For a long while, I worked on a particular software stack as it bounced between various corporate custodians. It dealt with selling and delivering groceries. Somewhere in there, it was acquired by a long-established online grocery store, call it Us-To-You Biotics. This place had been selling groceries online since the 1990s, initially by running around with their hands full of carrots and paper. When they bought a shiny new technology stack, and a handful of engineers with it, the initial integration actually went pretty well and they continued selling food, so they looked to see where we could help with other parts of the business.
One big source of money and headaches was the annual Thanksgiving turkey presale. For years, customers would preorder their turkeys a month or so in advance, their name would go on a spreadsheet, and around Thanksgiving there would be a frantic week where a bunch of people stopped doing their regular jobs and counted frozen turkeys instead.
I imagined a straightforward improvement. We could create the concept of a preorder, which would add a dated order line item to the user, rather than the order. Then, every time we create an order, we see if any preorder record with the right date is on the user record, and if so, we move it over, and from there it’s just an order line item.
I drew a quick sketch, gathered the main turkey allocators, and proposed my idea.
The sight of that wall of uncomprehending faces will stay with me for a long time. I think they didn’t understand why I was telling them about computers, when they wanted to talk about frozen turkeys.
In the end, I spent a month making a website that included some of the functionality of the original spreadsheet, plus useful links to the admin view of customers and their orders. As it turns out, the tool only saw use one time. The next year, Us-To-You Biotics delcared bankruptcy a week before Thanksgiving and we all lost our jobs.