I took about four deep breaths and tried to relax; the GRAND OPENING was over !!!
It all started four weeks earlier when the great minds at the corporate office on the east coast decided that our company needed a change in image. The announcement came down: YOUR STORE WILL BECOME A WAREHOUSE GROCERY STORE.
Okay, I said to myself, no sweat. We are going to change our 9,000 square foot store into a warehouse outlet. Should be as easy as getting bacon from a chicken. All the prices on everything in the store would have to be changed. No problem you say; just change the master computer. Uh o, no computer, it’s the early 70’s and the class 5 register is still king. You know the one with the two keys , A & B and the two cash drawers also interestingly enough A & B. Ah yes the days when the Naderites ruled the pricing direction in grocery stores. When consumers weren’t smart enough to remember the price tag on the shelf molding. (The Naderites’ philosophy, not mine.)
Off to the races: close the store, paper the windows and begin to take off the old price and put on the new price on every can, box and assorted package you can think of. All the prices should go down if we are going from a conventional grocery store to a warehouse concept. The easy way to change prices would have been to simply put a line through the old price and mark the new price below it. That procedure would have allowed the customer to see how much money they were saving from the old format. I should have known that this idea made too much sense. After all, format changes from conventional to warehouse meant all lower prices. I learned that at ISU in econ 101. I had minored in economics and psychology to go along with my management major. It was in econ 430 /530 a senior / graduate class that I learned about the famous “Cow Web Theory”. Our instructor was a PHD from Columbia University, who had trouble saying the word cobweb. He could spell it, he could diagram it, but when he spoke it came out Cow Web. I thought I was using the wrong book for the first two weeks of class, because I couldn’t find Cow Web in my book. The only way I got straightened out was back in the dorm when a fellow from Long Island pointed out all the Cow Webs in my room. It’s true; you don’t learn everything from the classroom. But I digress.
Back at the grocery five of us planned our strategy. The oldest member of our group had the best strategy, he decided to “hurt his back” on the first day of our three week adventure. Then the youngest member’s class schedule mysteriously changed and he was not available to help. That left 60% of the workforce to do the job. And what a job it was, because we found out to our disbelief that many of the prices actually went up and so the tumbling downward direction came to entire remove the old price before putting the new price on each and every unit. You will remember the type of packaging that is in a grocery store. There are: glass bottles, plastic bottles, cellophane bags, paper bags, plastic bags, tin cans, aluminum cans, steel cans, cardboard boxes, plastic coated boxes, etc. You see where I’m going, don’t you? With all that type of packaging, you had several physical types of prices. There were: paper labels, ink stamped on by band stamps, ink placed on by dowel stamps, and of course the ever popular, “unremovable” stickers. Now to get rid of the old prices you had some options: remove with a harsh smelling liquid call appropriately price remover fluid. This fluid only worked on aluminum cans, when you came to a steel can or a steel lid you had to get out a piece of steel wool and scratch off the price while pouring on this smelly fluid. The usual result was cut fingers, burnt lungs and a crappy looking can or lid. Boy do I miss those days !!! About as much as I miss having another appendectomy. So much for the easy price change, let’s move on to the cardboard box and cellophane packaging. Sometimes these two items got priced with a band stamp, dowel stamp or the new fangled label gun. With the first two mentioned prices the only way was to take a black marker and obliterate the old price and take the new fangled label gun and “shoot” a label over the top of the blotch you just put on the product. Now for product that had a label on it, you had two pieces of equipment to choose from. The first was a Teflon piece of plastic that resembled the work end of a spatula. This Teflon price remover worked about as good as a sweeper that has the brushes working but no vacuum. You got some of the label, but not all. A lot of it went up your thumb or fingernail as you scraped it off with your hands. I compare the productivity rate to typing this story with my elbows. The second more advanced label remover looked like a miniature trowel sheathed in a plastic pouch with some sort of slick liquid on it. I was always afraid to ask what the slick stuff was. It remains a mystery to this very day. This was a better tool for getting the entire label; the drawback was this tool was razor sharp on the edges and many time you would cut yourself or even worse you would cut the package open.
Well there you have it, the most time consuming part of the transformation; removing all the old prices. Of course once the old price was removed, the new price then was placed on the package. After the first day, I knew we were in trouble of getting the job done in time. Only one thing to do, call the District Manager and explain that 40% of my work force was gone and could he send me maybe one or two folks from some of the larger stores. This met with little empathy for the District Manager was known for not liking “college boys” who got promoted earlier than the boys who worked their way up. I couldn’t understand why my DM took this view with me, since I worked in high school and worked my way through college all with this same company. It was as if he had flipped an attitude switched when I received my B.S. So after listening to numerous explanations as to why it would be impossible to get some help, I was left with some great advise: “you’ll just have to work harder”. HARDER wasn’t possible so being a college boy, I decided that LONGER would have to do. After two weeks in excess of a hundred hours each week, I had a mysterious knock at the front door. You remembered that all the windows and doors were papered over. Could it be the competition come to get a peek at what we were doing? Could it be my DM with some help? Could it be my mother to see if I was still standing after two torturous weeks? No it was a stranger in a suit with a nametag that identified this distinguished looking older gentleman as an executive of my company. I didn’t recognize the name, but I opened the door. He identified himself and said that he had been in our area for a couple of months and had been working incognito to get an idea of what things were really like. He said he had been living down the street from my store and came in to see how close I was to the schedule for the Grand Opening. He toured the store and after having assessed the situation told me that it appeared I had five days of work with only four days remaining. I told him we would be ready for the opening. What came next has had a marked impact on my psyche to this very day. He said and I quote: “It doesn’t look like you are personally putting enough time into this project” He could have told me I was sloppy, that I smelled bad, or that some of the signs were crooked. But he shouldn’t have told this college boy that working in excess of a hundred hours a week was not putting enough time into this project. The first thing I did was to reach for my store keys and drop them into his hand and said that if a hundred hours a week was not enough, then I was not the man for this job. His mouth dropped open similar to a hippopotamus yawning. When he finally closed his jawbones he said he maybe spoke to soon. No kidding? The next day 5, yes 5 assistant managers showed up at my store with instructions for me to go take two days off and rest up for the Grand Opening.
What could possibly top the three-week experience that I had just endured? Sales were great on Grand Opening day and being a college boy I decided that I had better make some bank deposits several times during the day. You just never know what can happen when you are doing this much business. It was about fifteen minutes before closing and fifteen minutes after I had made the final bank deposit that the robbery occurred. I never saw the guy with the blue steel revolver, but he must have been very discouraged to only come up with about $80 for his risk. After nearly being run down by the police trying to show them the way customers said the crook went, I sat on the curb of the sidewalk outside the front of my store and smiled inwardly and thought about the old adage, WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, ………..
