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More Projects at the Group

At lunch one day, Dave Wahlberg asked what I was doing as a contractor.  Among my customers, Capstan Converyors had me write a generalized controller.  The general part came from its decision tables.  One table described the nexus--the layout--of the system and a second table controlled the action of the gate controllers.  Some boxes went straight and some diverted.  Without changing the program, a warehouse manager could direct boxes outward to trucks and upward to stocking area.  Dave said that the Group could use such a system, and within the year, we had installed one; the building of the structure took most of the time.

Concurrently with the conveyor belts, we installed radio controlled barcode readers, which were manufactured by Aedex.
The close association with Heandige's led to improvements in the repair and service tracking modules.
Kurt Lamb, VP of Special Projects, oversaw a project where the stores shared the lease lines with credit card processing and inventory.  Putting most of the telephones thru the network saved $600,000 per month at first and then less as phone rates fell.
During the sale of the company, I wrote many reports that extracted data from the general ledger and the inventory

The old management had left the FG in debt.  Several suites followed.

Greg Pruitt, CFO of Atari, which bought the FG, needed a point-of-sale system for headquarters in Cupertino.  Doug Larson took one of our cash register systems and installed it as a stand alone system.  The old DEC system at Atari had broken.

During the first ten years of the FG, a few salesmen accounted for a very large proportion of the sales. At the highwater mark for the company at about $500 million per year, only 70 salesmen accounted for $210 million dollars.  These were the best of the best as in the programmer's pyramid.  These exceptional people earned almost 3% of gross as commission, which was about $80,000 per year.  Jack Trammiel could not understand this.  He thought that those high earners were over paid.  He thought that a few college students could replace one high earner.  We tried to persuade him that about 4,000 of the current sales people were part-timers and college students, and they simply did not have the same rates of sales per hour.  As he put pressure to reduce commissions, most of those top salesmen walked across the street to Circuit City or to Silo.

Chuck Walker at Temple City was one of these amazing salesmen.  He walked around the audio department with a pair of Koch headphones around his next.  When he sold a $1000 stereo with a gross profit of maybe $90 dollars, he usually sold a pair of headphones for $49 with gross profit of $25.  Also, he sold speaker cables for like $40 and gross profit of $30.  Notice that the gross profit of the accessories was half of the gross profit of the stereo.  Chuck occasionally had older classic stereos shipped to Temple City because he had persuaded some customer to buy the system.  In doing so, he reduced the 'dead' inventory in the chain and made himself an extra 1% commission.

Even more interesting, he would help customers test their own hearing.  In that neighborhood, rich men often bought systems for show.  Chuck would have the customer bring some favorite music on tape or disc.  Then Chuck would sit the man in a sound room where the man could hear but not see the speakers.  Many customers had poor hearing and could not tell the difference $100 speakers and $1000 speakers.  This revelation earned respect for Chuck.  He also had an incredible amount of knowledge about stereos.  On Saturday mornings, customers would line up to ask him questions.
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