Because of my fascination with robots and how they will make the human workforce obsolete, I often think about the business model at my own work and think of how robots might improve it. Yeah, I know thinking about how to eliminate my own job is strange, but it's just a thought experiment.
A few weeks ago, I came up with an idea that could be implemented today and the benefit of which was harshly shown to me this week. My idea is an automated ordering system. It's just a piece of software that tracks every item that is sold through the registers and orders what we have sold. For example, say a certain item comes twelve to a case. Once we sell twelve of that item, the ordering system would automatically add one case of that item to the order. Simple right? We sold it, so were down one case. And because we sold it, there's obviously demand for that item so we're likely to sell another case in the future. Also, the computer doesn't do anything stupid like accidentally order 11 or 21 like a human does because the buttons on the ordering gun are too small to use, or forget to order a whole bunch or stuff, which is what happened this week.
Of course, the benefits are enormous. First, with a computer doing the ordering and not a human, the business can save on labor costs. Let's say it takes 6 man-hours per day to order for the whole store (reasonable based on my own observations). That's 42 man-hours per week or 2,184 man-hours per year. Let's also assume that the average man-hour costs $15 (again reasonable based on normal pay-scale). That would be $32,760 saved per year per store. Stater Bros. has about 162 stores out (and growing) meaning an annual company savings of $5.3 million. This is an incredible amount of money, especially given that our profit last year, according to Fortune Magazine, was only $49.4 million.
The actual change in revenue is likely to be higher as well, since we'll actually have what was ordered on the shelves and we won't waste money because too much was ordered and we have to throw it away because it expired. We might bring in an additional $7 or $8 million all from a single piece of software that would likely cost far less than $7 million to develop.
The thing is, we aren't doing this. And this is because…well…I have no idea. It's a very straight forward solution (and it's no secret around my store that one of the bigger problems we have is ordering). Maybe the union forbids the use of this kind of thing in which case damn union! Oh well. Maybe I'll suggest it to one of the executives, get put on the team to help design it, and get a sweet office position in San Bernadino. Score!