The Spiked Heel

“He’s a superman,” Marge said, lowering her mirror. “He’s almost frightening in a way.”

“Oh, come on, Marge.”

“No, really, Griff. I think he’s the handsomest man I’ve ever met, and he’s well-spoken and loaded with charm, and he’s not above using a mild swear word every now and then, and he seems intelligent, although that may be part of his polish. He’s too perfect. It gives you the willies.”

“It doesn’t give me the willies,” Griff said, smiling. “Maybe our biological makeup…”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Marge said, but she turned her head away, avoiding his eyes.

“Well, I think he’s all right,” Griff said. “I don’t know how long he’s going to stay, but I’m sure he’ll give Julien Kahn a good shot in the arm, and Julien Kahn can use it. McQuade is one guy who’s not going to let any grass grow under his feet.”

Marge went to her desk and sat down behind the typewriter. “Well,” she said, “I imagine we’ll see.” She paused and looked over the papers on her desk. “I still haven’t finished this report.”

“And I’ve got to price these orders. That tour Friday knocked my schedule all to hell.”

“Back to the grist,” she said, sighing.

Their conversation ended abruptly as they both turned to the work before them. Griff knew his job well, and he was probably the only man in the factory who could labor over the pricing of an order without losing any time, appetite, or hair.

It was a pretty simple thing, of course, to price a standard model shoe. If the price did not instantly come to mind, there was always the price book to consult, and Griff frequently consulted it, his memory being good but not photographic. If an account requested a variation on a certain pattern, suede for example when the sample he’d seen had been in kid, Griff went to his files and pulled the cost card for that pattern. The cost card listed a detailed breakdown of cost for the sample shoe only, but it also listed surveys for that pattern in various substitute materials: suede, calf, fabric. When he knew how much suede the shoe would take, Griff had only to calculate the suede cost and substitute that for the kid cost, coming up with a new coat and subsequently a new price.

But there were times when even the cost card could not help him in repricing a variation an account called for. An open toe, for example, on a normally closed-toe, closed-back pump. The account out in Sioux City liked the pump the salesman was showing him, but open toes were going big for him this season. No, he didn’t like any of the open-toe patterns he’d seen. But damn, he did like that pump. Could he have it with an open toe? The salesman filled out the order, telling the account he’d see if it could be done. He wrote down the style number, and after that he put an X, and under that X= OT. If Sales approved the order, it was sent to Griff. When Griff saw that OT variation, he knew he could not go to his price book, and he knew he could not go to his cost cards. If the factory had never cut this particular variation, there was no bank of previous knowledge from which to draw. He was then forced to rely upon his intimate knowledge of each operation that went into the making of a shoe, visualizing the patterns that would be used, deducting so much for material, adding so much for labor. Except in rare cases like Posnansky’s black suede on Friday, where an outside estimate had been necessary, Griff could almost instantly gauge how much a variation from the basic pattern would cost, and he adjusted his price accordingly. If he ran into any trouble concerning the amount of material a variation would consume, he consulted Morris Davidoff and asked him to work out a survey with his graphs and charts. If he couldn’t figure what a certain operation would cost, he contacted Sal Valdero, the company’s Labor Man.

As a general rule, his department ran very smoothly. In most cases, when an order reached his desk, he jotted down the price in the lower right-hand corner, and then the orders were sent over to O’Herlihy in Production. Production copied the price onto the work ticket, alongside the final case number. When the shoe was completed, the Shipping Room attached a charge to the ticket, and both ticket and charge were sent up to Griff. He then checked his original price against the ever-changing price book. If his original price were correct, the charges were sent to IBM, and invoices were mailed on the same day the shoes were shipped.