When you buy something from a retailer — an auto parts store, for example —  the cashier typically scans items using barcodes. Then, those items are automatically deducted from the store’s inventory. Purchasing managers can monitor inventory levels almost in real time and adjust their orders accordingly. 

But when Rod Fuller worked as an inventory clerk for an auto parts chain in the 1970s, all that inventory was counted by hand. 

“You would just run down the list and count the number of parts that you had of each one, mark it in the column, put the date that you inventoried it, and then you’d send those sheets back to the office,” he said. 

As Fuller recalls, his team counted the entire store once a month. Certain products, such as oil and air filters, were counted weekly or biweekly. “The position was a full-time position, Monday through Friday,” he said. 

He and the other inventory clerks harbored particular disdain for certain hard-to-count products, like McCord gaskets. “Nobody liked counting that because they would be stacked side by side, and there’d be literally hundreds and hundreds” of them, he said. “I just think back on it now: ‘Holy snot, the man-hours and people that were required to do the job.’ I mean, it was unbelievable.”

Use the audio player above to hear Fuller’s story.

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