The actual scene in the back room of a Cape Town wine shop on restock morning

7 AM, Thursday. Two hours before the shop opens, twelve boxes are already stacked on the back room floor. Three invoices the delivery driver left behind sit haphazardly on top of the boxes, and I set a cup of coffee beside them and start checking each one against the shipment.

Starting from the ground up

When people hear "back room," many picture a tidy cellar. Reality is different.

• One folding table. On it: a laptop, a printer, a tape cutter, and four pens (three of which don't work).
• On the wall shelves: empty decanters, a half-used stack of tasting notes, and paper cups left over from last month's event.
• Below that, boxes set on pallets. The labels are supposed to face up, but half of them got flipped during shipping.

The first task is matching the invoices to the actual goods. It's common to order six bottles of Sauvignon Blanc and only receive four, or to find a vintage mixed in that was never ordered. Today, two extra bottles of Shiraz from a Stellenbosch farm showed up. They're not on the invoice. Let something like that slide and the numbers won't add up at the end-of-month inventory count.

The spreadsheet is the real tool

We do have a POS system, but I keep a separate Google Sheet as well. The columns are simple:

• Wine name
• Region
• Date received
• Quantity
• Unit price (in rand)
• Shelf location
• Notes (e.g. "check cork condition" or "reserved for Customer K")

I'd love to automate this with a Python script. Feed in the receiving data, have it update inventory by shelf, then look at sales velocity and suggest order quantities for next week. For now, it's all manual, every week. I've been working through pandas tutorials after closing, but once the shop day is over my energy is spent, so progress is slow.

What happens before bottles go on the shelf

I don't open a box and put it straight on display. There are things to check.

• Label condition. Customers don't like torn or stained labels. Many people buy wine as gifts, so even a single crumpled label can kill a sale.
• Cork capsule area. If there are any signs of leakage, I set those bottles aside.
• Temperature. The back room has no aircon. During a Cape Town summer, indoor temperature climbs fast, so boxes can't sit around long after delivery. I try to move them to the wine fridge or the shop floor shelves within an hour.

Once that's done, I flatten the empty boxes and stack them in the back corridor. Recycling pickup is on Tuesday, so I just have to live with the corridor being narrow until then.

A quiet hour of judgement calls

On restocking days, what weighs on my mind most isn't quantity discrepancies. It's price changes. When the same wine has gone up R15 to R20 per bottle since last month, I have to decide whether to raise the retail price straight away or absorb the hit and shrink the margin for now. I sort it out with a quick call or a few messages to the owner. Generally, if the increase is R10 or more, we pass it on to the retail price.

These decisions account for half the time I spend in the back room. More than the physical effort of hauling boxes, the quiet time in front of a spreadsheet, working the numbers is closer to what this job really is.

By 9 AM, when the shop doors open, the back room looks empty again. Customers only see the neatly arranged bottles on the shelves. Nobody asks what went on at that folding table to get each bottle standing there. So I figured I'd write it down.