From Rusty Fish Hooks to Satellites: Evolution Of A Retail Technologist

How we used space technology to give a small rural Wal-Mart store the same technological teeth as the big city.

How I Learned About Retail By Cleaning Out The Storeroom

How I Learned About Retail By Cleaning Out The Storeroom

Retail was my calling long before I had a title or a tie. It started when I was five years old with a neighbor’s phone call to my mother. Apparently, I was at their front door, working hard to close a deal on a handful of burnt-up candles and some rusty fish hooks I’d scavenged. I didn’t have a store, but I had inventory and a customer. That was the spark.

When I was nine, I would often spend a week or so with my Uncle and Aunt in Soso, Mississippi — a town so small there’s a song about it being the quintessential “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” spot. My uncle owned the only drugstore in town, and that’s where I got my first look at the “vendor-retailer dance.” Once a month, the comic book vendor would roll in with new titles. The deal was simple: my uncle got credit for whatever didn’t sell. He didn’t ship the books back; he just tore off the front covers and handed them over. To the vendor, it was dead inventory. To me, it was a month-old treasure I got to read for free. I was learning how retailers and vendors managed risk and credit — simple, manual, and strictly localized.

At twelve, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I finally built my own supply chain. My mom and I would drive down to Juarez, where I’d buy vegetables at rock-bottom prices. Back in Las Cruces, I’d load my “delivery vehicle” — a cooler strapped to a garbage can roller, topped with a scale and a stack of brown paper bags — and go door-to-door. Whether I was “buying low” in Mexico or gleaning the onion fields around Las Cruces, I was living the fundamental truth of the business: profit is found in the gap between what you have and how fast you can get it to the customer.

In my teens, each summer I would spend a couple of weeks with my uncle in Lucedale, MS. He grew about three acres of watermelons — both red and yellow (my favorite). I’d help him harvest the crop, and we’d take a load to sell to the local grocery store. We always had more than the grocery store could move, so we’d set up a display in the front yard of his house, which sat on a busy two-lane road. We’d put up a couple of signs on the highway and my job was to “mind the store.” It was a masterclass in customer service and negotiation. Customers always wanted a “deal,” and I learned that if they bought two, they got a discount. It was basic retailing, but the stakes were real.

Fast forward to the mid-80s, and I was seeing a much more corporate version of that gap as a Systems Engineer for NCR.

Ready To Open But Can’t

I was the middleman between a fast-moving Wal-Mart in Bentonville and a slow-moving, proprietary fortress in Dayton, Ohio. At the time, Wal-Mart was growing so fast it was almost comical. They could clear a lot, build a complete store, and fully merchandise it before the communication lines were even installed. AT&T had been broken into the “Baby Bells,” and they were all over the board in terms of capability and speed. We needed comms much earlier in the store set, but the telcos just couldn’t deliver.

Wal-Mart’s strategy was always aimed at small-town America, but that strategy was hampered by those local telcos. I’m not entirely sure how the conversation started, but leadership decided we needed to bypass the system entirely. We sought out a satellite-based network.

Hughes was the provider selected, and we set out to install a dish on top of every existing and new store. The system allowed for data communications and voice services. The quality of the voice service was pretty bad at first — one of the most common reports to Network Support was that the voice sounded like Darth Vader — but it allowed the Home Office to talk to stores without paying long-distance charges. Eventually, the “Vader” effect faded, and the tech stabilized.

The Satellite Equalizer

The NCR 1255 actually had a powerful feature already baked into the base code: Real-time Credit and Check Authorization. In a city like Little Rock, retailers used this every day because they had decent connections to local banks. But in the rural “Sosos” of the world, it was useless. The fragmented telco lines were too noisy and slow for a real-time “ask.” That feature sat dormant — a high-performance engine with no fuel.

The moment of leverage came when I finally got those NCR POS systems onto the Wal-Mart satellite network. Suddenly, the “hard wall” was gone. By getting the POS onto the satellite, I unlocked the standard functionality that was already sitting there. We didn’t need the local telco to find Soso on a map, and because the code was already in the box, I didn’t need to wait six months for a “special patch” from Dayton. We were simply creating additional value for a system Wal-Mart had already paid for, at zero incremental cost to NCR.

The Payoff

We flipped the switch, and it was an immediate Win-Win. It wasn’t about a complex mathematical formula; it was an obvious improvement to customer service and a clear reduction in fraud. A store in a Mississippi cow pasture suddenly had the same technological teeth as a store in Little Rock.

While Bobby Martin was the real architect of the scale — taking the foundation laid by his predecessor, Glenn Habern, and turning it into a global competitive advantage — this was the ground-level proof they needed. We’d turned the satellite into the “equalizer.” I went from being “part of the problem” at NCR to being the guy who proved the technology was worth the investment.

Not a bad jump from selling rusty fish hooks.

This story is part of Retail Tales Never Told, a collection documenting Robert Davis’s 35 years of retail evolution from the backrooms of the giants to the modern homestead in the Cascades.

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