Workin' Man - Part XX - Falklands Jalapeño-Pineapple Pancakes

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 Well, this was something different. In my previous management assignments I was looked at as the new guy who didn't know anything. When hired as a Grocery Manager at 48th & O my grocery experience was negligible. When I was promoted to assistant store director at Cornhusker I was replacing a popular and knowledgeable individual who had a very different management style. In both stores I was able to prove myself, and when I arrived at the South 27th & Pine Lake Super Saver I had a reputation for knowing what I was doing, and for being a tough but fair manager. (Although one person told Bob, our General Merchandise (GMD) Manager, that I was "moody" - fair enough!) In retrospect my five years as ASD at Pine Lake were probably the best years of my grocery career. Store Director Nick was easy to work for - he gave clear direction, but was not a micromanager, and the center store managers were experienced, knew their jobs and took direction well. 

One of the big differences starting out at Pine Lake was that, unlike my start at Cornhusker, things were organized. Nick was not a "nice guy" - he was friendly enough - but did not play favorites and kept a sharp eye on what was going on in the store. (He was also 25 years younger than I was) Shannon, our HR Coordinator was also pretty direct. My old Store Director, Matt K, once remarked that the employees at Pine Lake must have always been pretty clear about expectations with the three of us in charge. Employees definitely had their preferences for who they would go to. What they didn't realize was that we talked all the time and made sure we were in agreement on major issues. There was no going to "dad" because you didn't like "mom's" decision. One incident stands out. I was upstairs, looking out the window to the sales floor below and saw Tom C, the Frozen Foods Manager talking to Nick. Technically, since I was his immediate supervisor, he should have been coming to me. When Nick finished talking to Tom, I asked Nick what the conversation was about. Tom C was asking if he really needed to work until close on Christmas Eve. Nick asked him "What did Tom J tell you?" and followed up with "Whatever Tom J told you, that's what you need to do". We had each other's backs. 

Tom C, as it turned out, was not a very good Frozen Foods manager, and as it further turned out, Nick & I dropped the ball when it came to supervising him. In some respects the department appeared to be in good shape. He hardly ever ran out of anything, he always had his ad displays up timely, and the profit margin was always at or above budget. I was guilty, as was the company overall, of not questioning success. Tom C was a big man, he had to be well over 500 pounds. One morning he fell on some ice in the parking lot and hurt himself so badly that he couldn't work for what turned out to be seven months. As Center Store Manager I was his immediate supervisor and temporarily took over managing the department. I figured I could have a clerk do the stocking and I could order and build displays. I quickly found out what Tom C was hiding. 

Every department utilizes "backstock". During an ad you try to have enough on hand to get you through the ad week, in this case you store it in a walk-in freezer. Sometimes you just order too much, and you "run the backstock" before putting in an order so you don't order what you already have. When an ad is over, any unsold ad items are put in a secondary display and priced somewhere between regular prices and ad price. Tom C was not managing his backstock. When I took over the department there were at least 80 pallets of assorted backstock in the freezer. Ten pallets would have been excessive. Every shelf was filled, and every inch of floor space was full of pallets. After stocking the load from a delivery, Tom C would put any excess on a pallet in the freezer and then never touch it again. On his next order he would bring in more of what he already had. After an ad was over he would put what wasn't sold on a pallet in the freezer and then never touch it again. The result was that every week the backtock grew and grew. It's not like it was even organized. Every pallet had a jumble of different types of stock. It was a mess. Tom C, realizing that his department was such a mess that he would not be able to get it in order, turned in his resignation. We hired a replacement, who we were very upfront with regarding the shape the freezer was in. He lasted less than a week before he claimed that he fell in the freezer and spent another week on light duty. 

