Taking inventory in at a 7-11

I found this little tidbit from Charles Cox in my feeds today.  It was fun to read, but disturbing at the same time.  The story is basically about a guy at a 7-11 store that is being “forced” to use a tablet PC to take inventory.  Here is an excerpt of his little interview:

Charles: How does this thing work, anyway?
Joe @ 7-11: I use it for inventory. I tell it how many items are left, it orders them automatically. Like I’ll put down 2 for strawberry muffins, because that’s how many are left. See, there’s a graph.
Charles: It shows how many you’ve been selling?
Joe: Yes. Not many.
Charles: Well, nobody likes strawberry muffins, so no surprise there. But why does it help?
Joe: It doesn’t help me – we used to have vendors do this. A chip guy, a soda guy, they’d come and count their own items and take care of all of it for us. Now they make me do it.

Go read the whole interview, and hear Charles’ rather poigniant comments on how tablet pc’s and the resulting increase in productivity are being viewed by some…