organically merchandised frozen section
Of course, when an opportunity presents itself, he wishes to follow up on this notion of “delegating” certain tasks to Sharon, too. Especially considering this was apparently the main factor in his middling review, not to mention that she was, if Fred is to be believed, complaining about this to them anyway. So yes, it’s time to find the right avenues for passing on a little of this knowledge to her. And the first one that pops up, the aha! moment he immediately latches upon, is when Marla sends the next of her constant, miserable requests for yet another movement report.
Todd’s wife doesn’t even work here, obviously, is still just a newbie rep for Universal Foods. So it makes sense that she wouldn’t have any access to their various systems. But she certainly acts like the second in command, and the employees are expected to skip to her beat anyway. So for all intents, yes, she pretty much works here.
None of which might be a problem if she were a tad more agreeable. Because as many have noted, Marla continues to display this thoroughly perplexing personality split, shifting from one mode to another on a dime. She’ll go from seemingly on the brink of tears and a serious mental breakdown telling you about how nobody is helping her at her new job, she doesn’t understand what is expected of her and has no clue what she’s doing…to completely flipping out on you, nonetheless, if despite having “no clue” what she’s doing, you don’t execute things her way anyhow. And then groveling to either Todd or Don or both about such.
She’s also not the least bit appreciative when you do make concessions on her behalf, or teach her how to do something. And the biggest source of their difficulties thus far has easily been these damn movement reports. Quite naturally she has earmarked Edgar and Edgar alone as the person responsible for running these reports for her. However, in this particular instance, it makes sense in that even if she were to ask somebody else, they would surely deflect this to him anyway. For they would be unable to pull off what she wants, in most instances. This is because even Edgar can’t seem to appease her, at least half of the time.
Edgar would really like to tell her that The Top Of My Head Item Combination Report doesn’t exist — but even he is not quite crazy enough to voice this. That doesn’t change the truth behind this sentiment any, however. Because she keeps coming up with a wild assortment of products, verbally or by email, with nothing resembling any actual list, but expecting him to generate some kind of instant report featuring them all. And then becoming extremely unpleasant when he is unable to do so in a finger clicking flash.
The most obvious solution is to just run a report for everything, then chop it down to what she actually wants. Or him to forward her a more comprehensive report, and have her comb through it for the needed info. Except this isn’t want she wants, either, also becomes extremely unpleasant at these suggestions. What she requires, indeed, because there’s no better label for it, is for a Top Of My Head Item Combination Report to already exist, as is, capable of instantly morphing its components depending on her whims.
A great example of this is her frequent demands to see ice cream movement at Arcadia. She seems to spend much of her time at Arcadia, although the only theory Edgar can come up with regarding this is that she must be good friends with Don’s wife. It is after all by far their slowest store. At any rate, beneath this category of Peculiar Preferences, filtered for Arcadia, there is this sub-category of Odd Obsessions, and a drop down list for Ice Cream, which Marla is constantly wondering about.
The problem is, as he explains it to her, there is no “ice cream” department. Nor is there an “ice cream” sub-department. For that matter, there is no “desserts” sub-department, even, into which you might expect ice cream to be slotted if so, as but one kind of dessert in the frozen department. However, there is a category called Desserts, in the frozen department, which is probably about the best he can do for her.
These are like some of the old discussions he would have with Harry Redcrow, except Harry was just confused. That’s a far cry from someone as thoroughly unpleasant as she, without fail acting as though either he’s too stupid to comprehend her request, or else, far more often, as though he’s playing hardball on purpose because he doesn’t feel like cooperating with her.
This notion of a Category was something that Todd asked Edgar to come up with, over a year ago, in the early days when their new president was still bringing some actual fresh and legitimate ideas to the table. A Category would be used for something like, say, potato chips in the grocery department. There’s no reason why you would really want a sub-department called Potato Chips — typically, you would only establish such if tax or EBT reasons or some other compelling factor forces them to break a class of products out like that. The same applies to something like desserts in the frozen section. They aren’t going to create a completely separate sub-department called Frozen Desserts or whatever. Instead, this is where going another level lower with this Category concept comes into play.
The Category is an informal, loose, user defined field that he was able to add to Slingshot, at Todd’s request, and transfer over to RU Data. Of course, as there is no Category column in the new items file — and he’s not about to blow everyone’s mind by adding one at this point, and requiring them to fill this in as well — this means he is either manually changing this in both places for now, or else uploading a file if there are a lot of these all at once. Not everything has a Category number, because there are no tax or EBT or margin implications, it’s really just useful for report running. When setting this up, he went with the two digit category numbers that Universal Foods had for everything, which knocked out a good half of their database, and has chipped away at the rest ever since.
