The Shoebox Under the Counter Finally Beat Me on a Rainy Tuesday

My father opened the shop in 1991, on a corner in Boksburg where the taxis turn and the traffic light has been broken for as long as anyone can remember. He sold car parts. Fan belts, wiper blades, brake pads, the little rubber grommets that nobody knows the name of until theirs perishes and the door starts to rattle. When he died the shop came to me, along with his way of doing things, which was to write everything on a piece of paper and put the piece of paper in a shoebox.

I want to be honest about the shoebox, because it worked for a very long time. It was a brown box that once held a pair of size nine Grasshoppers, and it lived on a shelf under the counter next to the bottle of hand cleaner. Every sale my father made, he wrote on a slip. Date, part, price, and sometimes the name of the customer if he liked them. At night he tipped the slips out, added them up with a pencil, and wrote the total in a hardcover book. He did this for thirty years and the shop fed our family the whole time.

The way we always did it

When I took over I kept the box because it felt wrong to throw away the thing that held his handwriting. I also kept it because I genuinely did not know a better way, and because every morning there were customers at the burglar bars before I had the lights on, and a man standing in the rain wanting a radiator hose does not care how you record the sale. He cares that you have the hose.

So I wrote slips. I got good at it. I could tell you the price of four hundred parts from memory, and I could do the change in my head faster than the young ones can do it on a phone. For years I was quietly proud of this. I thought the shoebox was character. I thought it was the opposite of the big franchise spares shop that opened two kilometres away with its bright lights and its computer that beeps.

What I did not count was how much the shoebox was costing me in the dark. I could not tell you which parts were selling and which were sitting on the shelf going dusty. I ordered on a feeling. Sometimes the feeling was wrong and I had forty of something nobody wanted and none of the thing three people asked for that week. When the taxman wanted figures I spent a weekend on the floor of the shop with slips spread around me like autumn leaves, trying to remember what a faded pencil mark had meant in March.

The Tuesday it fell apart

It came apart properly on a rainy Tuesday in winter. The roof over the storeroom has a leak my father also never fixed, and that morning the drip had moved. I did not know it had moved. It had found a new path and it was falling, drop by drop, straight into the shoebox under the counter, which I had left slightly out of its place.

I only noticed at half past four when I went to tip out the slips. The box was soft. The slips at the bottom had gone to pulp, the ink had bled, and a whole week of sales had turned into grey paper mush that smelled of wet cardboard. I stood there holding it and I felt something I had been refusing to feel for years, which was that I had been running a real business, with real money moving through it, on a system that a roof leak could erase in an afternoon.

I did not sleep well. I kept thinking about my father, and about the fact that loving how he did things was not the same as that way still being good enough. The next morning I phoned my niece, who works in retail in a mall in the East Rand, and I asked her the question I had been too stubborn to ask. How do the proper shops keep track of all this.

Asking the question I had avoided

She did not laugh at me, which I appreciated. She explained that what I needed was a point of sale system, which I had always vaguely imagined was just a till that goes ding. She explained that the till is the smallest part of it. The real thing is that it remembers. Every brake pad that leaves the shop, it knows. It can tell you at the end of the month what sold, what did not, what you are running low on, and what is sitting there tying up money you could use elsewhere.

I spent an evening reading, properly reading, the way I had not read about anything to do with the business in years. I looked at a few South African options, a company called pos system among them, and I made myself understand what the words actually meant instead of pretending I was above them. Stock on hand. Low stock alert. A report you can hand the accountant without spending a weekend on the floor. None of it was magic. It was just the shoebox, if the shoebox could add, remember, and never turn to pulp in the rain.

What surprised me was how much of my resistance had been pride rather than money. I had told myself for years that a computer was for the big shops with the bright lights, that a man who knows his parts does not need it. Standing there with a box of wet paper, I understood that the big shops were not winning because they were soulless. They were winning partly because at the end of every day they knew exactly where they stood, and I was guessing.

Learning to trust the screen

I will not pretend the change was smooth. I am fifty-four and I had never used a barcode scanner in my life. The first week I was slower than the shoebox, and I swore at the screen more than once, and an old customer named Vusi teased me without mercy while I hunted for a wiper blade in a list. But by the second week something had shifted. I could see, actually see, that I was selling three times more of one brake pad than another, and that half my shelf of a certain filter had not moved in a year.

The thing I had been most afraid of, that a pos point of sale system would make the shop feel like the cold franchise down the road, turned out to be the opposite. It gave me time. The adding up that used to eat my evenings now takes a few minutes. I spend that found time talking to the customers, the way my father did, remembering which bakkie belongs to which man and what he was fighting with last time. The machine does the remembering I was bad at, and I do the remembering I am good at.

I kept the shoebox. It sits on the shelf still, dried out now, empty, next to the hand cleaner. Sometimes a customer asks about it and I tell them it ran the shop for thirty years and nearly drowned on a Tuesday. My father would have grumbled about the whole business, the scanner and the screen and the reports. But I think, somewhere, he would have been glad that the shop he built is still standing on the corner where the taxis turn, and that it finally knows what it is holding.