“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 57

The predominant word on the streets has it that Karen Hatley is a bitch. This is what virtually all of the employees say, particularly those a safe distance removed from her. But Edgar doesn’t believe this is quite accurate. He doesn’t think Karen Hatley is a bitch, per se. If pressed, he would describe her as a smug contrarian instead. Technically speaking, she’s not that difficult to get along with — even though she is going to disagree with just about anything you might say, and act as if you are fairly ridiculous for even suggesting what you have.

Whenever mentioning Karen to anyone, among the first things that someone will inevitably say is that she “comes from money.” But all Edgar can ever think is, how much money could she possibly come from if scrounging for work at the Healthy Shopper Market? Maybe she’s the only person Duane trusted to thread the needle of this highly sensitive, tightwire act of a Walnut outpost. But if she brings that much to the table, you’d have to believe he would want her in the busiest location possible.

Not that Edgar doubts this is true, about the money thing, at least as far as how she perceives herself. It would certainly explain a lot. Perhaps she once had money, or her family still does but she has to wait for various figures to kick the bucket before accessing it. At any rate, the pretensions are often laid on quite thick, like for example whenever you happen to name-check Duane in a conversation. Upon hearing such, Karen always closes one eye and tilts her head one direction, then repeats this gesture with the other half of her head, before placing a hand on her chest in a dear heavens manner and and recoiling.

“Oh you mean Lester!” she will declare, enjoying a quick chuckle at how confusing you made this conversation, though she was luckily sharp enough to figure out what you meant.

Okay, so apparently Duane’s given name is Lester. Who knew? He clearly prefers to go by the middle one, however, for as even Valerie observed one day, bringing this up on her own accord, “you call his office, how does he answer, every time? Yeah, this is Duane. Come off it, bitch.”

Well, it’s encouraging to know he isn’t the only person that picked up on this. But this affectations are only a minor nuisance, whereas the endless objections about how to perform every function, these have a potential for altering their business fortunes.

He received his first primer course on this in the original Walnut configuration. Among the other difficulties, the lack of any informational network here made pricing especially tricky. On the plus side of the ledger, rotation concerns are not really a problem here, because they will almost always (assuming an item actually sells at all, heh heh) just about let the stock on the shelf deplete before replenishing it. This is because they’ve got to hand sticker the next batch, and it’s best to wait as long as possible before doing so.

Even though the moment at which this happens and how they arrive at this price is apparently open for debate.

During one of the first price/supplier updates, following Walnut’s opening, he had asked her about the preferred method for getting these changes over to them. In the early going, he was printing off a price tag batch for them, same as everywhere else. Of course this led to her endless complaints about most of these being unnecessary, and wasting everyone’s time. After that, he got in a habit of printing off a bunch for them at Southside, then bringing those along with him during his next visit and just hanging the damn things himself.

But in between, anything could happen. And it seemed like a good idea, for general principles, that they should at least have a record of all the price and supplier changes there, if not a copy of his master spreadsheet showing every single item in the database. For simplicity’s sake, sending just the update file would be a little easier for them to reference, provided somebody jumped on this information right away. For example, marking discontinued items, or supplier changes, and stickering items at the new price if need be, before he arrived there with the new tags. Barring that, though, they would be flipping through who knows how many files, which would actually be more time consuming than just sending a current spreadsheet with every item they carry. Most of all, they would have no idea what to charge if bringing something in for the first time, which seemed to happen constantly at even this sleepy little stall. He was highly in favor of the latter, if not both, and suggests as much to her, that he send these files every week.

“I mean you can if you really want to,” she scoffs, accompanied by a dismissive pssh type sigh and a chuckle, “but any time I wanna know the price on anything, I’m just gonna call one of the other stores. So…yeah…”

Well, whatever. If this is how she wants to play it, this is her store and her time. One tends not to argue with the boss’s wife if at all possible. Yet his first thought is that, okay, he can totally see her doing this, but the other employees? Not so much. And even if she is calling the other stores with every burning product question, is this seriously the best use of everyone’s labor hours? Assuming the person who answered the phone was the same one looking something up for you, he feels like this would still be way less efficient than just opening an Excel file and typing a UPC into the search box. So come to think of it, this isn’t just her time at stake here.

Now that they’re fully plugged in at their new Walnut location, though, this particular scenario no longer applies. She has no choice but to ride along with certain operational procedures. Given that they have no sales history, filtering by such doesn’t even work, not yet, meaning that he’s connecting in remotely and printing off every change, period, and will likely continue doing so for some time. There are plenty of big ticket vitamin items, to cite one example, which might sell twice a year, if that. And Dale for one has told Edgar from the outset he doesn’t care how much Karen is complaining, print everything. And so he has.

Not that her beefs are limited to this corner of the retail universe. One day he’s working here and decides to buy an energy bar for lunch. He doesn’t expect a gold medal or participation trophy, but most leading industry analysts do agree that sales are a good thing, and therefore he’s doing his minuscule part to help keep this operation in the black. Quite naturally Karen complains about this, in ringing him up, on the grounds that it’s bringing her average ticket size down. Noting this in a completely serious, matter of fact manner, further explaining that she actually punches in small transactions like these in Training Mode, and then rings them all together on one receipt for real at the end of the day.

