analogy, it’s reminiscent of the skilled athlete who really doesn’t care about winning or losing — technically, it doesn’t matter, if they’re putting up the same numbers either way, except in the end it always does wind up mattering, somewhere along the line. At present, your Ralph and your Laurie and your Trudy, they are performing well enough as department managers that they’ll surely keep their jobs as long as they want them. Despite the poor, anti-progress attitudes, the failure to realize they’re just killing themselves with these unnecessary, antiquated methods. And even that is maybe so bad, but then they want to campaign against more modern ones on top of it. That’s great if you prefer to work by whale oil powered lantern, but don’t condemn those of us who kind of like electricity.
Thankfully he has plenty of those who also get it on his team. As always the stray conversations drift in, occasionally jarring him out of his work, occasionally only surfacing when he’s taking a breather and listening to them. Like grabbing another cup of coffee and hearing the reliable trio of Dale, Valerie, and their visiting IT guru Jack holding court over in the next room.
“…what kills me is the same ones complaining they can’t get anything done,” Dale muses, “are the same ones who insist upon calling everybody on the phone.”
Jack laughs, adds, “either that or they can’t remember shit.”
“Yeah,” Dale chuckles, “boy, I’ll tell ya what, my memory these days…wow. I can’t remember shit and I just don’t have any time! Heh? Send an email? What?”
“Just think back thirty years ago or whatever, though,” Valerie points out, “back then they would have been, like, the modern ones, on top of shit.”
“Oh god,” Dale groans.
“No but I’m serious, like, they would have been modern and edgy or whatever for wanting to call people on the phone. And their bosses would have thought that was bullshit, and insist upon driving around everywhere talking to everyone in person, all day long.”
“Half of ’em still do,” Jack jokes.
“Yeah, I was gonna say,” Dale laughs again and adds, “are we sure that’s changed? Like with Harry it was this big macho thing, he thought it was some kind of passive-aggressive horseshit or something, to send somebody an email. Well, heh heh, at least up until he sent The Email, anyway.”
“Well, I get it some of the time, if something’s really complicated or personal or whatever,” Jack adds, “or even with, like, certain industries. I mean, you probably can’t remodel someone’s house via email, or over the phone.”
“Not retail, though,” Dale says.
“No, definitely not retail.”
“Well and not the corporate world in general, really!” Valerie adds, “it doesn’t work. Sometimes I have to send the same message to thirty people. What, I’m going to call up each of them individually, and tell them all the exact same thing? What kind of sense does that make? Or can you imagine driving everywhere to tell them face to face? We’ve only got three stores and that would already be…huh huh. There’s no fucking way.”
Ah, God love ’em, Edgar thinks yet again, these are his people. That’s his first thought. The second is that Vince obviously must not be in the building right now. Beyond that, if Edgar were involved in this conversation, he would probably add one other point. If he were out there with them right now, he would mention that there’s another reason a certain personality type tries to avoid email: they hate being pinned down. Healthy Shopper Market has employed quite a few who fit this profile, in prominent roles, even, in that they despised email because then a person could go back and hold them to something they said days or weeks earlier. No Corey, if you look into our email history, this is what you told us the last time. See?
Still, he’s aware of this trending term silos, and all the handwringing about it, a grim specter haunting the modern business landscape. And maybe he ever so slightly alluded to it somewhat, with his speech about knowing what you don’t know, at that charming little interview weeks ago. Because one epidemic weakness occurs when you’ve got, say, four or five people working together, and they all agree on one point. There’s a tendency to think that just because you are all in agreement, that this must therefore mean that your opinion represents reality. It could be a cranky vitamins department all in perfect agreement that something sucks, or it could be an office staff concurring that the complainers themselves are what sucks. How do you know which viewpoint actually does represent reality?
Well, it occurs to him today, a little thought exercise probably goes a long way. While we can’t pull this off in the physical universe — at least not that anyone knows — it’s fun to daydream about mathematical models. Let’s say you could theoretically drop each side into a separate universe, identical except that the complainers are left to their own devices with one version of this company, those who get it are left alone with the other. Which of these fantasy teams would prove more successful? Yes, exactly. And that’s pretty much all you need to know.
