“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot”- Chapter 90

Or so they believe it to be. But before anyone can make a significant dent into this inquiry, they find themselves blindsided by another major twist. This chapter of the saga arrives on a Friday, two weeks to the day after Duane announced his resignation. This memorable morning began with their outgoing boss sending a mass email to everyone, thanking them for their contributions with this company, that he’s enjoyed his stay, and he appreciates all the well wishes. He’s also making his rounds to each of the four locations, drifting through to say his goodbyes, which does add fuel to the rumors that he plans on leaving this region entirely.

Nobody knows for certain, however. Edgar happens to be at Palmyra this day, which is also coincidentally Duane’s last stop. An intriguing one already, considering Karen remains gainfully employed as its store manager. As Edgar has spent the day discussing various matters with Sharon, showing her various things, as they outline strategies and the interplay between their two jobs, neither of them has had any time really for contemplating even such a major change Duane’s leaving, what this final day might mean.

When Duane breezes into the store, late this afternoon, he is accompanied by Rob Drake and Friendly HR. Edgar doesn’t think anything of it, nor does anyone else that he’s aware, as he offhandedly assumes this is maybe standard protocol for such a tremendous change — a couple of key witnesses on hand, to ensure nothing crazy happens, the common industry practice when conducting this transition. He shakes Duane’s hand one last time, too, just like everybody, and tells his outgoing leader that he truly will miss having him around.

It already feels like Vince’s reign represents a blip on the radar, and it hasn’t even begun. But maybe this won’t be so bad. Considering this farewell ceremony a done deal, Edgar and Sharon embark on another project over in the housewares section, scanning, tagging, and adjusting inventory should they encounter any negatives. It’s almost four bells when they see Karen coming down the aisle, though it would seem she’s on her way out the door, calling it a day.

“See ya!” she halfway cheerfully calls out, though pausing not the slightest.

Neither of them pay much mind to this — although it turns out that bit about her heading for the door is only partially correct. She was indeed moving in that direction, but not just for the day. Nobody else has the first clue, however, until Rob rustles up a bunch of them for an impromptu meeting back by the time clock. With their trusty human resources leader looking uneasy beside him, Rob explains what just went down.

“Effective immediately, Karen Hatley is no longer an employee with this company.”

At this unexpected news, edgy but somewhat relieved sounding guffaws ripple through the crowd. But as Rob seemingly improvises his way through a canned speech, touching upon the expected boilerplate platitudes about a potential conflict of interest and moving in a different direction and so on, it’s only natural that many begin to wonder about the ramifications, extending outward. With the Hatleys out of the picture, whomever is appointed store manager here is likely to have much more laissez-faire approach than Karen, and in the case of Vince replacing Duane, that’s a no doubter.

Immediately on the heels of this, with Liberty’s closing date fast approaching, they post their long awaited list of the keepers. An exercise highly reminiscent of a sports team announcing their opening day roster, after last cuts. As probably just a mighty fortuitous coincidence rather than expertly enacted plan, Billy, as expected, makes the grade, and slides readily right on into Karen’s vacated store manager spot. Somewhat more surprising is that two others are offered transfers — Candace to Arcadia, okay, a solid pick, but then the highly controversial and almost surely nepotism related move of Allen Willis going to Central.

Candace shudders at the prospect at working for Ralph again, however, and asks to become a cashier instead. Allen, meanwhile, in one of the most generous gestures anyone has ever seen, witnesses one of the young girls in grocery at Liberty, bawling her eyes out upon learning that she’ll be out of a job in two weeks. He asks if she can take his place instead, and if so he will look for work elsewhere. Management okays this, although it’s not a major stunner when, in typical Healthy Shopper Market fashion, that girl works three days at Central, decides she doesn’t like it there, and quits anyway. Allen never returns to the fold, and when the lights go out on their original store, none of the others are ever seen in this uniform again, either. Edgar regrets not asking for the retro looking neon sign above the cash registers, spelling out their original company name, and wonders what became of it. The last he ever heard about Sam, another regrettable loss, that dude was running a hot dog stand.

