"Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot" - Chapter 92

“What if we started havin, like, an Employee of the Month?” Shad suggests, from his chair in the last row, “then we could give them an incentive, maybe an incentive for the month, somethin like a parkin space by the front door...”

“Yeah, I think we're gonna park that, for the time being,” Rob wisecracks, meaning not write it down or follow up on it, from his post at the front of the room.

So begins, more or less, this highly inclusive meeting of the minds, in the conference area at Central. With three rows of chairs, arranged in a loose arc, Rob standing in front of a white board, Friendly HR seated beside him writing things down in a legal pad. They have kicked things off by encouraging anybody at all to speak up with ideas on what needs to be improved at the Healthy Shopper Market. This one is apparently considered not all that pressing – which does make sense, considering many of the other topics bandied about.

“Can we not, like, start hiring some better people?” Vicky Fisher suggests, with her familiar, somewhat queasy looking half smile, “the quality of help we're bringing on board here, I mean...all I can say is, seriously?”

“If you worked here six or seven years ago, you wouldn't be complaining, trust me,” Edgar jokes. Well, it's a joke in the sense that everyone laughs, anyway. He then adds, “we had some scary, scary dudes working here back then...”

“Dudettes?” Rob questions, and everyone cracks up all over again.

“Yeah, and dudettes,” Edgar agrees.

Vicky doesn't necessarily look convinced, although her original question is somewhat lost, as somebody else pipes up with what's at the root of all this. “I think we're gonna have to start paying people more, if we expect to hire quality help, and keep them around.”

“This is something we've already made a decision to address,” Friendly HR notes, glances up at Rob, who nods in agreement. Speaking to the entire room, she adds, “we've made the decision that this is gonna be one of our top priorities, we're gonna take a good look at what the industry standards are as far as pay for the various positions, you know, and try to get more in line with that.”

“Okay because, like, I know for a fact,” some relatively new cashier from Central says, “the kid pushing in the carts at Whole Foods makes eleven dollars an hour, to start! How we gonna compete with that?”

A chorus of murmured agreement floats through the room, as others are aware of this point. Still others gasp in astonishment, some shake their heads, although each of these reactions pale and are forgotten in the wake of Shad's. Up to this moment, he'd been leaning back in his metal chair, its front two feet in the air, hands crossed atop his stomach. Once this cashier's comment reaches his ears, however, he abruptly lurches forward, the chair's feet and his own smacking the floor with a loud thud.

“The dude pushing in the carts at Whole Foods makes eleven bucks an hour!?”

“Yeah...,” the original commentator says, smiling and nodding, as a handful of others also echo this sentiment.

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwww maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn........,” Shad groans, wearily shaking his own head, appearing genuinely crestfallen. He doesn't come right out and so say, but the implications are pretty obvious, that this assistant store manager at Healthy Shopper Market does not make eleven dollars an hour.

As the room erupts with nervous laughter, Rob offers a good natured attempt at restoring order. “Okay, okay,” he says, holding up one hand and smiling, “right, well, like Carla said, we are taking a look at adjusting the pay rates here, so just bear with us. I would say, this, though: we have to be realistic.”

So judging from this comment alone, it's already shaping up as a probably not quite earth shattering pay bump they are looking at. Then Rob adds what will likely become his all-time most notorious quote, which is, “you can't save the world if you go out of business.”

Already some plainly consider this a ridiculous sentiment, and that will only increase after the meeting breaks and they have a chance to compare notes with one another. But Edgar understands where this guy is coming from. While you don't exactly want to start breaking out the violins for what is a fairly wealthy business owner, at the same time, he has a point. They hit their high water mark of five stores some two and a half years ago. They are now down to three. If everyone involved gets a huge raise without the company seeing any increase in profit or productivity, then where are they?

Carla reiterates what they've just said about trying to get in line with industry averages, though, before moving on. Edgar can't be the only one whose thoughts linger behind, though, thinking now only about what Rob said, but its counterargument. He might have a point, okay, but how much does this matter to most of the employees? A small percentage are dedicated lifers who would stick around no matter what. The rest are probably wondering why they wouldn't just jump ship to a place that pays better for doing the exact same job.

There are no easy answers to this predicament. Ideally you would hope that HSM begins trending upward again, because treading water isn't sustainable. In the meantime, sure, they likely need to not only act on this bit about “adjusting” (read: increase) the pay somewhat, to get more in line with industry standards. But as on ongoing concern, it seems that you would have to get more proactive somehow with identifying who your key players were, and rewarding them accordingly, in place of this prescribed yearly review business, with its token, barely keeping pace with inflation raise if they are lucky.

Moving on to additional points, Tosha, the new hire onboarding woman, raises her hand and asks if there's anything they can do to speed up the process for getting applicants approved. Her point is that it generally takes so long for this process to complete itself, between receiving the application, interviewing, the store deciding they want to hire this person, a background check, followed by a drug test, that by this point weeks have gone by and in all likelihood the candidate has already given up and gone elsewhere.

So Carla makes note of this. Edgar then has one relatively benign suggestion of his own, which is that they begin working on typing up formal instructions on how to do things around the store, and keep these in a binder. He explains that most of the information has been passed along by “urban legend” through the years, to the extent that there's no tracing the source for some of these processes now, and anyway there are a lot of wacky theories and just plain incorrect procedures circulating. Not to mention that if someone who does know what they're doing happens to leave, those left behind are quite often screwed. Responses range from indifferent to vaguely receptive, although the next question – as expected – becomes who will work on this, then? He volunteers, although Sharon also pipes up and says she's happy to collaborate with him on this.

