The sixth and seventh columns of the new items spreadsheet are dedicated to cost and retail, respectively. Cost obviously doesn’t appear on their shelf tags, and there’s nothing they are doing within the Orchestra system that involves these numbers – the monthly margins are calculated at the invoice level, i.e. the sums coded to each department based on how AP is entering them. They are giving their shipments the ol’ eyeball test on the back dock, but there is no check-in process otherwise, no logging of item by item inventory into their system.
The cost on this spreadsheet therefore is somewhat ceremonial, outside of the job Edgar’s doing, calculating retails based on each department’s markup. But it had been in place when Teri trained him, and they changed nothing when he took over this role, even if nobody else needs to know this particular information. And as anyone who has trifled with these Excel spreadsheets endlessly knows, it made the most sense to leave that field right beside the retail one, just for simplicity’s sake, when applying and dragging down formulas.
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://jasonmcgathey.wordpress.com/2021/02/27/tales-of-a-scorched-coffee-pot-chapter-19/