Nick had the idea that before we hire another manager the first step would be to organize everything. He and I, joined by Assistant Grocery Manager Jamie, and a team of grocery clerks, pulled all the pallets out one by one and organized them by type of product: potatoes on one pallet, frozen vegetables on another, frozen dinners on a third, and so on. When we started it was so disorganized that there literally were potatoes on every pallet. This took two different sessions to get everything organized. While we were working we found several pallets of old ad items that were seriously out of date, those had to be thrown out or donated. We probably got the number of pallets down to 65. For a while we had grocery clerks pulling pallets out and stocking from them each night. We had wrapped each pallet in plastic and afixed a sign with the last date that it had been worked. We had a system. Except Nick caught the grocery clerks rolling out pallets, unwrapping them, moving the top layer around, and then putting them back. He banned the clerks from running backstock. Which meant that me and some of the other managers had to do it.

Little by little the number of pallets decreased. There were some mornings when the Frozen Foods order was less than a dozen cases because we had so much backstock! We had probably got the number of pallets down to around 40 when Pat Raybould stuck his head in the freezer one day and freaked out. He demanded that we set a date when the backstock would be down to a reasonable level (10 pallets?). I tried to tell him that it was impossible to do, we had no idea how long it would take us to get to an arbitrary number. Of course he had no idea how bad it had been and how much progress we had made, but the law of diminishing returns was setting in, as well as the lack of any more low-hanging fruit, and a dearth of other available cliches. I eventually picked a random date, which we ended up not making, but he soon forgot about it, as he usually did. 

One of the side effects of having to run Frozen Foods for so long was that I learned to drive the standing forklifts. In addition to the traditional sit-down forklift, Pine Lake had two stand-up forklifts. Since at the time we were the only store that had them anyone transferring from another store didn't have any experience with them. The advantage to them was that they had a tighter turning radius, which was helpful in narrow aisles. The down side was that if you were trained on the sit-downs, everything felt backwards. I had to work in the freezer every morning, which, once we cleared the floor of all the excess pallets, was very spacious. This made it the perfect place to practice driving the stand-ups. More on forklift adventures later. 

One of the first things I did after transferring to Pine Lake was to convince Nick that we needed to adjust our schedules during the holidays. Officially those of us who were salaried were required to work a minimum of 45 hours a week. In most stores this meant that you were scheduled for 45 hours, but if an crisis came up you worked extra. No allowance was made for getting those hours back. What I proposed was that we plan to average 45 hours per week during a holiday season. This meant that during Thanksgiving or Christmas week we all might be working 60+ hours, but we would work 25 or 30 on the slower weeks. This was difficult to do over the Christmas holidays since we were busy leading up to Christmas, which was immediately followed by a busy New Year's, with year-end inventory in their somewhere. I would start mapping out the managers' schedule well in advance in order to get Nick's approval (especially since I was writing his schedule too). The benefit to scheduling this way was that the store had the maximum number of managers during the peak times, while no one worked more than an average of 45 hours per week. Of course the corporate office would not have approved of this arrangement, and we sure weren't going to tell them! We also instituted a requirement of mandating that department managers work certain peak times during the holidays. All managers had to work until close on Christmas Eve, and work a 12-hour shift the day before Thanksgiving. Nick and I scheduled ourselves this way too, so no one could complain. I was surprised to learn that in a lot of stores the schedule didn't change for holiday weeks and stores were staffed during peak times by third tier evening supervisors instead of department managers. There was some complaining, but I believed that if you agreed to work in a retail store you had to be available to work on holidays. 

One of the managers who was challenging to schedule was Peter, the Assistant Grocery Manager when I started. He was a rabid Husker fan and had season tickets, as well as attending several away games each season. At first this wasn't a huge problem, since the assistant grocery manager usually was scheduled on Sunday, with Saturday off. He turned down at least one opportunity for promotion to grocery manager in another store when he was adamant about having Saturdays off during the football season. Eventually he was promoted at Pine Lake. I honored his time off requests for every Saturday for the first year he was in that position, but after one season I announced that I would no longer accept time off requests, since it seemed like everybody wanted off on game day. He worked it out by switching shifts with another manager, but I never thought that he was committed to be a manager in a retail grocery store. Attending Husker games and playing golf seemed to be his main priorities. Otherwise he did a good job and was a key member of the management team, as long as there wasn't a football game conflicting with store priorities. 

