Order Out Of Chaos

After so many positive responses to my last post, I thought maybe I would share the thing that consumes the most of our resources at the shop with you all in more detail.

Have you ever wondered how this yarn gets out onto the shelf for you to look at?

Have you ever thought, “My golly this is a lot to organize.” when perusing a yarn store’s stock?

Did you know that every single skein you see in the entire store has been touched by at least 3 employees who work there: One who received it, one who labelled it, and one who stocked it. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but we have all touched some of that yarn.

Yarn starts out its life on a sheep. Fast forward a bit: Blah blah spin blah blah wind blah blah ship blah blah arrive. Now it’s at a yarn shop where it looks something like this.

When we get this order, it usually comes in boxes. The order you are looking at is an order from Cascade Yarns, our largest account and one of our favourite companies. We make VERY LARGE orders from them. This is why we do not order your yarn the moment you place a backorder. We tack it onto a regular shipment to save money on shipping, money that we then do not have to charge you. We order from Cascade about every 3-4 weeks, so depending on how close to our ordering time it is you may get your yarn in a few weeks to a little over a month. That’s if they ship it quickly and they don’t have to backorder your yarn to the mill. By the way? This photograph is not the entire order. The entire order filled 15 Boxes that all came up to my waist and were too big for me to encircle with my arms. We like Cascade, yes we do.

After the yarn has arrived, we take the shipping list that they (hopefully, I pray every time because it could not be there..) put in one of the boxes. Guessing which one is part of my fun, especially when there are 15 boxes to choose from. A boy’s gotta have options, ya’ know? The shipping list is a list of everything we ordered and if they shipped it or not and in what quantities. For instance, one line might read: Cascade 220 – Coral….2….0

This means that we ordered 2 bags, but they didn’t ship any. There are a whole slew of reasons why, all of which I have no control over so I don’t worry about them unless somebody asks. After we check the shipping list to make sure that what they sent us is what we ordered and that the missing things, if any, are accounted for we get to start processing the order on the computer.

This is POSIM’s Inventory Analyzer. If we have ordered this yarn before in this colour, it’s very simple you just open a working purchase order, check all the stuff we received, create a processed purchase order, receive all of the yarn electronically, blast off some labels and settle in for a nice session of On Your Ass Time.

If we haven’t carried this yarn or it’s a new colour, you get to create a new Item Card. Frankly, unless it’s a class or a new pastry in the cafe, I hate doing this part. It’s detailed and complicated and I always screw it up unless Hannah is watching me do it which defeats the purpose of having somebody else do it anyway. This screen is what I stare at when you ask me how much of something I have and I don’t know. The window that’s open at the very top is the search I get to play with to see what crazy thing the item card for your yarn got filed under. Sometime in the past, somebody decided to name all the colours of certain yarn lines names that were different from their official names. This gives me fits and hives every time somebody asks how much of those yarns we have left. Thank god we sold most of them off and don’t want them back, thxvrymch.

I mentioned labels. Ah, yes, the labels. Every time you come in to buy something and I try to scan it before typing in the barcode because the scanner is a fussy snit, think of this. All the yarn on the shelves has a label on it. All of the labels are put on by hand. Try to calculate the hours it takes to do something like this when usually only one person can be spared to be working on it at any given moment. All of the labels are printed on a continuous strip. A strip of one Cascade order is enough to mummify any NBA player AND his best friend PLUS their two “lady companions” if they all stand close enough to each other.

After it’s labelled, the yarn is put on the shelf or into backstock. We have a back room where we keep all of the extra yarn that won’t fit on the shelf. We need more shelves back there. We need more shelves out on the floor too. I think we might have too much yarn.

A Day In The Life Of…

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at your favourite yarn shop? Do you ever think how nice it must be to knit all day? If you’ve ever considered getting a job at a yarn shop, this is the post for you!

Below is a summary of how my day goes, start to finish, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. These are the 3 days I work from open to close at the shop.

Wake up late, get dressed, drive to work in really terrible traffic.

Get the story ready for business by cleaning and feeding/watering the bunny. Also field pre-open phone calls from vendors, customers, and telemarketers. The phone calls do not stop throughout the whole day.

10 AM, unlock the doors and begin serving customers. People are, literally, standing on our doorstep most days and it is very strange to be vacuuming while people stare at you wondering why you won’t let them in. Why? Because I am cleaning, and also discussing business things with my boss and manager. Things that concern the running of the shop, any problems we faced the day previous, and also making sure that my manager has had enough coffee to function appropriately.

From 10 until we close, I do some mixture of the following.

• Check a shipment to make sure the company sent us what we ordered, and not what some crack monkey thought we wanted.
• Label and stock new yarns. Our shop is 3000+ square feet, or so I’m told. This is a LOT of yarn.
• Restock old yarns.  Ditto square footage and amount of yarn above.
• Answer questions about knitting, yarn, patterns, gauge, blocking, finishing, screw-ups, mistakes, and also why I don’t have something in the exact same shade as their grandbaby’s eyes.
• Picking up the phone to field vendors, customers, orders, troubleshooting the website, inquires about our hours, yarns, patterns, classes, and sometimes wrong numbers. (I once got asked “Is this Nova Outpatient?” and I said “No Ma’am, nobody here wants to recover from our addiction.”)
• Running messages to my boss and manager.
• Handling problems such as “I backordered my yarn yesterday, why isn’t it here?” and “All your yarn is itchy.” (It is not. There are summer breezes itchier than some of my yarn. I admit I am very defensive about my yarn.)
• Continuously greeting customers as they come in.

Somewhere in the day I am usually told to go eat something before I faint, or I whine incessantly about my poor imploding stomach until I am sent off to consume some nourishment. Somewhere in the day I will get to go to the bathroom at least once, I hope.

In this day, I will probably talk to over 80 people, I will disappoint at least 3 people by not having what they need, I will delight approximately 4 people by having exactly the thing they were thinking of, 2 people will find the exact yarn their pattern calls for in a colour they love, and more people than I care to count will walk out without having bought a thing or asking any questions and I hope it’s not because they felt neglected since I almost feel stalkerish in my tendency to follow people around sometimes.

Some days are busier than others, but to be honest ever since Heather bought the store last year I don’t think I’ve had a truly lazy day. There is always yarn arriving that has to be processed before it can be labelled and that can take hours, and it’s not something I’m trained to do so I get to restock, and help customers, and clean, until finally I get to do all those things and help label 15 boxes the size of several small children worth of yarn.

The perks for all this work? I love helping people. I love my regulars and my coworkers like family. It is so easy to thrill somebody by handing them a skein of cashmere to touch that it gives me giggles and goosebumps every time. The yarns we get are interesting and beautiful, and I get to share them with all of my best friends – That would be You. So I love my job. I love coming to work. But I work very, very hard. And most of the people I work with? They work even harder than I do. I can’t fathom it, lest I start to feel ill. So if you think it’s nice to be able to knit all day, come hang out at the shop with me, have some lunch in the cafe, and enjoy my favourite place to be while you knit. I probably won’t be able to sit with you much, but I will like having you there all the same.