Who’s On First?

Conversation overheard on a terminal market:

Customer:       Pea Pods?
Salesman:       Pea shoots? No.
Customer:       No.  Baby peas.
Salesman:       Mini green peas? Yes.
Customer:       No. Little green ones!
Salesman:       Micro greens? Sure.
Customer:       No! (pause)(sigh) Sugar snap peas.
Salesman:       Oh, sugar snap peas.  Next door.

It was almost Abbott and Costello!  With all of the expanded offerings available today, who can keep track anymore?

Let’s take that a step further.  How many items does a perishable seller have to stock in order to remain viable to his customers? How fresh they are will depend on turns and the inventory control skills of the seller.  If the freshness battle is lost, so might be all of the additional sales generated by the plethora of new items.  Demand forecasting and logistics become the crucial element in this scenario.

What experts do we need to do this?  Google? Amazon? UPS? Their algorithms don’t account for unexpected variables – look at all of the late Christmas parcels in 2013 due to the weather.  Our growers, buyers, truckers and sales teams have all of the know how; we just need to maintain good old fashioned communication between all parties.

We never want to wonder “Who’s on first?”