In light of the post-Covid shift in the employee-employer power dynamic, it might seem like we were too tough on our employees when it came to scheduling and time off. Now, you hear a lot of people declaring that they aren't requesting time off, but informing their boss that they would be gone. Even now, I stand by my position that if you are going to work in a store that is busy on weekends and holidays, by accepting employment there you are agreeing to be available during the busy times. I think that the fact that the whole management team was there during the holidays, not taking advantage of their position or seniority, helped sell the idea that no one was getting vacation time approved during holidays. 

One of the most important things that I learned from Nick was that you did not run out of anything during the holidays, especially not "holiday" items or anything that was in the ad. During a holiday week we would make a list of everything we were out of first thing in the morning. We would start out by calling other Super Savers and Russ's to see if they had an extra that they could transfer. Then we would split up the list and head out to our competitors to buy as much as we could of the items that we needed. This procedure led to the case of the infamous Falklands Jalapeño-Pineapple Pancakes. I was sent to Hy-Vee with a mission to secure Bisquick, canned pineapple, and for some reason, jalapeño jelly on a snowy Christmas Eve. I had found all three items on my list, emptied the shelves, and headed up front to pay for them all. Now people who have never worked retail might think that this was a win for the store that was being raided -- they're making sales, right? But what's really happening is that their customers will be disappointed when they can't find these items on the shelf. (Hy-Vee used to try this with us just about every Sunday in order to replenish their ad items. After it happened once I refused to sell to them!) But anyway, back to Christmas Eve. As I stood in line, pushing a shopping cart full of just three items, I was starting to attract attention. Customers in line curiously asked me what I was doing with these seemingly mismatched products. I tried to deflect attention by telling them that I just got whatever was on the list, but that didn't satisfy them. Thinking fast, I told them that my wife was from the Falklands,  and every Christmas Eve, for our whole church, she made a Falklands delicacy -- jalapeño-pineapple pancakes! I made it out the door with my cases of mismatched breakfast food, and told the team back at the store about my adventure. The next two Christmas Eves I actually made jalapeño-pineapple pancakes for everyone to try -- surprisingly tasty -- and popular! 

Workin' Man - Part XIX - A Shady Business

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 All four Lincoln Super Saver ASDs switched in one move. The Cornhusker ASD (me) moved to Pine Lake, who moved to 56th and Highway 2, who moved to 48th & O, who moved to Cornhusker. I'm going to divert from my own personal story to focus on what was going on in another store. 

Store Directors earned bonuses based on how close their gross profit was to what was budgeted. In most situations if you achieved or exceeded your budget the budget was increased the following year. Rarely was it lowered if you failed to achieve the profit target. For some reason the exception was the store that the previously mentioned Ron S ran, the 56th and Highway 2 Super Saver. The profits regularly exceeded the budgeted amount by a huge margin, but the budget was never increased. This guaranteed that the store director and assistant store director received the maximum amount in their annual bonus. The ASD who was leaving 56th was very upset about leaving. He was used to getting the maximum bonus - in fact, he had recently divorced and his child support was based on the assumption that he would continue to receive the maximum bonus. As I mentioned in Part XVII, Bill had been transferred out of my store and to the 56th Super Saver, since Ron S had been "promoted" into the corporate office. A couple of things happened in the wake of these moves. The first was that the budget for gross profit was changed to more closely reflect the business that the store actually did. (Why not sooner?) The second was that the store's inventory was counted more closely. 

