Now, one of the things we do to keep
the store organized and keep an accurate record of inventory, we spend time
every week working as a team to condense the store down. Take for instance, the
frozen food department. We were enormously concerned with power outages causing
massive spoilage. So we went to town in that first month consuming a lot of ice
cream, microwave dinners, and such. Well, if twenty people all eat a Hungry Man
dinner (urp!), that is twenty boxes off the shelves in one meal. Multiply that
by a week with the number of survivors that we have and store shelves can empty
out quicker than you might think. So rather than having 100 different freezer
doors running, we started condensing down all of the frozen items into as
little number of doors as possible. Then once a bank of freezers was completely
empty, we would take them off line. (Again, this is to conserve power and
reduce the risk of a Freon leak compromising the whole system.)
This is not just reserved for the
frozen food. I have written how we have condensed down the Produce Department
and the Meat Cooler. We also do this with general products along the grocery
shelves. Obviously some aisles condense down faster than others. Kilo is only
one dog so obviously, the pet food aisle and the small automotive section have
barely been touched.
I really feel that this is important
to do for a couple of reasons. It gives us something to do collectively to help
pass time. Very important. But it also gives everyone a firm grasp on how much
we are eating and how much we have left to eat. T is a visual reminder of,
“Hey, we only have this many olives left.” And so on and so forth.
I guess the smart thing to do would be
to break down the actual shelves themselves once we get them completely
emptied. It is not something that is a huge issue now but come April of 2014, I
am anticipating that we are going to have a lot of empty shelves. You would be
surprised how quickly feeding thirty one people can deplete your supplies.
Plus, the more shelves we empty, the
more space we get. More space equals more creative things to do… which is not
always a good thing but it does make for some fairly entertaining moments.
