I've been quite busy these days updating the price tags at work. As my more regular readers know, I work at Trader Joe's, a gourmet supermarket which is familiar to Californians but which also has many stores in the Midwest and Northeast. Each Trader Joe's has its own crew of signmakers who create all the signage for the store by hand. Everything from price tags to small ads to bigger "billboards" is all done by real people right there in the store, rather than printed out impersonally the way the big chains do. I am one of three hard-working artisans who work for my local Trader Joe's as signmakers. The entire store is full of our work. Not only are we paid for our work, we are also invited to sample the goodies and wines day by day as they are offered to us. Yes, they pay us to drink wine and sample gourmet food.

Every few months we need to generally update our price tags, more than the ones that get updated every week due to price changes. Tags get messed up, or fade, or the product changes or is discontinued; any number of things happen to make them obsolete. This month has been an update month, and so I have been especially busy switching out hundreds and hundreds of hand-written price tags. Our backgrounds or color borders might be done by computer and/or reproduced by color copying, but all our writing is hand-calligraphed, thus giving Trader Joe's a "humanized," friendly look that appeals to customers.

Imagine a Trader Joe's store as a three-dimensional structure in which the local conditions of the general function "gourmet food" are specified by a single price on a calligraphed price tag. The thousands of price tags are the "infinitesimals" (an old word once used for the innumerable points which made up the curves that calculus analyzes). My job is to create the fullness of a well-signed, information-rich space by making the infinitesimals which comprise that three-dimensional structure.

As my manager explains, the updating of the price tags is a never-ending activity, since the criteria for the tags as well as the prices are always changing. He refers to signmaking as "trying to hit a moving target." Since one of the practical functions of calculus was improving the accuracy of military artillery, then I can say that learning calculus will in some way, if only metaphorically, help me in my work as a signmaker and professional gourmet.

Posted at 2:09 am | link