the stampede of technological progress, part 4
After my brief flirtation with a Computer Science major, I plunged headlong into impractical artsy-fartsiness, and wound up with a degree in Dramatic Art. For twenty-some years, I had very little contact with computers. Somehow, technology managed to continue stampeding without me.
I caught a few glimpses of the herd along the way. It wasn’t always pretty. For a couple of years I worked for The Nature Company, when they were a relatively small business with a few stores around the SF Bay Area. Legend has it that the owner met somebody at a party who sold claimed he could painlessly set up a computer system which would track the inventory and ordering for the whole enterprise. We wound up with a woefully inadequate system which was a nightmare for all involved.
I worked in the warehouse, receiving books from the publishers and sending them to the stores. Before the computer, we had a paper-based inventory system which worked pretty well. As the computer system started up (in 1985), we wound up with two separate systems at the same time: the old system, and the computer data sheets. We didn’t get computers or terminals at our work stations, that would have been too expensive. Instead, in addition to a whole new set of paperwork, we had to individually mark each book with the price and a sku number. Since most books came with pre-printed prices, they didn’t need to be marked at all before. That was a lot of extra work. The new computer sheets went to the computer people while the rest of us used the old system.
During my tenure there, I saw no sign that the computer system might possibly ever work. From my perspective, it was just a lot of extra stupid work with no discernable benefit.
Later, I had another experience computerizing a retail store’s inventory system. This was at Palmer’s Camera in Berkeley. This was technically a simpler project—it was only one store—and technology had had another eight years or so to stampede along. This time, the technology sorta kinda worked.
I checked Google, and sure enough, the company that produced the software, The General Store, is still in business. It’s been many years, and TGS has no doubt improved through many versions. I assume/hope the TGS of 1992 bears little or no resemblance to the TGS of 2008.
TGS was the first time I had intimate congress with a database. I was doing all of the receiving and a good chunk of the purchasing for Palmer’s at the time, so I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the new system. We did get it to work well enough that it started to save work time, but it was a struggle. Part of the struggle was with TGS, part of it was with our own budget, and part of it was with technophobic staff members.
One of the TGS problems was that it couldn’t handle some of the complexities of our ordering. There were hundreds of items we got from more than one supplier, often at different prices. There were hundreds of items for which we got case lot discounts when we ordered in even case lots. There were other items for which we got discounts when we ordered more than a certain minimum number. TGS couldn’t handle the variables and never gave reliable wholsale amounts for our orders. If I needed to now, I could create a database system that could handle all of those variables, but it would be a pretty big job.
The basic relational database structure has been around since the late 1960s, and even with several thousand widgets to track, a system like this wouldn’t require all that much computing power. The computers and software of the day should have been able to work better than this—in fact, they could—but we had the econo models of both hard- and software.
Tags: stampede