Without getting too deep into the math, one of the key numbers that determined a store's profit was the inventory level. If inventory was undercounted, profit calculations would be low, since the assumption would be that the missing stock had been either thrown out for being outdated, or stolen, since there was no revenue to account for it. If the inventory, on the other hand, was overcounted, then the opposite would be true and the profit margin would be calculated higher than the real number. The latter was what was going on at 56th under Ron S. It was a test store for using an internal ordering and inventory system called INGEN (I forget what those letters stood for), which, among other things, kept a running, daily, count of all items in the center store departments. One of the problems with using this system for your inventory count was that there were many possible data entry, human error, possibilities. For example, a customer buys two cases of Chobani yogurt, 12 to a case. There are eight different flavors, but the cashier rings them all up under one flavor. The result is that one flavor's inventory will be lower than the actual numbers, while the other seven will show a higher inventory. Markdowns were another problem. Usually marked down items were rung up manually by department, so there was nothing in the system to indicate that it had been sold. Outdated items that were thrown out had to be scanned out of the inventory, but if not, the system thought they were still there. At 56th under Ron S it was discovered, after he left, that the inventories for several departments were higher than actual and were skewing the profit calculations, making the store look more profitable than it actually was. 

One of the things that B&R Stores engaged in was never questioning good results, while freaking out over bad ones. The 56th and Highway 2 Super Saver was a profitable store. At the time there were no competitors nearby (this was pre-Walmart), so no one questioned the continual high profits. The store management who were raking in huge bonuses certainly didn't question it. It wasn't until a new management team came in that the inventory issues were discovered. One of the things that stores were supposed to do, was continuously update their inventory. There was to be an employee specifically dedicated to this task who would rotate through the store, keeping the inventory accurate. Bill, and his new ASD Dan set about to check their inventory and get things in line with company policy. They found out that things were really, really bad. The inventory numbers were way off. So much so that several departments had negative gross profits, which is virtually impossible. Another thing that was impossible was the scenario where the new management was so incompetent as to take a very profitable store and run it into the ground in one year. Not only run it into the ground, but screw it up so badly that it was losing money. (One of the things that I found out about that store was that routine maintenance and repairs were being ignored when Ron S was in charge. This led to Bill having to spend a lot of money fixing things that never should have been broken. The store was also filthy. When I was there for a reset the dirt under the shelving was so thick that small animals could have gotten lost in it. When we discovered this Ron [who with us] tried to get us to believe that years of dirt had accumulated in one year)

Around this time the corporate office decided to change assistant store director responsibilities again, using 56th as a test store. The position of in-store HR Coordinator would be eliminated, and each store would have two ASDs, one of whom would be responsible for HR functions as well as a couple of departments, and the other would oversee the rest of center store. This was a project pushed by Operations VP Tom Schulte and opposed by HR Director Donna Bristol. A second ASD was brought in and Dan, the existing ASD was given the HR responsibilities, which he was completely in the dark about. He attempted to get help from corporate HR, who refused to assist him, or even educate him on his HR duties. He reached out to HR Coordinators in other stores, who were willing to help him, but were prohibited from doing so by Donna, in a petty retaliation for losing the battle to Tom. Of course Dan failed. He was set up to fail. 

Meanwhile, in order to solve the problems that took place under Ron S's watch, corporate sent in...Ron S. Ron set up a little table in the grocery office as his desk and went about micromanaging the management team, including mandating the precise number of hours that Dan could spend working HR. Of course nothing that he did fixed the problem. The problem traced back to overstating inventory, which, when corrected, led to low and negative gross profits. Correct inventory levels would cause the profit problem to correct itself. These obvious observations never occurred to the corporate directors. Bill and Dan were blacklisted and moved to smaller stores as punishment. This opened my eyes to the kind of people that I was working for, even though at the time it had no direct effect on me. 

