OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill. -- Two living room chairs, a large area rug, a set of china, a big lamp, a nightstand, a floor fan and a circular card table.
These are the things a good friend of mine says she'd like to give away now that she's moving homes. After volunteering to help her move and to circulate this list of things she'd like to shed, I tell her that I too have been in "moving out" mode even though I have no intention of doing so.
I realized I have too much stuff for the size of my home and a lot of it really has to go. I'm sure we've all had that feeling of wanting to light a match and start over.
"You're smart to get rid of stuff when you're not under the gun," she says in the fourth round of an email exchange. "I thought I was ahead of the game, but man oh man ... too much stuff."
In my own spring cleaning, I found a box full of cables that could fit any number of cell phones, iPods, laptops, from generations going back a dozen years. Then I go through the inevitable concern of tossing the box when I might actually need one of those cables to plug into something that I currently use, or worse, haven't used for a couple of years but could decide to use tomorrow.
Then I think about how I do things now, everything from answering emails to typing articles and start to feel I'm riding a rusty steam engine on a rickety track over a river gorge. I'm holding on to technology, software and ways of doing things that in a digital age are the equivalent of a manual typewriter.
I know you're asking yourself, hey, this guy has been writing about technology in convenience stores for years, and he's talking like he's Fred Flintstone, a real-life techno-saurus.
My response? If I walk like a duck and talk like a duck, I'm a duck. "Quack, as charged."
All I have to say in my defense is that I interview the experts, develop a strong level of understanding and deliver those words to you, the reader. I never had to write a program, install a point-of-sale (POS) solution or build a firewall.
To my credit, I'm always thinking about what these new developments mean to people. Real people. Someone who has to execute a job, be it managing a store, analyzing a boatload of sales data or in my case, writing a story on retail technology.
All this to say that as I better understand the solutions now coming at retailers--especially ones that can help manage task verification, tax calculation or employee onboarding--I think about any number of my own daily chores that could simply evaporate if I use the right technology.
Let's take the back-and-forth of emails. It took me four or five to communicate effectively with my friend about the furniture she wanted to give away. But what if it was my editor and we just needed to confirm that I contacted all of the sources I said I was going to and finished half the interviews. Today, that's four or five emails. But it could easily be me checking off three boxes in a survey on my cellphone.
Tap, tap, tap, scroll, send.
No emails back and forth. No idle chit-chat about the weather (which for some would be a loss). No extraneous thought.
Now in a real manager's scenario, that simple back and forth could happen dozens, even hundreds of times over a chain of 20, 40, 100 stores. To have all that typing, emails and spreadsheets suddenly gone is one major spring cleaning.
So when I'm finally done packing boxes, donating stuff, possibly getting a few dollars from eBay, I'll have hit my own reset button, started fresh, established--with the glorious help of technology--a cleaner, more efficient way of doing things.
You'll want to meet that slick dude.
Angel Abcede has written about technology in the convenience industry for over two decades, tracking how retailers develop and deploy solutions covering everything from store operations to item-level analytics.Yes, you can still email him at aabcede@cspnet.com.
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