Chapter 11

Monday morning found me again walking through the door at Wallace Specialties. Ted was on the phone, but waved at me. On my desk I found a few orders that Ted had already taken, so I picked and boxed them. There would be more before the morning was out. I sat down and took out my book, but before I could even open it, Ted poked his head in.

“Let’s take a drive. You asked about the warehouse on Friday. You should probably see it so you know where it is if you have to go there for some reason.”

“Um, sure. What about the phone?”

“Miriam’s here, and she knows the order system so she can enter any order that’s phoned in faster than I can. I can do the credit card stuff later.”

So into the van we went and headed off toward one of the suburbs. He pulled into a small industrial park with a variety of businesses that didn’t do a lot of work on site, and just needed an office and a place to park their vehicles and store tools and supplies.

He drove around the back and stopped at a long, steel building, windowless, with a single door and a roll-up gate for vehicles. There was a small sign next to the human-sized door that just said ‘Wallace’. Ted stepped out and inserted a key into a lock next to the vehicle door and held it while the door rolled up.

Back in the van he pulled into the building. It was way bigger than it looked from the outside. There were raised shelves in several aisles on each side of the van. In the back there was an open area where some bulky crates were stacked.

“So here it is, the secret archives of Wallace Specialties. Well, mostly it’s just the stuff that doesn’t move as frequently as the stuff in the store. But it’s also where we keep the bigger things that would take up too much space.

“When my dad first started the business, everything he sold was packed in the one storefront where the counter is now. He had it all stacked on shelves and it was hell to find anything. Eventually he had to rent some adjoining storefronts, then we outgrew even that. Hence this warehouse.

“Why don’t you look around, get a sense of where things are, while I find the things I came for. Each aisle has a list of the catalog items that are found there, by number, just like in the store. And each shelf has a range of catalog numbers for what’s supposed to be found there. I’ll be about fifteen minutes.”

He wandered off to one end and I stood there, a little intimidated by the size of the place. I supposed I should have anticipated it, given the size of the catalog, but still...

I picked an aisle at random and walked slowly through. This seemed to be tee-shirts with bawdy sayings, such as I had seen in the catalog. They were all available in S, M and L, all in plastic sleeves. A little further on were lava lamps in boxes, small bedside lamps shaped like an erect penis, complete with shade, also in boxes. I shook my head.

I wondered how quickly these moved. He probably wouldn’t have been able to answer that question even a month ago, since they didn’t seem to track of when or how frequently these were ordered. Soon he’d be able to answer that question, by running a query against the sales database.

Further down the aisle I found I had reached the S&M section. Fortunately all the items were boxed, but the lurid graphics on the box left nothing to the imagination. Oh, look, there’s the whips, and in a variety of happy colors, too. And handcuffs, in pink and gold. And matching ball gags!

I stopped short when I turned to my right and staring me in the face were a multitude of dildos. Big ones, little ones, green, black, white. Hard ones, flexible ones. Ones with built-in vibrators. Double-ended dildos. There’s some with a shaft that twists and rotates, extends and contracts, and with a separate extension for the clit. It was overwhelming. The only ones I’d ever seen up close before now were the torpedo vibrators, about the shape and size of a big cigar.

A few feet further down were similar toys for men, like pocket pussies, also in a variety of colors and sizes, some with built-in vibrators. I’d never seen one close up, so I stared for a minute, trying to take it all in.

I looked down. On the bottom shelf was a box containing one of the fucking machines I’d seen in the catalog. They were quite expensive, I remembered. There were more stacked behind it. I had to kneel down and look closer, as the box had illustrations showing the array of attachments included. I tried to imagine them in use.

“Carter, where’d you go? I’m all set.”

I pulled myself back to reality and called out to him. “Lemme find my way out of this maze. Be right there.”

When I did find the way out, the back of the van was open and a couple of cartons were inside. “Good thing I didn’t have to send the search dogs out for you,” he said. “What do you think?”

