The review also identified supervisors at other locations who had used the same flawed appeal-routing system without necessarily making improper chargebacks. Their cases required separate examination rather than collective blame. Nadine asked headquarters to evaluate whether the shrink targets rewarded stores for reclassification rather than genuine reduction in waste. She had once thought her responsibility ended at giving managers a number to meet. Now she understood that the way a number was achieved belonged to her responsibility as well.
For Tessa, the end of the first month came without any certainty that the trial would lead to permanent work. Some days she drove two hundred miles between farms and stores, collecting documents and witnessing inspections that ended in straightforward agreements. Other days she spent hours resolving a conflict over a few cases of produce whose condition had changed during transport. The mileage reimbursement and written schedule mattered more than she had expected, because she could now account for her own work without begging a manager to acknowledge the time it took.
She kept every report in a shared archive accessible to both sides, with personal information protected and relevant source evidence attached. When she made an error in a lot code, she corrected it through a visible amendment rather than rewriting the original note. It felt awkward at first, leaving a mistake in a permanent history. But the first time a grower thanked her for making the correction easy to follow, she understood that the visible history was the point.
Late one Friday, Samuel called to ask how the role was going. Tessa was sitting in her car outside a receiving center, eating a sandwich she had bought hours earlier and forgotten. She said the work was difficult and sometimes tedious, then asked how the orchards were doing. He told her the trees were beginning to slow for the season and that the last Eleanor Gold shipments had passed their inspections without trouble.
"Does that mean you think I should be grateful?" she asked lightly.
"No," Samuel said. "It means the fruit was good and the records said so. That's what the contract was supposed to do all along."
Tessa looked out at the trucks crossing the lot. "Then I think the job is doing what it should," she answered.
By the end of the sixty-day trial, Tessa had visited sixteen receiving locations and eight of the fourteen Heritage farms. She had observed enough ordinary disagreements to stop being surprised by how often the facts were mixed. A store could reject a truly defective portion of a load and still mishandle the paperwork. A farm could send good produce in packaging that allowed preventable damage, and the store could make that damage worse by leaving the pallets in an unsuitable place after arrival.
Her reports did not read like arguments for one side or the other. They described the condition of shipments, the inspection methods used, the names and times attached to each decision, and the evidence available if either party disagreed. She included the costs of preventable disputes: wasted driver hours, second inspections, emergency replacement shipments, spoilage during a hold, and the time spent answering claims that should have been clear from the first record. When she tallied them, the expense of having an independent liaison appeared less mysterious to the growers who had initially opposed the position.