Billing for your footwear shop in Jharkhand
The pair, the size and the colour, each counted on its own as the carton is opened.
.jpg){kind=link}
A safety boot with two toe caps, a haat stall-keeper who takes a dozen and pairs that dry out in the back room
A safety boot comes in one size with two kinds of toe cap
Workers from a plant or a mine come for boots, and a boot is not only a size. The same size has a steel toe and a plain one, at two rates. On a shelf of black boots the difference is inside, and a customer who was sold the wrong one is back at the counter in a day.
A haat stall-keeper takes a dozen chappals and pays after the haat
Some of the pairs that leave the shop do not go to a foot. A man who sells at the weekly haat takes a dozen chappals to put on his mat, and pays when they are sold. The shop is giving credit to a seller who will not be back for a week, and the slip says only a dozen.
Pairs that sit too long in the back room dry out and crack
Rubber and leather do not like a store room through a hot summer and a wet monsoon. A carton opened late shows soles that have stiffened and straps that have cracked. The pair has been in the shop for a year, and nobody noticed that it was never taken off the shelf.
Each boot named by its toe cap, a stall-keeper's dozen kept apart and the slow sizes seen before they dry out
Each boot is named by its toe cap, and the shelf count shows both kinds
Add the steel-toe boot and the plain boot as two items in each size, with their own rates. A worker who asks for steel is sold steel, the bill says so, and the count shows which kind has run out first.
The dozen goes out before the haat, and what he still owes is read after it
A stall-keeper takes a dozen chappals to sell on his mat at the weekly haat. Bill the dozen under his name as it leaves. A week passes before the next haat, and the pairs his mat did not sell stay with him. His page shows the dozen that went out and what he still owes, and the counter's walk-in buyers are not mixed into it.
The slow sizes are seen in the count while they can still be sold
Open the items and read which sizes and kinds have not moved for months. Put those out at a lower rate, in the front of the shop, before the sole stiffens, and order the sizes that sell instead.
What the phone keeps beside the boot rack and the dozens for the haat
Sell to other businesses
A haat stall-keeper applies to buy a dozen on credit, and his orders and what he owes are kept together, apart from the people who walk in for one pair.
Daily reports
The days of last year's wet-field weeks opened one by one, gumboot size by size, so this year's order is written from a figure and not a guess.
The whole shop in one place
The boots, the chappals, the dozens sent out on credit and the cartons ordered in one list, so the cartons in the store-room are seen with the rest.
A capital, a plant town and a mine: where Jharkhand's feet are shod
Footwear sells differently in each part of Jharkhand, depending on what the customers walk on and what they earn. The boots of a plant town and the chappals of a village are bought for very different reasons.
- Ranchi, the state capital, is an important centre of trade and commerce in Jharkhand; nearby forests supply furniture, match box and paper industries.
- In Jamshedpur most people work in industrial units: Tata companies, iron and steel, automobile and cement.
- Tata Steel's Noamundi mine in West Singhbhum is the area's largest employer, with about 1,500 on its rolls, and has drawn equipment and logistics firms.
Questions Jharkhand footwear sellers ask about boots, stall-keepers and slow sizes
A foreman from the plant wants the same boot in different sizes for his gang. Do I enter the lot as one item?
No, enter the boot as one item for each size, each with its own count. The foreman's bill has a line for every size, and the shelf shows which size is thinning before his next lot.
A safety boot comes in the same size with a steel toe and a plain one. How do I tell them apart?
Make each kind its own item, size 8 steel and size 8 plain. The plant worker asks for steel toe in his size, and the bill carries the same words, so his paper shows what he asked for and what he got.
Last year's carton of a chappal and this year's carton look alike. Can I keep them apart?
Yes. Add the older carton's pairs as one item and the new carton's as another. Sell the old pairs first, and give them a lower rate of their own before the soles stiffen in the back room. The new carton keeps its rate and its count.
A wholesale market at Chas and the crops of Palamu
Chas, the suburb of Bokaro Steel City, is notable for a large wholesale market. A footwear shop within reach of it can buy cartons close to home, and the question each time is which sizes and which kinds to take. A shop that serves both the town and the haat can use the same cartons for both.
The district site lists paddy and sugarcane as Palamu's main crops, and shows lac cultivation in the district. In a district that lives on its crops, a pair of shoes is bought when the crop is sold, and that decides the months in which the shop is busy. The shop that knows how many pairs went after last harvest is the one that does not over-order before the next.