What Thoreau Don't Know

Near the beginning of Walden, Thoreau writes that "it would be some advantage to live in a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them." The irony, of course, is that now we would say even the most "civilized" mid-nineteenth-century American lived a life far more primitive than any imaginable today. No Coca-Cola (nor plastic bottle in which to hold it); no Gore-Tex jacket (nor zipper with which close it); no Chevy Blazer (nor asphalt on which to drive it). Really, how can you talk about gross necessaries when you haven't even been to Filene's Basement?

Which brings me to my friend Ping, who not only drinks, dresses and drives la mode but has an active hand in making sure modernity moves speedily forward.

Ping is a purchasing analyst in the Non-Traditional Purchasing Department of a Fortune 500 food and beverage company. She graduated from college last June with a degree in industrial engineering, and started work in November. The function of her department, she told me, is to "purchase anything that's not related to the end product." This might mean nuts and bolts for machinery, hairnets and uniforms for employees or adhesives and cardboard for packaging. The list runs into the tens of thousands: everything necessary to move from idea to product except for the product itself.

In the eyes of the consumer, these products exemplify Thoreau's celebrated "simplicity." The company's best-seller is a drink you can buy at Store 24 for a little over a dollar. Its two main ingredients are sugar and water, and it comes in a plastic bottle with a twist-off cap and coated wrap-around paper label. That's it.

Behind the scenes, however, lurks complexity enough to daunt the TF for Math 55. For starters, 423 million gallons of this stuff are sold every day. A typical bottle holds about a quarter of a gallon. That's over a billion coated wrap-around paper labels to buy every morning. The Non-Traditional Purchasing Department does the buying, and they do it very carefully. When millions of dollars move with each font change, after all, the more MBA's the merrier. As Ping put it, "Looking at a bottle, you wouldn't think hundreds of people did months of work just to switch a type of adhesive used in gluing the label to the bottle."

Two years ago, a separate department for non-traditional purchases was only a circle on a new CEO's org chart. His goal, Ping explained, was "to consolidate the supplier base" and thereby "leverage spending." In English, this meant that where once each of the company's manufacturing plants had different local suppliers, they would now buy every item in larger volumes at lower prices from one or two national suppliers. "This seems to be the trend nowadays," Ping told me. "In the beginning, they hired some consultants to do a diagnostic and found out there was a saving potential. Then the management set a target of $53 million in savings in two years for the department." These expected savings were to come by changing how--not what--the company purchased.

In the specific case of the glue on the label, Ping's team sought their sellers online with the help of a dot-com "market maker" whose web page trumpets its expertise in "business-to-business online auctions for buyers of industrial parts, raw materials, commodities and services." For every different adhesive needed to attach label to bottle, Ping said, "they had at least four of five [online] bidders," each a national supplier. The winning bid represented a savings of 20 percent.

Now, said Ping, "they need to test [the new glues] in the R&D facility and then in the [manufacturing] plants." In all, the intellectual assembly line will move from CEO to management consultant to purchasing analyst to materials buyer to development tester to factory overseer before the new process for gluing the label to the bottle is complete. It is exceedingly unlikely that any of the 423-million-gallon daily drinkers will notice a thing.

"Coming from an intellectual family, I am excited about ideas, but often don't respect enough what it takes to transform an idea to reality," Ping confessed. "Everything is just so much more complicated than you think in school. [It's] a good reality check. To do well on this job requires a different set of intelligence from performing well in school: less abstract intelligence, but more people skill, common sense, just knowing how to get things done."

I'll drink to that.

Jeremy N. Smith '00 is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.