Retailers Count on Inventory Crews to Make It Add Up
Keri Gaoa is the Wyatt Earp of the late-night retailing scene. When it comes to totaling inventories on a digital tabulator, he is considered the fastest gun in town, the man with the lightning touch.
“His fingers never stop--the movement is unbelievable,” marveled Sharon Trussell, Gaoa’s supervisor on nights when he and others compute the inventories of entire stores--sometimes a million items.
“When he’s on my crew,” she said, “it’s like having 10 extra people.”
As Trussell spoke, Gaoa, 35, was moving down an aisle of the Clark Drugs outlet in Lynwood. The row was jampacked with toys--plastic commandos, ships, airplanes, beach balls. Gaoa wore the boxlike tabulator just as Earp might have worn it--on one leg, hanging from his belt. Never once did he look at it as his fingers raced, rapid-fire, at a clip that can canvass 300 items a minute.
The late-night clattering of keys filled the store like the restless song of crickets. In addition to Gaoa, about 25 other employees of Washington Inventory Service were at work shortly before midnight. On ladders and on hands and knees, they were carrying out a daunting assignment--to total the retail prices of every last knickknack and tube of lipstick in a cavernous store where shelves were stacked up 12 feet.
It meant ringing up diapers, mops, walking canes, socks, eggbeaters, toilet plungers and more--much, much more--all by 2 o’clock in the morning.
The taking of inventory is a rite of American enterprise, a task carried out by anonymous bean-counters well after closing time, when it cannot interfere with sales. At some stores, it is a post-holiday tradition, completed in time for taxes and financial reports. Yet more and more, inventories are becoming year-round events, according to retailers.
Having two, three or even four inventories a year enables managers to be more keenly aware of which products are selling, which are not, and to what extent a store is being hurt by theft. That knowledge is especially important in today’s competitive economy, with unprecedented numbers of new products reaching the market, said store manager Joe de Silva, who contracts for an inventory of Lynwood’s Clark Drugs every sales quarter.
“There are decisions that must be made on what to carry (on the shelves),” De Silva said. “The inventory helps.”
On a typical night, 15 to 20 or more inventories are conducted throughout Los Angeles, said Frank Michaels, regional manager for San Diego-based Washington Inventory Service, one of the nation’s largest such firms. Teams of counters vary from two members to 100. At huge Home Club and Target stores, a night’s tabulating may involve more than $4 million of merchandise, Michaels said.
“We had one girl who quit on us in one hour,” said Trussell, describing the toll that is paid in sore feet, aching fingers and fatigue. “She couldn’t take it.”
In the 1950s and ‘60s, inventory teams dictated into recorders, talking so fast that they were often mistaken for wandering auctioneers. The recordings had to be deciphered by trained office workers.
But technology has streamlined the process. With today’s electronic data collectors, professional teams can catalogue quantities and prices almost instantly, breaking down subtotals by aisle and feeding results into computers. In stores that price merchandise with bar codes, crews can even forgo their key pads by outfitting their calculators with tiny laser scanners.
On this night, the tabulating was being done without scanners, but each team member wore one of the boxlike tabulators. A portable computer was set up in a stockroom. Trussell was armed with a map dividing the 15,000-square-foot Clark Drugs outlet into 137 sections--45 in the stockrooms, 15 in the pharmacy and 77 on the main floor. Counting began in the stockrooms and the pharmacy at nightfall. Then at 10, when the store closed, the action moved onto the main floor. Completed sections were marked with yellow stickers until they dangled from shelves like confetti.
“If I was married, I wouldn’t be married any more,” said Janice Sanchez, 24, of Carson, as she rang up tubs of ice cream in the frosty chill of a walk-in freezer. Like several other employees, she moonlights doing inventories while working days as a machinist. “There’s pretty much no social life,” she said.
But inventories offer flexible hours--generally, employees can choose which nights they work--and on-the-job training. Although the pay is an un-yuppie-like $6 to $9 an hour, the work is popular among students.
“It’s a really easy job . . . once you get the hang of it,” said Julie Szajlai, 21, a Cal State Long Beach biochemistry student who answered an ad two years ago in the school newspaper.
Szajlai tabulated storeroom boxes of baby lotion while, not far away, 40-year-old Lyn Ward of Downey rang up laundry soap. Ward likes the flexible schedule, except when a job goes until dawn.
“I remember walking out of some stores at 6 in the morning when you started at 9 (the previous night),” she said. “You’re really dragging.”
As the night wore on, the work went swiftly. Occasional shouts rang out--”Price check!”--and assistant store manager Moses Rodriquez hurried to supply a figure.
“A thrill a minute,” he quipped.
In a liquor storeroom that smelled of aged spirits, a counter unearthed a deck of playing cards seemingly stashed for some poker game. What should he do with it?
“Play on your break or something,” joked sales clerk Louise Lopez, looking at the cards with amazement. “I have no idea how long they’ve been back here.”
By half past midnight, the tabulating seemed nearly complete. The team was an hour ahead of schedule, but the computer showed several missing sections. “How did ‘33-back’ get skipped?” Trussell demanded, dispatching tired workers to correct the problem.
Untabulated caches of merchandise turned up in several places, delaying the final totals.
Dennis Fitzsimmons, 52, of Lawndale, a moonlighting machinist, fed one of the night’s last tallies into the computer. A crew veteran, Fitzsimmons works 20 to 30 hours a week doing inventories. He hopes to use the extra money to buy a 42-foot cabin cruiser.
But there are many, many nights--and untold miles of aisles to go--before he realizes his dream. “Champagne taste, beer income,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe someday.”
