Page 36 of The Hard Way

Eventually he came back. “Looks like you’re cleared.” He smiled and led us down the produce aisle. The store décor hadn’t changed from when I was a kid. The banner over the leafy greens section saidFresh from the farm!and deeper in I caught sight of the dippyPiping hot!banner over the bakery section. My sisters and I used to laugh about that one because they didn’t actuallyhavea bakery at Piggly Wiggly and none of the stuff was ever piping hot.

Now the old signs just made me happy.

The manager pushed through a silver door at the corner of the store and led us back into a shipping area full of crates and pallets, all arranged around two truck bays. He went to the wall and pulled an iPad from a metal holder. The iPad was encased in a thick acrylic frame with a loop on the corner that had a chain coming off it, attached to the wall. They really didn’t want that iPad walking off.

“This is the back end of the system. Deliveries come in here, and we enter the SKU. They connect to the checkout. Well, you know how it works.”

“Looks good,” Thor said. “Can we see the records for this shipment of cheese?”

“Sure.” He slid his finger around the dirty screen and pulled it up. It was a lot of numbers on a spreadsheet. “Here’s the SKU going in the back and the SKU out the front. It reads forty-three minirounds in the store, but that’s not accurate anymore—we pulled them, and the lab people took them.”

Thor looked really interested just then. I noticed something pass between him and Zeus. “They took them from your display case? Out on the store floor?”

“Yeah. We had all the Sunny Sisters inventory out in the case. It’s a nice label and a local cheese. We like to support the sisters.”

“But the FDA took fifty rounds out of here,” Odin said. “And your system says only forty-three rounds were in stock. That’s a seven-cheese discrepancy.”

Warren frowned. “They took everything on hand. Probably a promo set of sampler cheeses got mixed in. The sisters give out a certain amount for sampling and such. The important thing is that we tracked everything that went out the door.” He pulled up a new screen, a spreadsheet of some kind. “This is the detail of what walked out the door. In the week after the delivery, we sold ten units via credit card and two units with cash, and we contacted each and every one of those purchasers as soon as the recall hit. Not soon enough.”

“Thanks,” Thor said. “This is all we need. Very routine.” They shook hands, and we were out of there.

“Fuckers were selling the sampling cheeses?” I said once we were out in the breezy parking lot. “Motherfuckers. Those sampling cheeses were for sampling, not for selling out of the case.”

“So your sisters give a certain amount of rounds for sampling?” Odin asked.

“Yeah, we’d provide extras for sampling with every shipment. They were separate. They wouldn’t go on the inventory.”

“For giving out to customers,” Odin clarified.

“Yeah, for giving out to the customers. Not for the store to just sell out of the case. Fucker. Can you go back and punch Warren?”

“Did you assume that the store always sampled the promo cheeses?” Zeus asked. “Before this, I mean? Are you surprised to learn they would take the cheeses earmarked as samples and put them into the case?”

“Yeah! It’s in both our interests to run samples. People like the samples. It draws them to the store and it warms them to our brand.” I felt this pang of sadness.Our brand.“My sisters’ brand, I mean.”

“What if theydiduse the sample cheeses the way they should’ve? You assume they did. It’s what they’re for. Right?” Zeus said.

“Yeah, it’s idiotic not to.”

“So maybe those extras weren’t sampler cheeses.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “So the inventory is wrong?”

“Wait,” Thor cut in. “If there’s one thing a computer knows how to do, it’s count. Their system logged what went in that back door and what walked out the front. We have seven extras. We have an explanation for the extras—sample rounds that got thrown into the case.”

“Right,” I said.

“So, maybe those are samplers, sure. But what if they aren’t? What if the store used the samplers like they should’ve? What would be an alternate explanation—not delivered by Andy and not samplers? How else could extra cheeses have materialized in the case?”

I suddenly saw what he was getting at. “Somebody could just put them in.”

“Exactly. What if somebody took those cheeses out of the dumpster before the garbage truck took them away and brought them to the store and slipped them in?”

“Fuck,” I said.

“They were already packaged, right? They were priced with that barcode. They were the same lot as the good ones. You could slip a piece of cheese into the case, and it would just sell like any others.”

“Oh my god. Yeah.”

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