Loose Cannon: The Old Man and the Vitamin C
It was June, and the greengrocer’s son had returned home from business school. During the year he had written letters to his family displaying his new knowledge and asking which systems his father would let him introduce into the family store.
“So, how’s business?” He asked his father, when he walked through the produce market’s doors.
The old man shrugged. “I don’t have a fancy computer to help me cross-analyze buying habits like you want, my radishes are apparently too far from my cucumbers to facilitate same-basket buying, and I don’t even know what trigger-based marketing is, much less how to do it. So how can business be good?”
A woman entered the store, and he pointed at the stack of rhubarb she had headed for. “Wait,” the greengrocer said to her, “I got strawberries in the back.”
The youth felt pity for his father. “Wouldn’t an enterprise-wide data system make your life easier?” He asked. “Something that tracked the flow of your merchandise sales patterns?”
The old greengrocer pointed at his scale. “You want enterprise-wide? I got one machine here, and another one over by the carrots,” he said. “When you weigh, it spits out a little label. The label has pictures on it. If someone weighs truffles but puts in the price for bananas, I know when I ring them up. But you tell me I need a networked system, so how can business be good?”
The boy thought back to his lessons. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you captured customer names and addresses, so you could send them little reminders and special offers every now and then?” He said. “Think of all the extra money you could generate.”
The old man grimaced. “Maybe. But who has time to do all that phone calling and envelope licking? I get in a crate of cantaloupe on Monday, I know I can sell a crate of cantaloupe in two days, I get in another crate of cantaloupe on Wednesday, and I sell out by Friday. Could I pay you, Mr. MBA-to-be, to paste stamps and get people back in here to buy cantaloupe on Wednesday? I didn’t think so. So how can business be good?”
“All right, so you’re not computerized, you don’t do any shopping cart analysis that would provide detailed reports on what produce people are buying in what combinations, and you’re not doing anything to build traffic,” the youth said. “So given all that, how’s business?”
The old man looked at his son. “We’re in a recession, and people are cooking more at home now than they have in a decade,” he said. “It’s never been better.”
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