Shelby's Life and Whatnot

Inventory

Inventory. For those of you who have worked retail, the word makes a shudder go through your body. For those of you who have never worked in retail, the word sounds like something you'd do to check with your internal feelings about an issue. The latter is far easier.

This is my first time in retail and so I got roped into doing inventory. Inventory is where you count every single object in the entire store. Keep in mind that our store generates over 10 million dollars in revenue a year--you can imagine that's a lot of merchandise. Is it.

My inventory shift was the final push. Others had been doing smaller inventory jobs but our crew (of 9) was to make sure that everything was indeed counted. The actual process was easier than I thought it was going to be. Each fixture had a handy bar-coded sticker (and by "fixture" I mean the actual fixtures on the floor in addition to individual bins and boxes on the shelves) and we had handy bar-code guns. You'd scan the fixture number in, then scan the SKU (price tag) of the item, then count said item and enter it in to the gun. Then you closed the fixture and had to re-enter the total number of items to make it balance. If it didn't balance you had to start over again.

Concrete example. Let's say you have a bin of white tennis shoes. You'd scan in the fixture (bin), then scan the tennies and count them (let's say 10), then hit the close fixture button, enter the number of items in the bin (10), and you're done. However, it got complicated. You have a bin of white tennis shoes (10 of them), but also in the bin are some black loafers (say 6) which you have to scan and count, and unfortunately for you there are 2 pairs of purple sandals and 7 pairs of bunny slippers. So once you've scanned the tennies, the loafters, the purple sandals, and the bunny slippers, then you have to close the fixture and enter the total number of items in the bin--in this case it would be 10+6+2+7--25. So when you had multiple different items in a fixture, you had to keep a running total on a piece of scratch paper of the number of items you have counted, because of course once you've entered it, you can't go back and see it again.

I had one nightmare bin--NIGHTMARE. The bin held very, very small items. 429 very, very small items, to be exact. They all needed to be counted individually. Worse--I had to count this bin THREE TIMES because I kept getting out of balance. Yes, I counted 1,287 items in a single bin. Yikes.

We had to do this at night, of course. I started my shift at 10:00 pm and got home at 5:00 am. I went straight to bed but woke up at 10am this morning. I anticipate a nap in my very near future.