I worked in an American grocery store for a while, and the employees, even the managers, did not take cooler temperatures seriously. They were eager to shrug off, make excuses for, anomalies. Because they were too busy, and a freezer meltdown (which happened as the result of malfunctions more than once) was a ton of work, a huge disruption.
Far from saving money, I’m sure an automatic monitoring and control system that raised an alarm at headquarters would have cost that store more money. But it also would have resulted in better monitoring. It would have done a better job than the people who were avoiding that job were doing.
Much later, I worked at an engineering sub-contractor for a hospital equipment manufacturer. One of my projects included adding automatic temperature monitoring and logging to some pretty simple OR appliances. Humans were supposed to be checking the temperatures of these things on a regular basis, but I got the notion that we weren’t trying to save staffing costs so much as we were trying to make sure the mandated monitoring actually happened. Who really has time to check the temperature of the blood cabinet every hour? When things get busy, that’s the kind of thing that gets skipped first. If anyone was even taking it seriously in the first place.
I worked in an American grocery store for a while, and the employees, even the managers, did not take cooler temperatures seriously. They were eager to shrug off, make excuses for, anomalies. Because they were too busy, and a freezer meltdown (which happened as the result of malfunctions more than once) was a ton of work, a huge disruption.
Far from saving money, I’m sure an automatic monitoring and control system that raised an alarm at headquarters would have cost that store more money. But it also would have resulted in better monitoring. It would have done a better job than the people who were avoiding that job were doing.
Much later, I worked at an engineering sub-contractor for a hospital equipment manufacturer. One of my projects included adding automatic temperature monitoring and logging to some pretty simple OR appliances. Humans were supposed to be checking the temperatures of these things on a regular basis, but I got the notion that we weren’t trying to save staffing costs so much as we were trying to make sure the mandated monitoring actually happened. Who really has time to check the temperature of the blood cabinet every hour? When things get busy, that’s the kind of thing that gets skipped first. If anyone was even taking it seriously in the first place.