“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 15
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Once a week, after going through the invoices, Edgar emails the department managers, spelling out what they could have ordered cheaper elsewhere, and/or should have for possible some other reason, like quality. The vendor and the item number are after all listed on their shelf tags, are two of the fields on the new items spreadsheet. Merchandisers are copied on these emails, although the degree to which they’re involved with product ordering itself ranges from heavily (Christie) to pretty much introducing new item lines only (Dale). Harry Redcrow as always seems to not have much faith in the information Edgar is imparting, and may in fact continue to consider him an idiot.
Confronting the butcher, Scott, with any of this information, or questions prior to that, asking what an item was even ordered for, is something that Edgar consistently dreads. Although it’s worth noting that Scott has been far less hostile than expected, when presented this information, or when Edgar’s questioning an order, so that’s something. The antagonistic butcher has earned back a measure of respect for this, as they haven’t even locked horns once.
Still, while he might know his way around cutting meat, it’s clear this dude doesn’t possess much business acumen. For one, ordering remains out of control, both in volume and in attention to cost. Scott might take Edgar’s suggestions well, but this isn’t to say he’s doing much with that information. He has a clinical aversion to studying any numbers whatsoever. Sometimes trucks from two different vendors will arrive on the same day with the same items, a clear sign of major disorganization. Over cutting is the other major ongoing crisis, although this too persists, and whenever called to task by management over such, his only, continually stated defense is, yeah, but doesn’t the case look awesome?
Combining these factors, after continual months of nothing but negative profit numbers, it’s not exactly surprising that Scott is the next person shown the door. Some early debate on this topic had centered around bringing in someone over top, and leaving him in place as merely the cutter, but everyone agreed this sounding like a nightmarish power struggle scenario, and it was difficult to imagine him playing nice for anyone. Once it’s decided that he has to go, they bring a small team to deliver the news, because nobody was quite sure how he would respond. But by all accounts, the termination went relatively peacefully.
“I’m surprised they didn’t bring in the SWAT team to fire Scott!” Aria howls, to Edgar, as he’s going through the register with a snack this morning. Laughing merrily, her gold front tooth prominently on display.
While amusing, this doesn’t exactly shore up their personnel situation. And if Palmyra is the trouble store in this regard, then the deli/meat operation without question holds that title when it comes to departments. And if you trace this problem down to its source, though commonly treated by ownership as anywhere from petty to unfortunate to unimaginative to tacky to a non-issue to complain about, the most likely culprit for an in ability to attract and keep quality help comes down to pay. Maybe benefits factor in, at least for those a little bit older, but it’s mostly it’s the moolah.
You didn’t need to know exact figures to ballpark the math, and why it didn’t really make sense to keep the purse strings so tight. Of course, it was safe to say that most ownership figures had not come up through any kind of ranks like this, had no firsthand experience with this retail industry at all. Particularly if you were talking about someone like Rob Drake who had married into the business. And therefore maybe didn’t possess the kind of in-the-trenches knowledge that might cause one to rethink some of this entrenched industry “wisdom.”
But, okay, supposing for the sake of argument that the average deli grunt made something like $9, just to throw a number out there that wasn’t too far off the mark. Whatever it was, few would debate that it was well known this figure came in a sight below industry standard, as far as one’s major corporate competition went. And that therefore they might have trouble keeping entry level help around as a result.
The only problem was, entry level work didn’t just disappear because you had no staff to deal with it. So what happens? The specialists wind up doing the entry level work. Chefs were therefore waiting the counter all day, store managers were stuck running an endless cash register. Maybe some of these characters were on salary, and if so, bully for the operation — sort of — but many were paid by the hour. Made all the worse in that this typically bled into the weekends, i.e. you were paying a butcher or a cake decorator time and a half to wait the counter all day instead.
If pressed, the typical ownership response was usually a huffy and defiant, what, these people are too good to wait on customers? which totally missed the point. Or else a dismissive laugh in replying oooh hoo hoo, no, we are not paying the entry level help more. Yet if the average foot soldier was pulling down $9 bucks an hour, then it’s not unrealistic to expect that the specialists are making twice that, or maybe even $20, even at a place like this, which translated to $30 on overtime. In other words you could bump up the starting rate a buck an hour across the board and have three people here waiting the counter for what you were paying one chef to do so. Or not. Have three of them here anyway, or two of them here at time and a half instead. Point being that you weren’t magically papering over your problems by having a specialist handling tasks that anyone off the street could do.