Before I close out this sordid chapter, I want to call back to another sordid chapter. HVAC maintenance and repair for all the stores had been contracted out to A-1 Refrigeration, a local company. While I was still working at the Cornhusker store, one of their technicians was sexually harassing a teenaged girl who worked in the Deli. She complained to the store director, who complained to A-1, who immediately fired him. Dan H, the pervert in question, went on to start his own HVAC company. With the collusion of John W, one of the Super Saver ASDs, he obtained some of A-1's invoices and approached Jane Raybould to become contracted to maintain the HVAC equipment at some of the stores, underbidding A-1's rates. Jane gave him the contract for all the Russ's Markets, leaving the Super Savers to A-1, despite being made aware of why A-1 had fired him. His company was also given the contract for the new Russ's at Coddington and West A. Jane eventually fired him, but only because he did not obtain permits for what he was doing, not because he sexually harassed teenaged girls. 

Yes, a shady business.

Workin' Man - Part XVIII - Cornhusker Twilight

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

Before I get into my final phase at the Cornhusker store, I neglected to mention an incident that took place during my first few years. One of the corporate directors took me aside one afternoon and informed me that he saw a pharmacy employee take a soda from the cooler and go into the pharmacy without paying for it. He asked me to accompany him while he confronted the individual. When she came to the pharmacy door she explained that she paid for it at the register inside the pharmacy and showed us the receipt. As I was explaining how she should pay before leaving the sales floor in order to avoid any misperceptions, Jeff, the pharmacist, started yelling at us. He maintained that pharmacy employees were "better" than the rest of the employees and how dare we accuse her! He then attempted to slam the door in our faces, but was prevented by me inserting my foot in the doorway. Jeff complained to Brian, the store director, not only saying that I (the corporate director was somehow absent from his complaint) accused his employee without cause, but that I kicked the door in. I gave Brian my side of the story. He didn't follow up, but I found out much later that he believed that I really did kick in the door. Ironically, the pharmacy employee in question was fired about a month later because it was discovered that she lied on her application. Jeff later walked out in the middle of a shift, leaving the pharmacy unlocked and unattended. It later came out that he was regularly verbally abusive to all his employees. On another occasion he was so out of control during an argument with Bill, slamming his fist on Bill's desk, that Bill's pen set came flying across the room. 

Well, anyway, Bill was gone, Matt K was in. At first he seemed like another "nice guy", but a workaholic. For the first month or so he worked seven days a week, 7:00am until at least 7:00pm (half day on Sunday though). I made him mad when I asked him if everything was alright at home! I was disabused of my perception of Matt as a pushover when he fired a few people within his first few weeks. He had no patience for people not doing their jobs or thumbing their noses at company policy. However, he had such an easygoing manner that when he fired people he made it sound as if it was the best thing to ever happen to them. The first employee that Matt fired was the overnight doughnut fryer. We'll call him Lou, since I can't remember his name. Well Lou was frying doughnuts one night when he slipped and ended up with his arm shoulder deep in the hot fryer oil, burning him pretty badly. Company policy was that every accident had to be reported, but company policy also required that everyone who was in an accident get a drug test. Lou, who was aware that he would fail a drug test, didn't call the manager in charge, but called his sister to come get him and take him to the emergency room, hoping to avoid that drug test. Shay, the Night Manager happened to be walking by the Bakery when she heard someone whimpering. Lou was on the floor, in a fetal position, on the phone with his sister. Shay let Brandi, his sister, take him to the ER, but now the accident was on the record and Lou had to get a drug test. Which he failed. When he came back to the store, healed enough to go back to work, Matt called him up to his office. Lou refused. The next thing we knew Matt's extremely pale complexion turned beet red and he stormed out of the office to confront Lou. Deb, the front end manager turned to me and said "I guess that's what he looks like when he's mad". Matt didn't make Lou think getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to him!

