repent, yea verily i say, repent, for the day of inventory approacheth!

[edenfalling]

Inventory day, for those who have not had the dubious pleasure of reading my complaints over the years, is where we manually count every salable item in the smoke shop. And by manually, I mean with actual pencils on actual paper, because aside from the lottery system, we are technologically mired in the 1970s. (Yes, that does mean we don't accept credit cards -- we have neither the physical machinery nor the necessary agreements with any credit companies -- which can on occasion be difficult to convince customers of, especially when they swear they paid with a card just last week, no really they did! (No really, they didn't. *headdesk*))

Anyway, we used to do inventory semi-annually, around the second or third of January and then again at the start of July. But Mr. Speakerphone has decided that this is not frequent enough and allows discrepancies to creep into the financial accounts, so henceforth we will do inventory on a quarterly basis.

(My two cents on the issue is that if he invested in a computerized inventory system and a barcode scanner, most of the discrepancies would vanish just like that, but of course that costs too much when he can order us to do extra work instead. Gnrgh.)

So tomorrow I will head in to work from 9am to 2pm and COUNT ALL THE THINGS. Or at least the things that other people will not be counting and which I didn't already count tonight, because PM likes me to get a head start when possible and I like her not to be pissed off at me (and inventory can induce a hair-trigger temper in the kindest of souls, which is not a category either PM or I qualify for, alas).

Oh well, at least we get free pizza and one beverage out of the madness.

Comments

[branchandroot]

*shakes head* the more I hear about the owner, the more I think the guy is a total whackjob. I mean, if he wants this shop to make money, a /little/ capital investment seems in order.

[edenfalling]

I do not disagree at all that he is a strange, strange man. But! The thing is, we are actually a small and ancillary part of his business -- what his company (it is a private family-owned company) mainly does is distribute newspapers and magazines over the Southern Tier and some of the Finger Lakes regions in New York. But because of the way the publishing industry works, if he wants to distribute popular magazines A, B, and C to grocery stores and Wal-Marts and so on, he also has to take copies of the rest of the publisher's magazine line -- magazines D through Z, so to speak, most of which are niche and/or porn -- and then he has the choice of either letting them languish in a warehouse for a couple months OR owning a specialty magazine shop and maybe getting a little extra money for his trouble. So he owns two magazine shops. His main focus has always been on the distribution contracts.

Even so, yeah, there is no question that we could be doing better than we currently are if we made a few simple changes. *sigh*

[branchandroot]

*rueful* Yeah, not a recipe for getting much attention paid to making it a healthy and growing concern. Ah, well.

[sabriel]

I know your pain. My office is still doing IT hardware inventory manually too. Which means, once every quarter, my co-worker and I divide up the flour to count all the desk phones by hand. This is further complicated that some departments keep an extra phone hidden away for 'guests'. And then there's the software inventory that's STILL a mess, and computer inventory....

[edenfalling]

Oh dear...

[sabriel]

Sadly, this situation is not going to change any time soon.