Pencil on the range list is still a grouping

Shops that still buy from the Deserter’s Bazaar and from a cash-and-carry in the same week keep two languages. The till speaks codes. The owner speaks “the red crate apples” and “the Turkish biscuits we tried in May.” A clean SKU list that ignores the pencil is a grouping nobody will read on Monday.

When a first briefing arrives, I ask for the sheet that actually hangs in the back room. Arrows, crossings, a phone number of a supplier in the margin. Those marks become family names in the grouping book. Codes sit underneath, in smaller type, for the weeks the till is complete.

Market stalls that send no file at all can still sit with us if they have a notebook of daily totals by crate. The plates are coarser. They are not worthless. Refusing a stall because it lacks a CSV is a habit of desks that only like tidy chains.

The book stays with the shop. If a new manager arrives and renames the biscuits, we change the book in front of them, not in a private folder.