My only complaint about Matt was that his communication style was very indirect. I had gotten used to Bill, whose style was such that there was no mistaking what he meant in any situation. Matt was more about hinting. In the year that I worked with him I can't recall him ever telling me what to do, but after a while I learned to crack the "Matt Code". Sometimes I would just decide that if he couldn't be direct I wasn't going to try to decipher his intentions. My last Christmas Eve at Cornhusker a few of us decided to play our own Christmas music, rather than the Muzak, over the stores public address system. One of the CDs was Twisted Sister's Christmas CD. Matt would repeatedly skip the CD to the next one, but would not ask us to stop playing it, so every time he turned it off, I would work my way up front and turn it back on. This went on all day and he never said anything. 

One of Matt's first changes was to give me my own office, instead of having me continue to share an office with the Grocery Manager. He had the maintenance guy convert a storage closet into my office! 

It was during this time period when the corporate office decided to change the responsibilities of the Assistant Store Directors (ASDs). Up until then the ASD position was largely undefined. We were like the Vice President of the United States with very little written down about what we were supposed to be doing. What an ASD actually did depended on the individual ASD, the needs of the store and the expectations of the Store Director. Going forward the ASD was to be delegated direct authority over what the grocery business called "Center Store": the grocery, frozen foods, dairy, spirits and general merchandise departments. The Store Director still was responsible for the whole store, but the ASD's responsibility for center store was formalized. This changed my focus somewhat, since previously I had acted as a sort of manager-without-portfolio, spending my time cruising the store, looking for problems and troubleshooting. I could still do that, but I now had to think about annual performance reviews for the Center Store Managers, and keeping an eye on gross profit and labor hours much more than previously. 

ASDs, in addition to being Center Store Managers, were also the designated Safety Coordinators at their respective stores. This involved running a safety committee meeting each month where we would review any accidents to determine whether there was a safety issue that could be addressed or if the employee was simply negligent. We also looked at ongoing safety concerns and made recommendations for correcting them. ASDs were also responsible, as part of being Safety Coordinator, for training employees on the use of forklifts and pallet jacks. Ironic considering my several forklift accidents over the years! 

As anyone who shops in a grocery store knows, periodically "everything gets moved around". Not really, but the goal of a store reset is to optimize product placement, which does include moving a lot of things around. Sometimes it's spurred by a remodel, sometimes an attempt to change the shopping flow. When I first started with the company each store director was asked to send a couple of people to the store being reset. Usually it was someone who no one would miss for the day - a grocery clerk or a janitor. Around this time a new position had been created: Category Management Director. The Category Management Director's responsibility, among other things, to plan and oversee resets. Scott, the new director, got permission to make all the ASDs the permanent reset crew. Although none of really wanted to be out of the store for a week doing manual labor, it made sense. The ASDs were familiar with all aspects of center store, and were experienced enough to require little direct supervision. You could give any of us a planogram (a visual representation of what a section should look like) and we would get the job done without further explanation. I lost track of how many of these I did over the years; it was hard work, but a camaraderie developed among all the ASDs (especially the "ASD meetings" that took place in a nearby pub after the day was done). I can't move on from this section about resets without talking about the "gondola train". For some reason a row of shelving in a grocery store is called a gondola. Sometime a whole row has to be moved. Rather than disassembling and subsequently reassembling them, the gondola train was utilized. This handy tool consisted of a device that was similar to a jack on wheels. We'd place it under the load-bearing part of a section and jack it up slightly. Jacks were placed every 4 to 8 feet. Once all the jacks were in place we would simply push the whole aisle into position, one person every 8 feet. It's grocery poetry in motion!

