George Dot Com

Just to keep things current, one interesting thing happened to me yesterday. Today was simply an exhausting Saturday, so nothing new there really – an excess of cages to empty, but other than that, uneventful. Yesterday, however, offered a break from routine in the form of DotCom work. Within Tesco, DotCom is a department – just as Dairy is a department – which handles online orders. When an inconvenienced – or lazy – customer orders items online, it is up to the DotCom folk to rush about the shop and do their shopping for them. So, after a quick rotation check as per routine, I was whisked off to an uncharted section of the warehouse for an impromptu DotComTutorial. More in-house jargon; teampad, substitution, pick; in reverse order, these are: “picking up an item off the shelves”, “swapping an absent item for something suitable”, and “the weird little screen which tells us what to do”. Why the latter is called a “teampad” I will never know, but I can only assume it is some kind of conceited effort at reinforcing the collective endeavour. Or something.

Rather romantically, I had hoped DotCom work would simply entail getting a customer’s shopping list and doing it from beginning to end for them. Far from it! The end result is a somewhat soulless, mechanical process, but it is at least a slick and efficient mechanism. For we are not given entire orders but instead bits of orders. Individual customer orders are (or I presume are) all mushed together and sorted according to various parameters, such as product type and product location. These are then shuffled about and chopped up, and “dealt” to various “lists”. One pick list can have sections from up to six different customers. To illustrate, here’s an example routine: pick up a teampad, grab a “trolley” (more of a wheeled chest of drawers, with plastic trays instead of drawers), and grab a reel of stickers. This reel is, in effect, the “pick list”, and will consist of (up to) six stickers. They are demarcated with shapes, organised in a strict sequence: black triangle, red wavy lines, yellow circle, blue arrow, green star, orange square. [I am positively beaming that I remembered the order after just one day of it!] The drawers themselves are already labelled with these shapes, in L-R descending order. Then:

1. stick the stickers on the relevant drawers
2. scan your ID card thing to log in
3. scan each sticker in turn
4. wheel over to the “trip start point” – a barcode on the wall near where the warehouse leads onto the shop floor
5. read the screen and you’re away!

From then, the entire list – irrespective of order (i.e. shape/drawer) – will have been sorted in such a way so as to maximise route efficiency. This way, the DotCom team can get through the orders as quickly as possible, since all the orders will have been shuffled up in order to minimise wasted time through travelling all the way across the store for haphazardly placed items. You scan an item, it tells you a) if the customer wants it in a bag, and b) for which drawer it is destined. You then put the item away, and scan the barcode on the drawer, and continue.

Interestingly, and presumably for some means of keeping the team on their toes – and not bored – the teampads record a user’s “pick rate” statistics and are reviewed, potentially for internal competitions (my coworkers didn’t really elaborate on this last point). As you’re going about “picking”, a progress meter on the bottom of the screen tells you how well you are advancing relative to how you should be doing; a little yellow vertical line indicates “where” you should be on the timescale of the route, and the colour of the bar – red, green, blue – tells you how quickly you’re going. I was mostly very slow, despite being given lots of the allegedly “easy” Frozen Food orders. Things like substituting – which requires putting subsistuted items in blue bags – as well as bagging in general – can slow you down no end.

While this was quite diverting, the very reason I was enlisted – apart from broadening my technical horizons within the realm of Tesco – was that the department was running low on manpower that day. As a result – even with my stellar assistance – they were running severely behind schedule, and my lunch – set for 2pm, the time when DotCom usually finishes every day – was not until twenty past three. I was ravenous. Fish, chips, beans, and a KitKat chunky. Glorious.