“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 51

The next morning, he’s in the wine aisle at Southside, inspecting a curious development. Though coming down here to figure out whether a couple of items on the latest Benevolence Vineyards invoice were new or not, this other anomaly jumped out at him, and then a couple more. Now he can’t stop hunting for them. At issue here are a ton of those idiotic little hand-tagged stickers, from the old school pricing gun.

With his attention draw to it, he’s going through every single bottle in the wine aisle now. Or at least this is the intent. Edgar is maybe halfway through this project when Valerie comes skidding around the corner like a cartoon character, specifically seeking him out, and relieved now that she’s found him.

“Dude, what happened last night!?” she calls out to him, while closing the gap. “Do you know how all that stuff got into bed with me?”

Without even fully turning, Edgar has glanced her way with what might be termed a chain reaction of amusement. Initially smiling, to see her, then beaming at the first half of her comment, bursting into laughter at the second half. Except then he glances beyond Valerie, and observes a surplus of riches in that Mike Sewell just so happens to be stocking dairy right now, along that back wall, and is peering over at them with an expression at the complete opposite of this spectrum. Therefore Edgar begins choking on this laugh. As Sewell, with the cooler door open, and ostensibly continuing to stock product, glances repeatedly over his shoulder, shooting dagger after dagger this way.

“Mmm…no idea. What do you mean? What stuff?”

“Well, okay,” Valerie smiles, and pants, drawing up before Edgar at last, “I don’t know why but for some reason I woke up with, like, this book in my bed…and a…Jimi Hendrix sticker… and all this other weird crap.”

“That’s funny.”

“I must have gotten up and brought it to bed for some reason…hey, did I try and start a fight with my boyfriend last night?”

“You might say that,” Edgar cackles, then adds, “why, do you not remember last night?”

Her smile shifts slightly, from a general one to something sweeter, as she says, “I remember everything else. Just not that for some reason.”

Satisfied by this series of questioning, she retreats upstairs to her desk. Yet this leaves Edgar thinking that, well, she has obviously forgotten a lot more, because he last saw her waving from that pitch black bathroom, after he shoved her ass through that window. Therefore could have no way of possibly knowing what happened beyond this point, after he drove away, for example the mystery of the objects in her bed. But he thought it best not to mention this, to leave some doubt in her mind, maybe, about what did or did not happen, since she’s clearly confused on this point. Also, mostly, as it pertains to the hilarity of a grimacing Mike Sewell, eavesdropping on their every word.

Before long, his attentions return to work demands, however. And the oddity of these hand stickers persists. Because following Pierre O’Brien’s exile, Edgar is positive he went through here and removed every one of these that he could lay his mitts upon. He might have missed some, but not many. It’s also possible that some of these bottles could have been hiding out in backstock, though if he’s not mistaken, more than a handful must be fresh arrivals, are some of the new items he’s just tracked down. Which can only mean that it’s either Destiny doing this, though she’s only displayed a middling interest in wine, if absolutely unable to avoid working this set, or Vince Brancatto, which seems laughable, or…

Jake Gifford.

Yes, of course. It seems totally obvious now, and not the least bit shocking. He would have different reasons for doing so than his predecessor did — pricing quibbles versus new item embargo — but the result could very well be the same. He is in charge of both beer and wine, and has had no choice but to deal with the latter here now that Pierre’s up in Palmyra.

Well, there’s one easy way to determine this. Edgar drifts over to the beer department next, and, as expected, finds a litany of these damn stickers covering up countless UPCs. How fucking stupid is this? Talk about a willful step or three backwards, into the caveman era. Instead of scanning the bottles and cans, cashiers have to hit the generic Beer/Wine key and punch in a price. You can’t pull sales history on any of these items with any degree of accuracy, and have just shot manual errors if not outright scamming through the roof.

As he goes through every cooler door here, as well as a room temperature rack, ripping these price tags off, he debates what to do. Complaining to Destiny or Duane strikes him as quite childish, the way tattling always has, even though the corporate world all but demands it. He could mention it at the next meeting, and intends to, although if you do so without mentioning any names, you’ve got people smirking and grousing that this was passive-aggressive, and yet if you do call a person out, citing specifics, then you’ve got people complaining — and not just the person(s) called out — that this was bullshit and that you shouldn’t have thrown someone under the bus publicly. Of course, he also plans on confronting the source directly, first chance he has, although in certain circles, like for instance the HR lady’s weekly knitting group, this move is surely frowned upon as well.

The thing is, Edgar wouldn’t even necessarily say that Jake is doing a bad job. So this isn’t a personal vendetta, a hatchet job crusade. Apart from this stickering madness, that is, meaning the numbers are coming back okay. But he definitely needs to cool it with this nonsense, bring his department down from the lofty pedestal he has placed it upon. Still, while possibly just confirmation bias, Edgar is feeling relieved and justified to sit over in the managers’ office later this same day, working on the ScaleMaster program, as Valerie and Barbara are coincidentally bitching to one another about how rude Jake is. Humorless, attempting to dominate every conversation with discussions about the beer set, some weird combination of an airhead and a dickhead all at once. Getting extremely pissy if he randomly drifts up here for any reason and finds anyone using this very computer that Edgar’s presently occupying.

“You can just tell he’s gonna be around here forever, too, he just has that vibe,” Valerie says to Barbara.

Craig was also recently relating a similar tale to Edgar, highly reminiscent of that day he and Destiny made the mistake of selling a customer some Hop Supernova. This time Craig went and found some totally normal, long carried and perfectly mainstream beer offering on the backstock shelf, which a customer was inquiring about, handed said customer a six pack of the stuff and sent him on his way. Jake flipped out on him because he planned on stickering a different price over the barcodes before officially bringing these out onto the floor. Craig says he just shrugged with one shoulder and looked at the guy with an expression meant to convey, what the fuck is your point?

To Edgar’s thinking, events play out in this instance exactly as they should. He doesn’t see Jake all day, which inspires him to fire off an email that goes unanswered. Then the next meeting rears its head, which has him mentioning this as a general point, and in fairness, though Jake represents the runaway most egregious offender, this stickering insanity is certainly not limited to just beer and wine anyhow. When the dude appears in his office a couple of days later, however, in the wake of Edgar’s repeated, near-daily, late afternoon trips out there to search for and remove said tags, he can no longer refrain from saying something in person.

“You’re not responding to the price changes fast enough,” the Executive Beer Hipster says with a shrug.

“I’m doing it once a week, same as every other department. That’s just what I was told to do, and I’m doing it. I go through every invoice that comes in.”

“That’s still not fast enough.”

This idiocy startles Edgar into a laugh, as an excellent point has just popped into his head. “Look dude, we’re not changing the prices daily. Beer and wine combined do three percent of the store sales. It’s not, like, this major operation. You do half the business of bulk, but take up twice the space! At a much lower margin, no less.”

“I’m just working with the space they gave me,” is Gifford’s nonsensical reply, the sort of surreal thing people blurt out when unable to think of anything else to say.

“I mean, should we just dispense with the shelf tags altogether?” Edgar jokes, cackling as he runs with this theme, “we could put, like, a scrolling stock market ticker above the beer case, and have up to the minute price changes instead!”

“That’s cool. I’ll just take this up with Corey,” Jake says, nonplussed, thoroughly unamused by Edgar’s suggestion.

“Okay, well, I mean, I don’t want to mention this conversation to Duane, but I can bring it up if I have to.”

“You wanna hitch your horse to that wagon, huh!? Have at it! Hitch your horse to that wagon, and SEE what happens!” the alcohol merchandiser shouts, redfaced, before storming out of the office.