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.