Let’s Talk About Bean Counting
Completely unrelated to anything, I did some fiddling with the site’s CSS the other day to fix some issues I have with this theme’s formatting for posts. It’s entirely possible those code changes have borked some manual formatting done on posts up to this point, but I don’t really want to know. This is the first post-change post, so I’m curious to see if this will now default correctly. But anyway.
I left the theater to go back to school, and started working hours at Best Buy to bring in some change while studying. Ever see ‘Office Space’? The bit at the end where Ron Livingston is doing construction on the side of the road, that’s what I like to refer to when people ask, “what do you do?” This isn’t my career, but a gig to serve a set of needs. It’s been a few years now – this writing is part of the broader effort to do something with the schooling that pulled me into Best Buy in the first place – and I have been avoiding responsibility for other people at every possible turn.
My brand of leadership has always been applauded by my staff, but it’s always been seen by my superiors as a challenge. Some of that is because I can take on a lot, and that capability means credibility. Some is because many “leaders” are insecure and shallow and need for the only credibility in the room to be theirs. I generally see a big part of my job as making it easier for my boss to do theirs, but another part is applying myself and fixing stuff that I can fix.
But sometimes things are intentionally broken, for reasons that were only good in that moment, or were only good to a single person.
And there are systems at Best Buy that I disagree with, but they didn’t hire me to fix them. If I were in a leadership role, if I were getting paid actual leadership money, that would be different. ACTUAL leadership money (vs management money, which I’m not making either) actually pays for the indignity of working in broken rooms while you’re fixing them, and that makes a big difference. For all that I struggled to right Pacific and correct for bad habits across the entire chain, I was still struggling to put food on the table and gas in the car. Providing for that kind of prosperity – to a community of peers incapable of returning the favor and a leadership of millionaires unwilling to return the favor – while receiving so little in return is just bad math.
My first few months were just helping with merchandising. Cleanup, updating, etc. Really just hanging out and doing simple work for a few bucks. But because I’m me, I made an impression. Best Buy has inventory roles at each building, one person whose job it is just to count to stuff and make corrections to system data. That one person is the arbiter of the site’s product shrink- if not for them comparing sales to actual, the website is selling products that don’t exist, customers are looking for products that the site says are in stock but aren’t. They were the store SWAT, and I still have no idea what SWAT stood for. It was seriously 40 hours a week of just counting things.
It was glorious.
It was finding lost things, which is fun. It was solving puzzles, which is fun. It wasn’t helping customers, which is fun. It was working by myself, which is fun. It was also an unintentional highlight on a par with the theft recovery at AMC or the payroll correction at Pacific.
I’m not going to give numbers, but suffice it to say that buildings are expected to lose X amount of money every year due to straight-up theft. The goal is always zero but the budget is always more realistic. In practice with my SWAT work, that number was divided by 52 and that was what we could afford to lose every week. The products tracked were determined at the corporate level on a set of recurring cycles. Some categories of product would be counted every other week, some every other month, etc. Whatever the differences were, that was the shrink figure for the week, if the number was over that expected average the GM would be getting a stern call from Someone Important.
On the last week of the inventory year, a complete count would be performed of all the product in the entire building and compared to expected figures. That last full inventory had the same target number as each of the previous 51 weeks, so in some ways it’s a big roll of the dice, fitting a building-wide variance into a partial/weekly-sized bucket. The count takes dozens of staff hours to complete, and the numbers are crunched overnight and returned for review the next day.
Walking in that next day, I had no idea what to expect. I knew the process was a validation of whether or not my work had been done well/correctly for the previous year, but I had no expectations for targets or next steps. My manager and supervisor were talking about how close or far previous years had come, but “good” or “bad” was a bit of a mystery so I asked.
Again, I’m making up numbers here, but I’ll keep them propotional for reference.
“Anything over a $5000 variance means automatic recounts.”
We gathered around the printer while the warehouse manager had a look at the summary.
“$1000!”
This was at 6am, we were all there early just to have time for the recounts that were always necessary. In previous years at least. My supervisor threw up his hands in celebration, “I’m going back home!”
THAT was a job done well. That was a year of weekly cycle counts that kept the records so thoroughly close to actual that a full-building inventory turned out with a LOWER variance than the 51 component weeks that had preceded it.
It was in fact so incredible and unrealistic that we were stuck doing double-counts anyway because the regional guy wanted to see proof for his own eyes. Three of us spent the next day – 24 hours in total – proving me right. The needle moved off the 1/5th mark but stayed well under the target despite his every effort.
All in my day’s work.
About The Author
davetwsprocket
Dave didn't get the memo until, like, just now. He is capable with arranging words, but only just getting started at getting those words to actually do anything. He is motivated by a disrespect for authority, and towards finally doing what's right. He's good with people, but that's a learned skill- his natural inclination is to be far, far away. He's a Leo.