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Last night the inventory crew came in and thoroughly trashed counted all the items on the salesfloor. They were there until about 1 in the morning, which is pretty fast. There have been times in the past when they were still in the store at 4 in the morning.
Today came the part of inventory that is about as much fun as sandpapering your body, rolling around in salt, and soothing your wounds soaking in a tub of raw sewage: Reconciliation!
Reconciliation is when you are given sheets listing all the items where the inventory count, as taken by the stock people and the inventory crew, was significantly different from what our computer system says we have on hand. You then have to go to all the locations each item is located in, recount them, and either confirm the count as taken, or write down what you actually counted in each location to get a new count. If the salesfloor people didn't straighten the floor worth a shit, or the inventory crew turned out to be an even bigger collection of fucktrumpets than normal, or any one of 921,674,782 other things went wrong, you can end up with a dictionary-sized tome of pages of items needing to be double-checked, and you can spend all day doing reconciliation in addition to your normal customer service duties. It's fun. Really it is.
So today I was assigned to do reconciliation, in two of the worst areas of the store possible. First I had to do school supplies. This meant counting all the rolled-up posters we have in 1,639 different spots in school supplies, electronics, apparel and elsewhere because they are considered impulse buys. Took me about 45 minutes to track them all down and re-count them, and I still ended up about 75 short of what the computer said we should have. Oh well.
Then it was out to lawn and garden. The lawn and garden people got a late start on their reconciliation because a truck came in. Apparently, when we told all our vendors we wouldn't be accepting deliveries yesterday or today, that didn't apply to the nursery, because they sent a truck away and the driver had been waiting at the store since 5 in the morning for somebody to come out and unload his trailer.
So anyhow, counting out in lawn and garden turned out to be a super King Kamehameha bi-atch because of the following:
And to top it all off, none of us knew anything about plants and we had people asking us questions about plants. I ended up having a lady flip out on me because I didn't know where the peonies were.
Oh well, at least it's all done. Doing the truck tomorrow will seem like a relief.
Today came the part of inventory that is about as much fun as sandpapering your body, rolling around in salt, and soothing your wounds soaking in a tub of raw sewage: Reconciliation!
Reconciliation is when you are given sheets listing all the items where the inventory count, as taken by the stock people and the inventory crew, was significantly different from what our computer system says we have on hand. You then have to go to all the locations each item is located in, recount them, and either confirm the count as taken, or write down what you actually counted in each location to get a new count. If the salesfloor people didn't straighten the floor worth a shit, or the inventory crew turned out to be an even bigger collection of fucktrumpets than normal, or any one of 921,674,782 other things went wrong, you can end up with a dictionary-sized tome of pages of items needing to be double-checked, and you can spend all day doing reconciliation in addition to your normal customer service duties. It's fun. Really it is.
So today I was assigned to do reconciliation, in two of the worst areas of the store possible. First I had to do school supplies. This meant counting all the rolled-up posters we have in 1,639 different spots in school supplies, electronics, apparel and elsewhere because they are considered impulse buys. Took me about 45 minutes to track them all down and re-count them, and I still ended up about 75 short of what the computer said we should have. Oh well.
Then it was out to lawn and garden. The lawn and garden people got a late start on their reconciliation because a truck came in. Apparently, when we told all our vendors we wouldn't be accepting deliveries yesterday or today, that didn't apply to the nursery, because they sent a truck away and the driver had been waiting at the store since 5 in the morning for somebody to come out and unload his trailer.
So anyhow, counting out in lawn and garden turned out to be a super King Kamehameha bi-atch because of the following:
- We had to recount all the pallets of soil, landscaping rock, cow shit, etc. To do this accurately we'd have to take every single bag off the pallets, count them individually, and then return them to the pallets. We just said "aw fuck it", assumed that the pallets were stacked in layers of 4 or 5 or whatever, and counted them that way.
- The inventory crew counted about 3,400 4-packs of flowers. The computer said we should about 1,000 more. We have racks and racks full of them.
- Because the lawn and garden people were busy with the truck, we ended up having to yank people off the salesfloor to help count out there. None of these people knew where anything was, or how to even do reconciliation, so it was pretty much the blind leading the blind out there.
And to top it all off, none of us knew anything about plants and we had people asking us questions about plants. I ended up having a lady flip out on me because I didn't know where the peonies were.
Oh well, at least it's all done. Doing the truck tomorrow will seem like a relief.
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