WITH VIDEOS, RHONDA & SHARE GROUPS

Got a great video for you, and if you’ll pop me an e-mail, I’ll send you a copy. It’s a spoof of the courtroom scene in “A Few Good Men,” where Tom Cruise dukes it out with Jack Nicholson. Only in this version, Cruise is the snotty-nosed young MBA at manufacturer headquarters, and Nicholson is the battle-scarred sales rep. In the big scene, instead of yelling “I want the truth!” Cruise yells “I want more facings!” and Nicholson, instead of yelling back “You can’t handle the truth,” yells instead “You can’t handle more facings!” Nicholson’s other great line: “Deep down, you want me to load inventory. You need me to load inventory!” Like I said, pop me an e-mail…

I showed that video at the start of a presentation I did with Nash Finch’s Gary Spinazze at the National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association’s Retail Executive Conference in Tempe a month or so ago. This presentation, which we’ve done several times together, has him cast as Rhonda Retailer (he’s a very good sport) and me as Vinnie Vendor. We duke it out a la Rhonda and Vinnie in this magazine’s Face2Face feature, only with lots of audience participation. I figure if Bill Kitchens, NFRA’s good attorney, isn’t jumping around in the back of the room in near-panic, mouthing “Robinson-Patman!” at us, we haven’t done our job.

What I’ve learned over the last few years of doing this is that we as an industry don’t communicate nearly enough. In pre-conference surveys, “good old-fashioned communication” comes up as a suggested topic time and time again. We also don’t plan and prioritize very well. If I had my way, the entire industry would take next Tuesday off and be forced to read Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” It would probably save the industry $7.2 billion, and take 72 days of excess inventory out of the pipeline. (The numbers? Oh, I’m studying to be a consultant.)

But talk about timing. Just as I’m ruminating about all this during a coffee break in Tempe, I bump into my old pal Jamie Tenser, who I knew well in the prior century when he was writing for Supermarket News. (He still does, on occasion, but we won’t hold that against him.) Jamie, now principal in VSN Strategies, Tucson, Ariz., tells me he’s been working with this share group on in-store implementation. He suggests that I log onto the site, www.instoreimplementation.com and check it out. I do, and darned if the group’s report (which Jamie authored) doesn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about communication, planning and prioritizing. I did a story about the group in this issue, in The Buzz. Check it out.

We here at Reefer (by popular acclaim, the readers’ pet name for this magazine, undoubtedly a reference to refrigerated trucks) are close to finalizing putting together our own share group for refrigerated and frozen food folk. If you’re interested, pop me an e-mail. (I’ll send you “the video,” too.)