Yet possibly his favorite point of the day is introducing by one of the girls working in deli at Central. It's something he attempted sorting out briefly, before giving up in the wake of conflicting, unrealistic, or just plain nonsensical answers: the mileage issue. That was over two years ago, though, and he hasn't said a peep about it since.

This girl, along with a handful of others over there in the deli, is an hourly employee often tasked with running food over to the Arcadia store. They have a company driver, Gary, but he crisscrosses the state for everything from apples to bottled water and can't exactly twiddle his thumbs waiting to haul lunch offerings across town every day. So they're the ones tasked with doing so, but the problem is that this journey of about 17 miles, round trip, typically eats up an hour.

“So, I mean...we're only getting 38 cents a mile...”

“That's actually set by the government,” Rob interjects.

“...yeah but, I feel that's not really realistic, not when you consider the gas and the wear and tear on your car, plus Destiny tells us we're technically supposed to clock out when we make these trips?”

“Yeah, um, that's for insurance reasons, uh, you're not really allowed to be on the clock when you're driving between stores,” Carla concurs.

“Okay so that's even worse,” the girl says, “because then we're actually losing money for this trip. So then we'd either have to stay over later to make up for the hours, or...”

“Well and plus we're missing one employee right in the middle of the day when they make these runs,” Vicky adds.

“Yeah so see I feel like we either need to be paid more for these trips or...get another driver or...something...”

Friendly HR looks up at Rob, who glances down to make eye contact with her. They shrug and as Carla jots down a note about this, agreeing that they will take a look at that as well. Although Edgar's already thinking that what will probably happen on that front is approximately nothing – unless maybe they just decide to stop taking fresh deli offerings over to Arcadia entirely, or only when Gary or Vicky are able to. As for him, he stopped turning in mileage clear back when Corey was hassling him about everything in the known universe. Since then he has adhered to this strategy of remaining on the time clock to compensate for it. And nobody has ever said a word to him about this.

In other developments, there's a miniature ceremony for the grand unveiling of Valerie's mission statement, which has been typeset on a thick, foam padded placard, black type and a light grey background, with the company logo up top. These are to hang in every store, as soon as they order more than just this prototype. Instead of inviting the author to dictate her handiwork, however, the HR representative, now standing, does the honors.

“Who came up with this?” Mr. Locke grouses, from his middle seat. “You shouldn't use words like comprehensive. That just sounds pretentious.”

A smattering of chuckles pop around the room, but that's about the extent of his comment's impact. He might be company founder and still a 4% owner, but has by this advanced age clearly sailed into figurehead land. They will smile and nod, give him patronizing pats on the shoulder, but that's about it. After all, if they've yet to act on his highly informed and quite valid comments about the cramped Arcadia shelving, then this mission statement will remain intact as well.

It's only after the meeting breaks that Edgar stumbles into the day's sole truly important discovery, at least for him. Indeed, the epiphany presented to him today – presented being the key word, because it's not as though he can take credit for this – will count as one of the all-time game changers. As always, it arrives out of nowhere, and proves yet again of what might happen if you just get together with someone and shoot the breeze.

In this instance, it's because Reece Leibovitz, their accountant, has about an hour to kill, and is curious to see what Edgar's job entails. Though speaking on the phone often when he was the AP person, though she was the one who hired him, essentially, via that GoToMeeting video conference, this is their first time meeting in person. She gave him a maxed out performance review (all 3s on a scale of 0-3) during her year and a half as his boss, but admits with a throaty, cigarette tar drenched laugh that she has no idea what his current position entails, this data coordinator business, and is wondering how it plays into the grand scheme of things.

So they decamp to his office for a little less than an hour this afternoon. She will be in town again tomorrow, but plans on spending the entirety of this one at Bellwether, analyzing that operation, and meeting Glenda Jackson for the first time as well. With the two of them crowded in behind his desk – thankfully, Barbara hasn't felt the need to attend this charming little conference today – he shows her the various procedures in play, how he goes about determining departments, tax rates, retails, EBT settings, and so on, for their existing and newly added items, depending upon the situation. At one point he demonstrates how he downloads the latest Universal Foods file, applies a markup based on their own internal margin, by department, rounds that figure, then uses his favorite formula to see which retails have changed. At this last point, Reece throws up a flag.

“No, don't do that,” she says.

“Don't do that?” he questions, “but I need to compare last month versus this month. This formula also shows me what's not in the new file, which means it's been discontinued. And it really doesn't take all that long.”

“Oh no, I hear ya. Lemme show what I do instead, though. I just use a plug-in,” she states.

“A plug-in?”

Telling him what website to visit, as he does so, she first suggests that he hit Vince or Rob up for the whopping $25 licensing fee. Then thinks better of it, says, “tell ya what,” and whips out her own corporate credit card, pays for the license herself, which is good on up to five different devices. And so this is that flip switching moment. While he doesn't regret learning a bunch of different formulas, because it's been a highly educational experience, and advanced his knowledge in ways that it wouldn't have otherwise, this plug-in is certainly way easier. Made by some no-name offbrand company, it just attaches itself as another tab to Excel. Basically, you declare which two columns you want to compare in which two spreadsheets, click OK a couple of times, and it drops the result into the destination of your choosing. Awesome.

“Oh my god! That's amazing!” he enthuses, and can't stop thanking her enough. She offers a hearty, nicotine stained cackle and says that he's quite welcome.