Despite mandating a no nepotism policy, nepotism was tolerated when you were high enough in the organization. After all, it was a family-owned company! Jane Raybould, the Vice President of Buildings and Facilities, on paper answered to Tom Schulte, the Vice President of Operations, when in reality she reported to her brother Pat, the CEO. Tom also brought in his brother Tim to run the Floral and Front End Departments. There was a story about Tim, which I long thought apocryphal - supposedly Tim didn't understand the concept of nesting folders, or even folders on a desktop computer. Every file was saved right on his desktop screen until he ran out of room and called IT because he thought he couldn't save any more files. A few years later I met the one who was his administrative assistant at the time and was assured that it was true. Tim also overdid forwarding of emails. In general everyone at the corporate office was email crazy. A corporate office director would be in the store and notice an issue with the Floral department and send an email to the Floral manager and copy the store director and Tim. Tim would then forward the email that he was copied on, that clearly shows that the Floral manager and store director were copied on it, to the Floral manager and store director. As a bonus, he'd copy the forward to the company president and operations VP, who both would forward it to me. As a prank I set up an email rule whereby every email that I received, including automated alerts about our orders, was forwarded to Tim. I could definitely be a jerk sometimes. 

As Floral Director Tim set pricing and merchandising for the Floral departments. What he didn't understand was that Cornhusker, located as it was in a lower income neighborhood, didn't have many customers who were willing to pay a high price for flowers or plants. He would not allow us to mark them down, but directed us to throw them out. In order to make a point, Dorothy the Floral manager and I bought a grow lamp and put it in my office and started putting all the plants that we "threw away" in there. By the time I left it was like a jungle!  

One of the responsibilities that I took upon myself was doing the sales projections. Since the amount of money that each department, and the whole store, could spend on labor was based on a percentage of sales, this was a critical task. I suspect that many of the stores' projections were based on guesswork, but they definitely weren't in the stores I worked in. I created an Excel spreadsheet where I would create a store sales projection based partly on the sales from the same week the previous year. I would then adjust that number based on the percentage up or down that the store was trending over the previous four weeks. To project the sales for each individual department I would look at what percentage of total store sales the department sales represented the previous year and multiply the total store sales by that percentage; I would adjust those numbers up or down based on a four week trend. I would further take into account things like weather, ads, or changes in competition to come up with my final figures. All of this was embedded in various interlocking formulas.

Determining the amount of hours each department could schedule required some additional math. I would start with the already projected sales and multiply by the budgeted labor percentage - this would give me the dollars that could be spent. I would subtract the manager's salary and then divide the remainder by the average wage in that department, giving me the number of hours that could be scheduled in order to come in under budget. During holiday weeks I went a step further and projected sales for each day. Most of the time these projections were spot on. I remember one year a department manager was excusing his excessive number of "outs", claiming that he didn't know how busy it would be. When we compared the projected sales to the actual sales, they were almost exactly the same. I guess he did know how busy it would be! 

Ron S was a Store Director who was getting close to retirement. They "promoted" him to a corporate office position to make room for someone that had been recruited from outside the company. He had various tasks that he conducted on behalf of the various corporate directors. One week his mission was to come around and teach all the ASDs how to do sales projections. Years before some long forgotten programmer had created a feature to our primitive database that was supposed facilitate coming up with projections. The total store sales projection had to be hand entered every week. The budgeted percentage of sales for each department as well as their labor budget was entered at the beginning of each quarter. From this scant information the budgeted hours per department was calculated. It was definitely a blunt instrument and did not take into account what my Excel sheet did. On the afternoon when it was my turn for Ron to "teach" me, he walked me through the process as if it were software that could launch NASA rockets. I was already aware of this program and very aware of its shortcomings, especially the fact that not all departments were included and you couldn't add any, not to mention no way to adjust average wage. So I thanked Ron, told him that I was aware of how it worked and that I had a better method that I was using. Ron looked at me as if I had drowned his puppy and told me that he used it for years, and that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. Rather than argue with him further I simply went in and changed the total sales prediction each week, since I knew he'd be checking, and continued to use my spreadsheet for the actual projections. I had similar interactions with Ron over the years, I'll be revisiting him in the next article. But it's now time to move on. After six years at the 27th and Cornhusker Super Saver I was being transferred to the 27th and Pine Lake Super Saver.