The "UPTSQ1978555" Secret Code

Names of Cracker Barrel employees have been changed for their privacy and protection.




"Now we're going to learn about UPTs," Janice said matter-of-factly.


It was my second day of training in the Ole' Country Store at Cracker Barrel. I was still reeling a bit from the "crap on the floor" revelation of the day before. But I'd arrived for work with an earnest expectation that things weren't as bad as they'd seemed, and I'd do whatever it took to accomplish my mission of achieving affordable health insurance.


"What's a UPT?" I asked, wondering if that was some secret code for "Units of Peppermint Twists," or some other quaint country store ism.


"It tracks your Units Per Transaction," Janice replied, as if she was surprised I hadn't already cracked that mystery.


(I actually always had trouble remembering what the UPT really meant, and that acronym confused me to the day I walked out of Cracker Barrel for the last time. So in my mind's eye, I just referred to it from that day forward as "The UPTSQ1978555 Secret Code." It seemed  a little more secret-agent-y, anyway.)


Janice walked behind the register counter and retrieved a white notebook that was as heavy as a country ham and dramatically opened it to a page of row upon row of columns and numbers. She quickly punched a code into the register and showed me a mathematical formula.


Wow, I didn't know I was going to get to do math at this job, and as a full-time writer, you might as well have put a SQL code under my nose. But I perked up and tried to remember the sequence of steps through which Janice walked me.


Basically, I had to keep track of four things: 1) I had to know what our store sales had been at that precise hour of time one year ago that day, 2) I had to know what our store sales had been for the current hour of the current day, 3) I had to compare the percentage -- How much up or down were our sales from a year ago? and 4) I had to calculate the UPTSQ1978555.


The UPTSQ1978555, I was told, was the most important number.


It basically revealed how many items, on average, each customer had purchased. Every person who worked the store had to shoot for an average of 3 items per person/ or transaction.


As I looked at the table, I could see that most of the sales people averaged 1.8 items per transaction.


I can honestly tell you that in the entire 3 months that I worked at Cracker Barrel, I only achieved 3 items per transaction less than a handful of times. Usually, I'd hover around 2.8. But getting to the benchmark of 3 was next to impossible, unless you happened to get lucky with some little blue-haired lady who wanted to cover her Christmas tree with plastic gingerbread men made in China.


"Oh my," I bemoaned, looking at the column of last year's sales numbers compared to the daily averages. "Look how high we were last year compared to this year."


"That doesn't matter!" Janice quipped, suddenly transforming from her Mrs. Claus persona into someone who reminded me of a toll booth worker on the New Jersey Turnpike. "The ONLY number that you care about is the UPT ('SQ1978555,' I added silently to myself)."


"Why's that?"


"Because the economy is down. We'll never get to where we were this time last year. No one expects you to do that. The only number they care about is how many transactions you're making per customer," she explained.


It made sense, and it seemed like a fair measurement. We were supposed to haul out the UPTSQ1978555 notebook once an hour, so that we could see how we were faring regularly.


At the time, however, I didn't realize how much the UPTSQ1978555 Secret Code would affect my life at Cracker Barrel -- or how much it would potentially jeopardize my need to attain affordable health insurance.




Tune in for the next part of the Mission Impossible: Health Insurance tale.