Not that they have much time for contemplating these matters, or what any of it means. The most pressing concern now is a group effort examining Pattie’s work as a receiver, which leads to some troubling observations, including another huge folder stuffed with invoices she hasn’t quite gotten around to resolving. Edgar is actually mighty surprised by this, because she has drifted over to his office, almost every day for months, with any questionable items circled on her invoices. There’s a little bit of a language barrier here, but nothing like with Marita — Pattie does for example send the occasional email — and, again like Arcadia’s bulk manager, she seems pretty sharp, clearly understands her job and was taking it seriously.

And to some extent, he gets the backlog. It was expected that their biggest headache would involve getting supplies sorted out for the deli department, though once the ChefAssist plug-in was added, this has proven a little less problematic than they thought. The inventory levels still aren’t close to perfect here, but are getting demonstrably better as they flesh out the recipes. To distinguish deli supplies from similar items they were selling on the shelves, Edgar just created separate vendor names in their system — UniversalDeli for example — and this is how they are ordered, this is how the invoices are checked in and closed out.

But on the flipside, the produce department has been a much larger headache than expected. This is partially because they needed to figure out what methods would work on their end, but mostly due to chaos on the part of their suppliers. Not only is this the one category that they are most likely to utilize small time local vendors for, but even with the heavy hitters, antiquated methods persist.

Albertson’s is easily the largest company they work with which refuses to use modern business programs, for example. About once a year Edgar will inquire whether anything has changed on this front, but it never has. They have a positively gargantuan price list, updated once daily, which they still prefer to fax or send in paper form. In more recent years, they’ve made a slight concession by emailing PDF files of the same. On a couple of occasions, he made a concerted effort at using some PDF converter program found online, to render these price lists in Excel. But as the source documents were a major clunky mess, this didn’t work, entailing such extensive cleanup — and an ever changing type of cleanup — every 30 lines or so, moving columns this way and that, that he recognized this was going to take an eternity and would never realistically work.

So that’s handcuffing them from the standpoint of getting ahead of any new information. They were almost always in a situation where it made more sense just to see what was on these invoices, and react accordingly. However, this is again another company that will put SKU numbers on all their invoices, but typically not the UPCs or PLUs, which meant another layer of detective work went into matching what belonged to what. Further complicated in that the SKU numbers were constantly changing anyway.

If pressed, their most common explanation is that this is industry standard, when it comes to produce. Edgar was never quite sure he bought this one, but even when challenging them on this front, the next line of defense was basically that they were large enough to do whatever they felt like, so deal with it. But, in a nutshell, the main conundrum with Albertson’s invoices was that you might order a red apple one week that they are assigning a SKU of ABCDE to PLU number 4321, and a yellow apple given FGHIJ to PLU number 4322. The next week you’d order a red apple and they would assign the same SKU to a different PLU number, the yellow apple they’d list a different SKU for the same PLU number. And on the third week, they’d flip-flop the numbers between the two varieties.

Once Healthy Shopper Market got a handle on this madness — sort of, anyway, for the mission was never quite complete — they realized it made no sense whatsoever to distinguish between the different varieties of the fruits. They would have one entry for Apples and one entry for Organic Apples, and that was it. Everything else would be listed underneath as an alternate number for the same item. And counted as such during inventory. Of course, this still amounted to a ton of work because new SKU numbers were arriving every week, which required entry into their system for back end reasons, and brand new PLU numbers, which required entry to scan up front. In this instance, Edgar is debating entering every PLU known to man, at least, because these are universal, and are a known, not too horrible quantity. But of course even in this instance he’d be coming up with retails for hundreds of items that had never graced their stores, which hasn’t exactly been a top priority yet, not with everything else going on.

Now that Pattie’s feet are being held to the fire, he does feel bad for her, like the handful of them gathered here on the back dock — Edgar, Dale, Vicky, Destiny, Craig — are ganging up on her. But she can’t exactly just sit on invoices for days or weeks before getting around to addressing them. And yet, though a little crestfallen, possibly embarrassed by letting the team down, everyone agrees that she seems to take this intervention well. At least up until the next morning, when she also just stops coming to work.