Getting my goat

Nov. 3, 2016
It’s never a good sign when you drive up to your local Dick’s Sporting Goods store early in the morning before traditional business hours and notice a full parking lot with two squad cars near the front entrance. It’s like the Chicago Cubs won the World Series or something. Oh wait…

So I skedaddle into the building hoping to score a few Cubs T-shirts before the pesky crowds arrive (which I expected to happen around lunch hour). Too late. The panoramic scene before me resembled a cross between the Bridal Gown sale at Filene’s Basement in Boston and Billy meandering home through the neighborhood for supper after playing just two houses down in the cartoon “Family Circus.” Underneath the red, white and blue balloon arch commemorating the Cubs’ historic, milestone achievement were two 30-foot-long rows of tables piled high with stacks of different styles of T-shirts, shirts and hats as hordes of suburban fans – obviously taking early lunches from work – nosed, nudged and shouldered their way around each other like locusts. They clawed and pawed for the proper sizes at what had been neatly arranged stacks of linen, leaving rumpled piles in their wake like your teenaged son’s bedroom floor with the empty laundry hamper in the corner.

A police officer, standing stoically off to the side, eyes darting back and forth, his hands gripping his belt of weapons, hardly cracked a smile until I broke him of his beefeater pose with a few innocent comments and questions. It turns out he’d been on duty since 1 a.m. ahead of the store opening at 3 a.m. when the lines started.
With my merchandise in hand, I embarked on a winding tour through all of the nooks and crannies of the store, treading on carpet in spots that probably hadn’t felt shoe soles in a long time and retained that “fresh-floor smell.” (Sadly, I’m referring to the Bears and White Sox merchandise sections, but I digress.) I finally found the back of the line that was growing faster than you could spread the flu virus from coughing with an open mouth. Yes, right next to women’s socks way in the back.
As our queue of about 300 people – and growing by the minute – slowly slithered through the store, my new line-mates and I (who created our own impromptu “live” social network to pass the time) could only chortle as we noticed three or four store “managers” scurrying around the racks of ignored non-Cubs merchandise, trying not to make eye contact with any of the customers winding throughout the building. (We surmised they were managers because their lanyards read “Coach” on them, and they were pointing and talking as if trying to look busy doing nothing while their employees were overheating the few working cash registers at the front of the store.) Most amusing: The FedEx semi-trailer pulled up alongside the other entrance to the store, which was closed off to better manage foot traffic. (By the way, another “Coach” stood by those doors to direct people to the other doors on the other side of the building.)
We joked about storming the truck and offering cash for the Cubs merchandise as there was so little looting, pillaging and rioting in Wrigleyville last night. Some suburb just had to pick up the publicity baton and run with it, you know? We schemed about grabbing all the discarded merchandise along the way by impatient customers, paying for what we could gather and then scalping it on the street outside the store for a 10 percent or 20 percent markup. But alas, we retained our self-control. We already had invested 60 minutes of our morning for a few commemorative T-shirts, so what’s another 30 or so of inching along for another 200 meters to enter the Promised Land of Purchasing? Besides, we were just happy to be ahead of all those people still waiting by women’s socks.

When we finally arrived at the checkout counters – several of which were folding tables sagging at the center – we high-fived one another and stepped up to check out. This is where it turned interesting from a supply chain perspective. None of the merchandise carried a bar code or any kind of radiofrequency identification chip or tag. Instead, the cashier had to visually inspect each item and then thumb through a stapled packet of paper, each sheet sporting an image of a product with a bar code printed next to it. When he matched the item in his hand with the corresponding image in the packet, he scanned the bar code. Time-consuming, indeed. When I asked him why each item didn’t have a bar-code label affixed to it he replied that the merchandise had arrived this morning and was expected to move too quickly to justify marking each item. Of course, had the Cubs lost to the Indians, all this pre-printed merchandise would have been shipped to Africa and remote parts of Asia for distribution anyway, so I partially understood the oversight. I still thought this retail outlet could have configured a better, more efficient system for point-of-sale progress because they had at least a week to plan for it. This wouldn’t happen in hospitals, I reasoned. In most the merch doesn’t move that fast anyway unless you’re hording a treasure trove above the ceiling tiles.
Nonetheless, I exited the store after my 90-plus minute social and retail experiment drenched in euphoria and steeped in history, noticing the long line of people behind stanchions that curved around the building. I briefly entertained a thought to tell them about the wait they faced, but stopped myself. Maybe they were shopping for women’s socks. 
About the Author

Rick Dana Barlow | Senior Editor

Rick Dana Barlow is Senior Editor for Healthcare Purchasing News, an Endeavor Business Media publication. He can be reached at [email protected].