This popular phrase about robbing Peter to pay Paul didn’t just apply to money, it extended to personnel as well. Here at Southside they’ve just brought in an older, vaguely sad seeming chef, Christopher. And they here a really cool dude named Joe, who dresses just like the rockabilly enthusiast he is, to do nothing but cut meat. Except the thinking here is that they now have an extra body to ship up to Palmyra, for the next domino that’s about to fall.
“Don’t get me wrong, I like Christie,” Dolly is telling Edgar, as she is frying up some ribeye steaks that she suggested they enjoy, gratis, for lunch, “but sometimes she goes around her ass to get to her elbow.”
Edgar has never heard this phrase before, but he thinks it hits the mark — for a company slogan as a whole, that is, and nothing to do whatsoever with Christie. Take for example this mountain of items heaped in a trio of shopping carts in the seldom used third deli cooler, the one blocked by the portable rack of meat coats. One shopping cart consists of a bunch of formerly frozen items that someone stuck in here and never did anything about, though nobody seems to know the origin of this development or parties responsible. The other two, everybody back here insists, stem from management telling them to pull everything out of the cheese case, even though the new compressors (presumably meant to solve the malfunctioning-when-raining mystery) aren’t arriving until next week.
Some of this is assuredly related to the staffing shortage. “That’s great and all that they’re cleaning house back there,” Corey confides to Edgar, “but I’m still down two bodies in the deli and they haven’t hired anybody to replace them.”
Revisiting a thought he’s held for months, Edgar grabs an application, says he’ll talk to his mom about working back there. A prospect that Corey seems enthusiastic about without having even met her. Still, despite — or perhaps partially explained by — Corey’s detached-from-the-action style commentary, Dolly blames him for some of the chaos around here. There is of course the compressor situation. They’ve survived the ingredient gestapo’s quarantine, but now that cheese case continues to sit empty. And on top of this they also suffer this continued mayhem with the milkshakes.
Despite months of pushing the deli to blow through that discontinued ice cream line, by virtue of using Corey’s milkshake menu idea, they haven’t made much of a dent in that stockpile. Yet the concept continues to perform just well enough that they’re forced to stick with it. As far as the deli staff is concerned, their primary objection is that this ice cream is continually shuffled around and buried behind other staff back in the communal freezer. So they not only need to venture into the back hall, itself not too terrible inconvenient, they’ve got to dig around before locating the stuff, not to mention the correct flavor. Possibly moving carts or even palettes out of the way just to do so.
Dolly has long since drawn the line in the sand, unbeknownst to Corey, that any time anyone asks for a milkshake, she’s now telling them that they are out of the ingredients to make one. Which works well enough until this morning, when a woman who’s been asking for weeks approaches the counter first thing, requesting one. By herself at this hour, in the middle of giving the service case a much needed deep clean before setting it and attempting to unclog its backed up drain at the bottom right this second, Dolly repeats her now standard line.
“Oh bullshit!” the woman shouts, “every time I come in here, you tell me you’re out of the stuff to make it! I’ve been up since four o’clock this morning, and all I wanted was a chocolate milkshake!”
Whether intentional or just an anger fueled reflex, the customer lashes out with one hand and hits a stack of plastic cups, piled next to the scale atop the counter. Said stack topples into a caught off guard Dolly, as the woman stomps away. Dolly calmly picks up the cups and either returns them, if caught cleanly, or throws them away if hitting the floor. Then marches over and takes the milkshake menu down, hides it along a back wall.
With Dolly’s vacation fast approaching, bringing up the Russian girl from Southside is pitched as a much needed additional set of hands, for that week and beyond. They still have that trio of charming older Russian ladies, who all transferred from Frilly’s (one of which, it never fails to delight Edgar, pronounces spatula as something like chapoola), and that longstanding cadre is remaining in place. But a few months ago, one of their nieces, Natasha, joined the Southside crew, and she’s thus far proven smart, friendly, and capable, in other words just what this Palmyra operation desperately needs. So this move is made, a day or two before Dolly leaves for vacation.
But the reality is that this is something of an orchestrated hit. Despite the meat department’s curious rebound into non-negative profit margins, absent any actual meat department employees, overall the combined operation has continued floating in the toilet. Dolly is and will remain pretty bitter about the situation, blaming much of it, for example, on Christie’s baffling obsession with ordering in mountains of high dollar desserts that don’t sell. Auto shipping these half the time with nary a heads up, a complaint that in fairness is probably mostly true.
Nonetheless, on her first day back from vacation, Dolly is the latest department manager given the pink slip. Natasha will now be running this deli. A day or two after that, Edgar’s mom is hired, so she just barely misses working with one of his all-time favorite employees. Such is the nature of this topsy-turvy retail business.
