By Bill Scott, President, StoreReport LLC

It was in the summer of 1984, 32 years ago, a time that preceded the commercial use of the Internet; when Microsoft Windows, Networking, Powerpoint, the World Wide Web, Web Browsers, E-mail, J-Peg images, Broadband, Google, Wi-Fi and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” were yet to materialize. My newest customer was an oil company/convenience store operation, owned by a man who had a powerful effect on my success in the business of selling, installing and programming computers for oil distribution companies, with or without convenience stores.

Back in the day, the computers you find in most businesses today, were used primarily for playing games, creating simple spreadsheets, word processing and light accounting work. Electrical toys, as many professional computer experts referred to them, “Real computers” sold for $125,000 ($230,000 in today’s money) or more, were delivered on 18-wheelers and unloaded using fork-lifts.

My new customer’s computer was typical of the latter. It was around five feet tall, nine feet in length, 2.5 feet wide and weighed 990 pounds, and that’s not counting the terminals, printers and cables that were necessary to make it work. We had to take the doors off the hinges to get it into the building. It had a 20-megabyte hard disk that had to be installed by two strong individuals, and for backup, there was an eight-inch floppy disk drive.

The owner’s wife was doing the accounting manually, his brother was in charge of the stores, his brother-in-law ran the fuel operations and built the convenience stores, and his nephew worked in the warehouse. The company was indeed a family run operation.

Burt (the owner’s father-in-law), was an energetic old man, liked by most of the staff, and Burt was a ‘jack-of-all-trades’. Mostly, Burt stayed over at the truck stop, located less than 100 feet from the main office. Burt kept the driveways and pumps clean, helped to stock the shelves, cleaned the floors and bathrooms and amused the employees with stories about his youth. Burt’s famous intro into any discussion was, “Well, when I was your age…,” you can add almost anything after that phrase, and with Burt, there was always an interesting story that followed.

The installation period took about 90 days. No one in the office had ever worked on a computer before, comparing computerized accounting to manual accounting with ledger books was as different as night and day, and new functions, which in the past had been too complicated to do manually, had to be learned. An example of the questions I confronted were similar to this:  “Which one of these keys do I mash to find out how much Texaco awl (sic) I sold last month.” Many times I heard, “Well we didn’t have to do this in the old system.” I’m sure you guys who have installed computers in the past will know what I am talking about.

One day, the owner and I walked over to the truck stop to inspect the store’s inventory. It was a large space for a convenience store, 3,000-4,000 square feet, and I suspected there were more than 5,000 unique items on the shelves, with a large stockroom and an office in the back.

It was around 3 p.m. on a hot summer’s day as the owner and I browsed the store and chatted about how well certain items were performing, when one of the clerks from over at the sales counter asked in a rich southern accent,  “Mr. K? How’s that computer ya’ll are putting in over at the office coming along?”

Now, you had to know the owner as I did to understand that he rarely missed an opportunity to pull an employee’s leg (so-to-speak). He looked over at me and gave me a wink, and then responded to the young lady’s query by saying, “Well, we been puttin’ all that stuff in the computer (typing on an imaginary keyboard), and (making circular motions in the air) it’s beginning to print it all out…,”  he paused. Then with a very serious change in his demeanor he added, “And it told us, there are three packs of Nabs and a pair of work gloves missing.”

The store fell into complete silence. I swear you could have heard a pin drop. After what seemed to be an eternity, a tiny, but surprisingly loud voice coming  from the office, shattered the silence with, “BURT STOLE THE GLOVES.”

That was the moment when I suddenly develop a fascination with the tremendous power of inventory. After that incident, shrink mysteriously dropped by 30%.