The Hobart ScaleMonster program is Edgar's clunky if just barely passable portal into adding and editing items on the deli and produce scales, at Southside and Palmyra both. While Liberty does have one all-purpose scale in back that everyone uses, it has never been online, and this is considered no great loss. If anything is ever needed there, he jots down a quick note, and does so the next occasion where he's in the store. Liberty has one catchall PLU number labeled "miscellaneous item," which they can use in a pinch, crossing that out to write in the correct name, and this works just fine for the time being. Of course, it's entirely likely they will run afoul of the same weights and measures tyranny at some point, if for example packaging up bulk department snack mixes, but this prospect is a campfire compared to the forest blaze up in Palmyra right now.
The fact that they haven't been busted already - no store has - on this issue lends credence to the theory that the state has begun cracking down on a bunch of weird junk nobody ever enforced before. Which could be one reason nobody holds Edgar to blame for this ingredients list debacle. Then again, this technically isn't his job, as the deli merchandiser had always done so in the past. It's just something he recently offered to take on, relieving Christie of the burden, because otherwise, he can't do his actual job as well.
One central issue prompting this decision is the absolute mayhem of the PLU list. Primarily this is due to the ability anyone has to create a new number right at the scale itself, which most of the veteran deli personnel know how to do. But this has led to a self-perpetuating sprawl in that the more bloated their PLU list becomes, even if Edgar prints out freshly updated charts quite often, the less likely someone is to look up and/or find an item on there, which spurs them into making up a new entry on the fly. Therefore, it's not uncommon to have 4-5 entries for the exact same item.
He's been chipping away at cleaning up this mess, because it generates a whole host of other problems. Employees making up their own prices is one, for example. While he's attempted meeting them halfway, so to speak, and suggesting they use the "miscellaneous item" PLU instead, a la Liberty Avenue, this has met much greater resistance in these delis, for whatever reason. The veterans prefer to create a little moat of their own numbers that they know and can program with whatever, rather than constantly changing prices and names on the miscellaneous one.
Yet this also only contributes to conditions somewhere between irritation and befuddlement for the cashiers. As Edgar attempts explaining to the deli staff on numerous occasions, people can create a new number on the scale, and get it to spit out a label with a barcode on it, but this still won't ring up at the register. There's something called a "price embedded" or a "Type 2" UPC he must add to their computer system first, in order to get it to scan properly. And so while, say, Shelly gets this, most cashiers do not, and thus there's another barrage of missiles fired at Edgar on a regular basis over this dilemma, by said cashiers. Because this apple pie rang up yesterday, so why does it not today? It must have fallen out of the system, right? Not to mention that the price might be "wrong," or the item missing ingredients, or he must have deleted it, i.e. this is clearly some kind of oversight or mistake on his part, they believe.
Well, Edgar has been contemplating locking everyone out of those scales for a little while now - and this latest incident with the ingredients police erases any doubt. They can't have random people entering numbers on the fly any longer. That part is simple enough. Making a list of the fifty or sixty items, like BBQ sauce or mayonnaise, that need broken down, and then finding those in the store (an experience which will make him, if at no other moments but these, thankful that he works in a theoretically all natural/ organic grocery enterprise, and the ingredients lists are typically not quite biblical) is much more involved. And as always, anything to do with this ScaleMonster program itself proves a major adventure.
This program pretty much neatly straddles two eras: that of the first ever computer programs, and that of the Windows era. For example when exiting the program, there is the expected X field up at the top right, and there is also a (QUIT) option at the bottom, in blocky black text on a light grey field. Either of these will work, although one of them turns out to be a really bad idea.
Having grown up like most in this latter era, Edgar finds this out the hard way which is which when he, as a matter of habit, hits the X during his first ever occasion using the program. One can debate all day why this option would exist in the first place, yet the outcome of doing so doesn't leave much to the imagination. The program simply refuses to ever open again if doing so. It flashes onscreen briefly, then disappears. Edgar's breath catches in his throat to observe this phenomenon, although it's still the early days and Teri Barnette is on hand to chuckle and explain this is easily resolved. There's a series of DOS commands one must enter, which she happens to have on file, having discovered this herself the hard way.