So there is a Dessert category in Frozen, yes. Just not one called specifically Ice Cream. However, Marla does not want a report featuring all of the frozen desserts. It would displease her greatly if she had to look through such a thing, in search of ice cream. She doesn’t seem to grasp why he can’t just twitch his nose and automatically make this happen, the comprehensive, ice cream only report, even when he spells out the various factors in play here:
a) you could filter for a word like “ice cream,” sure, but only if it is always spelled out in the item description. And this is something he can pay attention to, now that he knows she is really into the ice cream numbers. But the problem is that, just speaking of Universal Foods alone, again just like with the gluten free stuff, they are known to abbreviate this as I/C, IC, I C, I Cream, I Crm, Ice C, Ice Crm, Ice Cm, Ic Crm, or Ic Cm, just off the top of his head. Now, once she becomes considerably irate over this topic, he does a find and replace in the system for every known abbreviation. However, even this will only take them so far, because
b) Universal Foods doesn’t even always mention this in the item description, nor do the other vendors. Or even if they do, there are plenty of employees who still insist upon typing up the new items files by hand, instead of copying and pasting from the vendor file. Edgar frequently has no idea what these employees are sending him. As has always been the case, it’s still not at all uncommon to receive a new product line where the only information given in the item description field is “strawberry,” “chocolate,” and “vanilla,” say, on three brand new products. And whichever way he responds to this, he’s got about half the people pissed off, of the opinion that he’s just being difficult or not doing his job correctly — whether he fires it back, asking for more information, or instead adds it to the system, with incomplete information. Yet, he’s of the mind that, if there’s enough information there to sell the thing, then he’s adding it. They can piece in the rest later. Especially because, knowing this place, it’s already been out on the shelf for who knows how long.
c) Well what about searching by brand names? Here again though you would be running multiple reports. For starters, their stores are not going to have those iconic ice cream brands found in a traditional grocery chain. While there are a few brands that specialize only in ice cream, there are just as many or more that are more of an across the board organic or natural product type company. So even if you ran separate reports for the two or three ice cream only vendors, you would still have to run the full blown Desserts report anyway, to cover the rest. You might as well just do the Desserts one to start with.
He briefly debates setting up some structure to drill down one level lower, to set up Sub-Categories for everything, before dismissing this as ridiculous. Considering that he is apparently the only person who knows how to filter down three levels, it makes no sense to set up a fourth. It would just create more unnecessary, finer point maintenance, in other words a ton more possibly pointless work, on the off chance that some belligerent Marla-type figure might ask for such a year or more down the road.
What ends up happening is, after a few run-ins with Marla on this increasingly absurd topic, he just bites the bullet and breaks Ice Cream out into its own category. He’ll take his lumps in the future, should somebody else complain that this is idiotic, wondering why a Desserts report would not include Ice Cream. Actually, the most likely scenario is Marla herself complaining about this, a few months from now, but whatever. Breaking this out has maybe made things ever so slightly easier — yet even this is debatable. It has put all of the current known items in their system under the same shiny, brand new banner, sure. But all of the problems with identifying these items in the future haven’t gone away. It’s just that instead of worrying about making sure the item description says “ice cream” somewhere, when he stumbles upon such, he’ll make sure they’re assigned category 27 instead of 23.
None of which really appeases her, it goes without saying. He has walked the frozen section at Arcadia himself, looking for something that might have been missed, and yet she continually insists that his reports are wildly incomplete.
“I know I’ve added more than this,” she keeps saying, yet again, during their latest face to face argument over this topic.
“Well, I don’t know, if you can find some specific items that need added to that category, let me know. These are all I could come up with. It’s probably never going to be 100% accurate anyway, because a lot of times, I have no idea what people are sending me. As far as new items, I mean. It’s not always clear what the item even is. They’re calling it Chocolate and saying it goes in the frozen section, and that’s all I have to go on.”
“Yeah, well, I know I’ve added more than this!”
“That could be,” he shrugs, “like I said, if you can find any specific items that are missing, let me know. The other thing is, too, keep in mind that this report isn’t even going to show items that haven’t sold.”
At this, she raises her eyebrows and pointedly insists, “no, I know for a fact they have sold!”
Ah, the infamous and oft employed “know for a fact” defense. It ranks right up there with “should be” pricing. It’s not anecdotal, because they know for a fact this is true. He’s tempted to point out one other thing, too, which is that Arcadia’s frozen section has, what, a whopping ten doors? This isn’t even one half of one side of a typical grocery store’s frozen section. This is more like the size of a meat department’s frozen section, broken off at the back of the store. So whatever she’s saying is purportedly missing, it couldn’t be a ton. Yeah, he’s tempted to add this, but decides he would rather just parachute out of this conversation instead.
No sooner have they maybe gotten this mostly ironed out, though, than she starts in on some similar crap with the pizzas, not just there but at all three stores. This isn’t to say that all of her requests are equally deranged, however. About half are totally normal ones, like this most recent inquiry, wishing to see dairy sales in Palmyra for the past three months. Receiving this therefore eventually becomes the most ideal intersection of various patterns, ideas, and momentum swings. Something about the confluence of a totally normal report request and the mention of the Palmyra store lends him a sudden flash of insight about the perfect way to handle this.
Management thinks he needs to “delegate” more? Ideally to Sharon, who, according to them, has been grousing about this very concept? Awesome. Running a goddamn movement report is about the lowest hanging fruit there is. It’s hanging so low, it’s actually not even in his tree, it’s resting upon the ground for anyone and everyone to scoop up. He expects that Sharon will have questions, and that the more ridiculous requests will still get forwarded his way, which is fine. Otherwise it’s a toss-up between this, and maybe having Sharon instead take over that monotonous slog of copying daily historical records to the shared drive. In which case, yes, dealing with Marla is definitely the less pleasant of these two tasks. As such, it only takes a moment for him to respond to her in perfectly sweet fashion, copying Sharon Tolliver on this email as well.
Marla: Hello again. Okay, moving forward, Sharon will be handling all of your movement report requests. So she should be able to get this for you fairly soon. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!
