Here’s a crazy thought: According to an online search, Charles H. Duell stated in 1889 that the U.S. Patent Office would soon shrink in size and eventually close as, get this, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
So, who is Charles H. Duell? He was the commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office at the time.
How presumptuous was that? Imagine: “Sorry, folks. We’re shutting it all down. All the ideas are already accounted for.” Sure, it was well past the 1760 to 1840 Industrial Revolution, but it was also pre-everything else. It makes you wonder if anyone feels this way today.
I know I’ve looked around the produce business after all these decades and wondered, what’s in store ahead? What else can people come up with?
I grew up in produce when limited SKUs ruled the roost, when few even heard of seedless grapes or watermelons; before anyone thought it possible to sell prechopped, packaged salads; before anyone realized that strawberries, artichokes or asparagus were anything but an eight-week-long, spring-only blitz; and at a time when multiple produce items required heavy, in-store labor as we trimmed, packaged, overwrapped and did other prep.
Our store ordering technology in the ’70s was a Telxon apparatus. You keyed in the produce order, one item number at a time, and it had a built-in coupler modem. You pressed a landline phone receiver to it, and as it transmitted the order, the Telxon machine emitted a space-age series of beeps, buzzing and clicking noises.
We were amazed. In fact, our entire produce warehouse operated on an 8-kilobyte computer inventory system. That’s incredible, knowing that a basic handheld calculator today runs on 20 times that powerful of a system.
Keep in mind that most of us at home then still had to physically stand up and change the television channel (having four to choose from) by hand.
Technology races ahead, sometimes beyond our human capacity to fully embrace it all.
But my favorite produce-related tech story happened decades ago. At the Idaho Potato Commission, they employed traveling, marketing field guys who were used to stopping and calling into the office periodically throughout the day to check in for any messages as they drove through distant markets.
To anyone who traveled back in the day, including this aging produce scribe, that’s how things went. Pretty common.
Eventually, talk started to circulate about then-budding mobile telephones. Better than belt-clipped pagers, a mobile phone was a real luxury — and really expensive. It seemed only important people like high-end real estate types or even doctors used these phones.
And so, the commission, like so many organizations at the time, pushed back on providing cellular phones for the traveling field team. “Not a necessity. Too costly,” they said. Understandable.
Not long afterward, one of the commission’s traveling guys pulled over to the side of the road somewhere on a hot, dusty day. He stepped into a phone booth, dropped in some coins and just as he was checking in for his messages, an oncoming car careened out of control, jumped the curb and smashed right into our unsuspecting friend in the phone booth, putting him in the hospital.
Thankfully, he was not critically injured, but the field guy became the poster child for no one ending up as a roadside target again. The commission unanimously voted shortly thereafter to supply the team with cellular phones.
Sigh. Be not afraid. In the produce aisle, all useful technology is recognized sooner or later. Some ideas are born great, some are eventually embraced and some technology is (quite literally) thrust upon us. (With apologies to William Shakespeare.)
Armand Lobato’s more than 50 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions. He has written a weekly retail column for two decades.
