Inventory

2017-2018 handoff °F

It's been on the nippy side for the past couple weeks here in the Northland. Whenever we get a week or longer stretch of frigid temps, it brings back vivid memories of Hoplin & Nelson hardware's "inventory week". Since the counting needed to be done by year-end, inventory was always taken during the week between Christmas & New Year's. This was an "all-hands" (plus some outside recruits) operation - and invariably coincided with the coldest week of the winter.

The next time you go into a hardware store, take a look around. There's a lot of stuff. Think about counting and recording every item in the building. I was recruited to help in this process at an early age. At age 10, I was given the job of counting the items in all the drawers and leaving a slip of paper with the total so someone could come along and record it. 76 #10 wood screws. 64 boxes of 22 long rifle shells. Six ½ x 4 nipples. 42 feet of canvas webbing. Deadly boring, but a lesson in stick-to-it-tiveness.

Hoplin & Nelson was a farm oriented hardware business. You could buy nails by the pound, a single screw or bolt if that’s what you needed - in hundreds of size/length combinations, a hog trough, a manure spreader, a vice grip, udder balm, bailing twine, a 4-10, dynamite, a Schwinn bike, a gopher trap, a P-trap, a pitchfork, a shotgun can, a can of paint - and linseed oil to stretch it, Melmac dishes, a spatula, a depression glass bowl, a Maytag ringer washer, ... and have your broken window or torn screen repaired while you waited.  Or a coffin. (see Hoplin & Nelson post)

The hardware was also home base for my father's plumbing, heating and electrical business, so the visible part of the store was only the half of it. There were 3 outside warehouses, 2 back of the store storage areas; an upstairs storage for seasonal merchandise; the basement for machinery parts (all these unheated). These spaces held as much merchandise as the store proper. The electrical shack out back had all kinds of curiosities that the electricians seemed to have some use for. The gas dock held dozens of 100 lb. tanks of propane. The main warehouses across the alley held the big stuff that took up a lot of space – conduit, soil pipe, duct work, water heaters, appliances. The lots to the north and south held the farm products – manure spreader, hay rake, hog troughs, chicken waterers and the like.  

And, then there was the dynamite shed, a tin shack behind the store with sandbagged walls and a padlocked door, holding several cases of dynamite. In those days, farmers used a lot of dynamite for blowing drainage ditches, removing rocks or tree stumps from fields – it was just part of farming. A half a dozen cases of dynamite in the middle of town wasn’t considered a serious threat to public safety.  

All this needed to be counted , recorded, priced and extended, item by item.

39 grease gun zercs @ $.15 ea = $5.85

87 2 gal Red Barn Paint pails @ $2.49 ea = $216.63

and about a million more entries ...

Once I got to high school age, I got the job of recorder with my father dictating as fast as he could. I was quick enough at math (not as quick as Martin) to do most of the cost extension calculations in my head, which saved some pain for Dave & Martin who had to do the extensions and totaling for the mountain of inventory sheets that resulted. And of course, working with my father meant "doing the warehouses". For this outside duty, I tried to squirrel away an empty Maytag washer box to sit in with my trusty clipboard, 3 sharpened pencils, fingerless gloves - and a kerosene heater to ward off the frostbite. But it was still brutal.

I hope you're still reading, because what I really wanted to get to is weather and some peoples' insistence on equating it with climate, implying that a stretch of cold temperatures proves that global warming is a hoax. This is pseudo-science at its worst and is either ignorance or deliberate deception. Weather is not climate. In fact, colder colds, hotter hots, more devastating storms, longer droughts are all indicative of a warming planet. The planet is warming, that is indisputable. It can and has been measured. You can claim that human-kind is not the cause, but annual carbon emissions into the atmosphere (measuring ~37 gigatons annually - that's giga as in billion) doesn't really seem prudent.

And a warming planet affects weather. Some truths:

• Planet warming most affects the poles - reducing ice packs. (you've seen the time-lapse glacier photos)
• Warmer air accumulates at both poles causing less ice, more water. (see next bullet)
• Darker surfaces (eg. water vs ice) absorb more heat. (Wear your black t-shirt on an August day)
• Warmer temps cause increased air pressure. (Blow up a ballon and set it in the sun)
• Higher polar pressure disrupts the jet stream and allows the cold air to move south. Normally, the jet stream traps the cold air well to the north of Northland. (see NASA photo below, normal on the right)

So the fact that the Carolina's get 5" of snow and Orlando temps are in the 40's; that 2017 saw 10 hurricanes with 3 category 5's (Harvey, Irma, Maria); that there were massive drought related fires in the far west; that 2016 had dramatically above average temperatures for the planet (+1.7°F, an enormous increase); that 2017 experienced record shattering heat-waves in the US, as well as in Europe, India and elsewhere; that coral reefs are dying; and on and on - should be an overdue wakeup call. You, dear reader, probably will not live long enough to see it significantly affect your life - unless you live on a coast or the desert southwest. But consider the world your children and grandchildren will inherit.  

There is hope. Things are happening at the state level. Even an oil-baron dominated state like Texas now gets 17% of its electrical power from wind power. Take a read: NASA's climate change assessment.  And if you want to be proactive - check out the Citizens' Climate Lobby.

Perhaps we all need to take an inventory.

Copyright © 2018 Dave Hoplin