“It’s kind of overwhelming. There’s a lot of stuff here. Does this stuff move?”

“Some of it. A lot of it is around ‘cause my old man liked to keep stuff in stock that had been ordered once or twice, in case a customer wanted to re-order. Mostly they don’t, so the stuff just sits here.”

“Yeah, I thought that might be the case. You must have a lot invested in inventory that doesn’t see much of a return on investment.”

“Tell me about it!” He blew out his breath in exasperation. “I can’t talk to my old man about it, he’s adamant, he considers it a company policy, we should always be prepared for a customer to re-order!”

He closed the rear doors of the van. “Go outside and make sure it’s clear, ‘cause I have to back out.”

I did that, but there was no one around so he had a clear shot. He handed me a set of keys. “Put that one in the lock and turn it to the right till the door’s completely shut.”

Not that hard, and in a minute I was seated in the van, handed him the keys and we were off.

We drove for a couple of minutes and he started talking again. “If I had any courage I’d shut down the mall operation and move everything out to the warehouse. But every time I broach the idea to my dad he gets apoplectic. I’m a little afraid of bringing it up again because he’s got a weak heart.”

“Yeah, some battles are better avoided. You might win the battle, but you’d lose the peace.”

“Exactly! I’ll probably have to wait him out. He’s well along in years, so it probably won’t be that long. That sounds kind of callous, doesn’t it?”

“No, it’s simple reality. You fix what you can fix now, and wait to change the other stuff till there are fewer impediments.”

He didn’t reply, but he nodded.

“Look, Ted, I know I’m just the summer help, but something occurred to me while I was walking around the warehouse. You can tell me to keep my nose out of it, but maybe it’s something you can do in the interim to streamline your business.

“I was noticing as I walked around that a lot of the items in stock hadn’t moved -- I mean literally, they haven’t been moved! -- in a long time, it’s obvious from the dust on the shelves. I was thinking, well, that makes sense, there’d be no way to tell from the order slips what was selling and what wasn’t, and I don’t think you have any way of tracking inventory, do you?”

“No, not really, it’s just estimates we keep in our head,” he replied.

“Right, and if it’s something that seldom sells, you wouldn’t really know how much you have on hand. But once you get all the current and old orders in the system, you’ll have a way of knowing who your customers are and, more importantly, what’s been selling. And by corollary, what isn’t selling.

“And if you know what isn’t selling, you know what makes the most sense to drop from the catalog. You could put the poor sellers on sale. Everybody loves a sale! Knock the price way down, folks will think they’re getting a bargain, maybe buy a couple. And then you could get some of your investment in inventory back and put it into things that move more quickly. That’s a lot easier to do when it’s computerized. You just have the computer pick out the poor sellers for you.”

He was quiet while he drove. I began to worry that I’d offended him, maybe he’d decide he didn’t need summer help after all.

As we turned into the mall’s parking lot he said, “That makes a lot of sense, Carter. You’re right, I don’t know what really doesn’t sell. We never did. My old man justified it by saying to himself, well, it’ll be there if somebody ever wants to order another. ‘Wallace will have it,’ they’ll say. But we’re paying a lot of money to keep that fiction alive.

“I’ll put that thought into the back of my head. Miriam’s whipping through the old orders, so maybe I can start asking my new PC those kinds of questions soon. I’d love to get some of that stuff off the shelves and into somebody’s tacky den.”

I laughed at that.

A few more orders had come in while we were gone, and Miriam handed the slips to Ted.

“Oh, thanks for doing that, Miriam, it really helps ‘cause people don’t always call back if I’m out of the store.”

He turned to look at me. “You know what this is, right? This is people making plans for their Fourth Of July parties, getting a head start so they’ll have the party supplies on hand. Look, racy cocktail napkins, plastic tablecloths with pictures of bathing beauties, drink glasses that ... well, not important. Anyway, people always order this stuff before a holiday. Same thing happens before Christmas and New Year’s.