What’s for supper tonight? Ask Arnold

Somewhere a computer is quietly thinking about you. It is deciding what you want for supper tonight and sending instructions to trucks and warehouses to make sure that your local Woolworths can sell it to you.

It is basing its thoughts on a whole range of factors — weather patterns (thanks, Al Gore), holidays (Eid, Christmas etc), special events (Rugby World Cup) and what you bought this time last year. I have now added one more variable to the system — expect to see an abundance of soup and cheese and bread in every Woolworths in the southern suburbs of Cape Town on Tuesdays from now on. That’s the night we like to call “Survivor-soup-and-cheesy-bread” night. Yes, we’re that sad. But every opportunity a family gets to eat together and do something together should be taken. So we toast Jeff Probst and cheer on the grubby Yanks with, um, toast. And cheese. And soup.

But back to the computer. Woolworths call it the “foods forecasting and replenishment system”. We’re going to call it Arnold. No real reason. I just think it is an appropriate name. Arnold is used to, um, forecast demand for foods and decide how to replenish supply. But sometimes he goes horribly wrong.

Let me explain, but I’ll start with a disclaimer … I love Woolworths. I think whoever is responsible for conceptualising its food halls should be given some sort of prize — nothing less than a Nobel Prize for Humanity will do. Its food is brilliant, fresh and innovative. I have no problem paying slightly more for it … it’s that good.

Last week it was my turn to stop to pick up the necessary ingredients for the Tuesday family feast, so I pulled in to the Woolworths at Constantia Village at about 6.30pm. The clock was ticking. I was in a reward challenge all of my own.

Stepping into the store, though, felt like stepping into a geographical space-shifter. I was no longer in leafy, abundant Constantia. I was in downtown Harare where people shop with suitcases stuffed with banknotes, peering hopefully at empty shelves, willing them to miraculously fill before their very eyes.

The cupboard was bare. Very bare.

So I did what any enterprising hit-chasing blogger would do. I whipped out my cellphone and took a couple of pictures of the empty shelves …

Here’s one …

… and here’s another.

There were more, but I think those two make the point.

I collared someone suit-like and nervous at the door and asked him where all the stock was. He was very apologetic and polite — even though he didn’t work at that particular branch — and promised to pass my concerns on. I seriously doubt he went to head office and said: “The Lankester children aren’t having soup tonight and it’s all our fault.” It’s more likely that he said: “There’s some nutter walking around our store taking pictures with his cellphone.”

During the photography exercise I attracted some attention from a security guard who walked a little too close once or twice, and some more suits glancing nervously in my direction. Stressed suit at the door was on his cellphone. I doubt Woolworths has a Vegas-casino-style back room, but I didn’t want to hang around and find out. I could just imagine sitting, strapped to a chair, with some brutish lug prodding the last remaining baby marrow up my nose demanding that I delete the pictures off my cellphone. Or pelting me with the contents of a bag of Chuckles (the new dark-choc-and-mint ones, please, should I have the choice). Time to leave.

Because it is the responsible thing to do, and because I was intrigued to know the answer to the question “Where was the manager of the Constantia Village branch when the second-last packet of minestrone soup was being lifted off the shelf by a jowly housewife at around 1pm? Or the last French loaf? Or organic veggies? Or free-range beef? Or chunky, fat-free cottage cheese (plain)?”, I contacted Woolworths.

More to the point, I contacted its press office. With the kind of urgency and empathy that big corporates invoke when faced with a “potential PR problem”, the good folk at Woolworths fell over themselves to investigate. They did. And, unlike various other corporates (ahem, Vodacom — see previous blog) they actually replied. And they did so with cogent, non-patronising answers. Clearly they take this reputation thing seriously.

As they pointed out to me, they also hate it when their shelves are empty. Because empty shelves stop people buying stuff, which stops them earning money, which is what they are there to do. Duh. The empty shelves at Constantia were a problem, I was told, partly explained by a particularly bad week compounded by a gremlin that had crept into an algorithm somewhere and … whoah … back up there, cowboy. Algorithm? You mean a computer sitting somewhere was monitoring chocolate-mousse levels and alerting the factory pumping it out when the mousse was running low? Where is this computer? Can I see it? Will it be my friend? What’s its name? Arnold.

I learned that the process of getting milk from the cow to the fridge at Woolworths is way more complicated than one would think. Enter Arnie (we’re that close now). It is what happens when geek meets retail. In practice it is really just a set of variables that is twiddled and tweaked to predict exactly how many avos the Hyde Park branch will need. They look at how many they sold at the same time last year, and they ask whether demand for an avo is something that rises and falls according to other factors.

So Arnie ticks along, spewing out predictions Nostradamus-like to anyone who comes along and asks the right questions. That’s all done a couple of months in advance. It’s freaky — Arnold has already decided how many people in Constantia are going to be buying mince pies come December. He knows what you’re going to do before you even think of doing it.

So that’s how Woolworths places orders with its suppliers. Then goods arrive at the warehouse, and from there stores are sent their allocation from the total supply. That’s done on the basis of another calculation, executed the day before the stock arrives. That algorithm looks at how much of each item the store has in stock, how much it anticipates selling and therefore how much it still needs to meet demand. Then the trucks trundle off to do their deliveries.

Inevitably, though, because human beings insist on getting involved in work that computers could quite happily do on their own, glitches creep in. An order is split into two loads; the computer just notes the first load and assumes there has been an under-delivery. The next day there will be an over-delivery to compensate, which means all the other stores in the area are not sent their quotas. It’s a downward spiral that results in the kind of empty shelves I saw at Constantia.

I have some sympathy for the computer. Generally speaking we blame these charming, inanimate objects every time something goes wrong. As I write this, Arnie is strapped to a chair in a back room with a burly, red-faced manager yelling at it: “Where is the Lankesters’ soup? Answers, you bastard, give me answers …” And of course no answers will be forthcoming. He only speaks in algorithms and, let’s be honest, no one really understands those.

So my family was deprived of their soup but, if we’d been living in an area that was being oversupplied, we could have had all the soup we wanted. It was an accident of geography, coupled with an over-eager-to-please computer called Arnold, who is currently staring down the barrel of a virus-infected syringe.

Woolworths tells me it is constantly working on these algorithms to make them work better. I take that to mean they are threatening Arnold with a Britney Spears screensaver. Meanwhile, the Constantia Village branch has been labelled something called a “priority pick”, which means it gets first options on all supplies leaving the warehouse. So if you live close by and suddenly find all you need every time you go into the store, then you have me to thank. Apologies to you lot in Claremont, but your soup is over at our branch waiting for me to pop in tomorrow. Arnold says I am going to, and who am I to disappoint?