ScaleMonster is so archaic that support manuals have thus far proven impossible to track down online, and nobody at the company’s home office seems to know anything about it, either. Through trial and error over the years, somehow Teri located this one guy, Andy, at a Hobart facility up in Ohio, who knows this program front to back. If anything ever goes haywire with it, he's the only person they ever even trifle with calling.
Still, though somewhat clunky, this outmoded eyesore is vaguely fun to use anyway, in the manner of a retro video game, fondly recalled from childhood. The vintage grey fields, the giant black letters and numbers in a font that can only be described as early computer. It is even advanced enough, however improbable this seems, that one can send information down from a central computer at the stores, via phone cables in the ceiling, running down posts in the deli and the produce departments to the scales themselves. Thus, he can connect remotely via VNC to the Palmyra office to enter his changes. The same is technically true at Southside, too, although for whatever reason, when this puppy was originally wired, they installed the program over in the merchandiser's office. In his lazier or more time-pressed moments, Edgar VNCs into there anyway, though it's only the next room over, although he has discovered that people hopping onto that computer over there tend to freak out, whether he locks the keyboard or not, leaves the screen on or blacks it out, and reboot the computer right when he's in the middle of something. Therefore, he's much more apt to simply walk over there.
As far as entering these long lists of broken down ingredients - long even though ostensibly using all-natural ranch dressing or whatever in their kitchen masterpieces - Edgar quickly determines that to type this out over and over again, for every recipe involved, is beyond dreadful. IF they can even determine every number involved, without scrolling manually from 1 through 9999 on both stores' scales, because again it's been a wild, wild west down there of the employees entering whatever. He has his lists of what the expected numbers should be, which is a good starting point, and can pull some sales data to inspect for any missing ones, and this will have to suffice
As it turns out, with an assist from Teri, who has done so once or twice before, there is a way to export a database report from ScaleMonster. Although the formatting here is a mess, nothing anyone would ever wish to pore over without a large bottle of aspirin handy, with enough finesse he is able to delete, space out, and rejigger the info enough into reasonable enough shape to at least make out what the numbers are.
Complicating things further is that the expected numbers between the stores nearly identically match, but there's a whole lot of non-matching randomness in both. Many are duplicates he can simply delete, along with this plan to lock down the scales. Employees will have to look things up - or have him properly add them, and wait like reasonable humans - instead of this spontaneous madness. But if not duplicates, it's going to take some cross-referencing, against the sales reports, and then if not found there, checking to see whether the type 2 barcode was ever added to their Orchestra Database, and beyond that, asking around to see if this number were even needed.
There is in fact a way to copy the database from one store's ScaleMonster to the other, which is apparently what Teri was doing every so often. Yet Edgar tries this exactly twice, before concluding this is not the way to operate. It literally eats up an entire day, tying up both programs in the process, and keeps crashing about halfway through anyway, requiring a complete restart. Not to mention that "every so often" doesn't really cut it with something like this. You would either need to do this every day, or forget it.
Theoretically, firing this process up the last thing every day might work, except nobody would be around to restart from the crash, not to mention that many of these recipes he's adding are last minute freakout type creations, which the employees are going to have a coronary over if he doesn't add right this second. Quite often, for example, he’s got deli personnel calling him with a new recipe for something baking in the oven at that moment, or even a piping hot dish fresh out of the oven. In these cases, after adding the type 2 barcode to Orchestra, he can just go ahead and enter the recipe into the applicable store's scale. If someone was panicking like this, then it was almost always a store specific item. If Christie Marsh was panicking over it, instead, then he would just go ahead and add it to both.
On balance he found this far easier, to just go ahead and manually add to both, rather than fool with this protracted database-copying nonsense. At most, you were talking a couple of dozen recipes, assuming there was some major line or brand new concept being introduced. And when he figures out a terrific workaround for this madness of typing out the broken down ingredients for marinades and sauces and the like, this is a relative breeze.
As far as he can determine, the ScaleMonster is so primitive that it won't let him copy and paste from any outside application. He tries this with Word, Excel, Notepad, and even a simple Find And Replace box, to no avail. However, it will let him copy from within the program, which allows him to simply create dummy numbers for all these basic staples, and then copy and paste ingredients from those PLUs.