There are also fun times to be had with the internet around this place. Though Felix had no choice but to equip this store with wireless — mainly so the portable barcode scanning guns would work — for some reason, Edgar’s laptop, which isn’t even six months old, will not pull up a signal in this place. It says something about DNS Lookup Failed, and he has not been able to figure it out on his own. Thus far however, though mentioning it to Felix and Teri both, all he’s gotten are the standard, “hmm…that’s weird…,” type comments and to his knowledge no one has made their way up here yet to investigate.

He attempts using Walnut’s office computer on exactly one occasion, before Karen complained about that. But he understands — it’s not uncommon for him to arrive in the morning and spend his first two or three hours doing nothing but reading, responding to and otherwise dealing with emails. And then typically needs to be connected countless times throughout the typical day as well. He can’t reasonably expect to tie up their lone p.c. the entire time. Maybe she needn’t be so caustic about this, considering that they are playing for the same team and everything, after all, but still. For the time being this yet again means arriving at the coffee shop around the corner, clocking in remotely, downloading every file he might need from his latest email onslaught, then bouncing over to the store. Then either doing the same in reverse at the end, or, if it’s a sleepy day and he thinks he can get away with this, possibly yanking their ethernet cable out and sticking it into his laptop for a few minutes, so he can upload whatever files he needs to, remotely into the Orchestra server.

Yet none of these situations quite compare to the arrival of the mystery scale. On the second day the new location is up and running, Karen calls Edgar’s office to gripe that their scale isn’t working. He’s a bit mystified by this because the only scale he’s aware of is one of those old school analog types with the swerving needle to display the weight, found in produce departments everywhere. They had thrown that back by their bulk section, in the second chamber of this oddly configured if charming enterprise.

“Really? What’s wrong with it?” he asks, attempting to conjure up a mental picture of this equipment and, not just what could possibly go haywire here, but how any of these situations could possibly involve him.

“None of the PLU numbers are working,” she says.

“PLU numbers? But…there really wouldn’t be any way to even enter any PLU numbers…,” he replies. Not that he was consulted in advance about any of this, but the arrangement she and whomever else had decided upon here was that they would place that one scale back in the bulk section, yes. The customer would weigh the item, write the PLU number and the weight upon the container, which they cashier would punch in at the checkout counter.

“What scale are you talking about? I’m talking about the one up here by the register!”

“You have a scale up by the register?”

After a little bit of back and forth, he figures out what the deal is. They don’t have a true checkout line here, which would have its own embedded scale for the cashier to use, but only a plain old countertop that shoppers set their purchases upon. Therefore after she discussed the matter with…Corey Brown? Yes…it was determined that they really could use a scale up here at the register after all. For example, not that they would need to punch any numbers in for this, but there’s a little produce section over by the front door, and this would be easier than forcing customers to bring their mountain apples and organic bananas around the corner and into the next room just to weigh them. But also, Karen now has this idea about packaging up a ton of bulk items, because she’s convinced they will sell better this way. Corey found some random old scale in the back hallway at Palmyra and brought it here this morning. Now Karen’s trying to punch various numbers in there, and determined that these are either missing or wrong.

Edgar cackles and tells her, “that’s not gonna work. Who said that would work?”

“That’s just what Corey said. He said this would work.”

Thus this piece of evidence is entered as Exhibit XYZ in the case of I Don’t Even Know How To Categorize This Stuff. Viewed from one angle, it’s hard to picture how Corey could be this clueless. Does he seriously believe that your average standard retail and restaurant scale comes factory loaded with prices and ingredients for Healthy Shopper Market recipes? This scenario is borderline impossible to fathom, especially considering that he’s roughly the same age as Edgar. So in other words nowhere near the techno-decrepitude of a Vince of a Pierre. But then what does this leave? All that remains, really, is the complete opposite, that Corey in fact believes he is an expert on these matters. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he just pick up the phone and ask Edgar how to handle this, if there were any doubt in his mind whatsoever?

Well, there is one other potential factor at play here. Corey’s an intelligent enough guy, who for example has no problem crunching numbers and submitting reports for his store. However, he does have the vibe of someone who just might have taken too much acid while following Phish around one summer. That sort of thing. And yet even this would not quite explain this scale situation. In this, like many others of late, Edgar has begun to observe that it sure seems like Corey is getting agitated whenever anyone else is considered an expert on anything. It bugs him that Edgar is thought of as the obvious go-to guru for something like this, even though it’s his job, because Corey thinks he should be everyone’s first choice as the ultimate knowledge resource.

This is just Edgar’s increasing suspicion, anyway. He doesn’t have any proof that this is so. But as it so happens, by the mid-afternoon moment that Karen calls him, Corey has already bolted for the day. Therefore there is one other possibility, which is that Karen is making this entire scenario up, that Corey thought she just needed something to weigh items and that was all. Yet she’s adamant that she explained this part to him, and he insisted that all the numbers would be in this weird old scale, and the ingredients, and the correct prices. And maybe Edgar just wants to believe her, because this is so hysterical, but it does have the ring of truth, it sounds like a typical Corey move.

Of course, Karen can’t quite let this one go, however, without getting in one final dig. Insinuating without coming right out and saying so that Edgar still should have known about this in advance, somehow, and it’s partially his fault.

“Well, you guys need to figure this out,” she tells him, before hanging up.