A School of Continuous Improvement poster sorts 4,128 stickered supermarket sandwiches into four cells, and the University adopts the result as a ceiling on how far its own surplus may be marked down.
A School of Continuous Improvement poster asks why the last stickered sandwich is left at closing
The School of Continuous Improvement has long taken an interest in how an institution decides that something is finished with, and the University’s newest answer is a shelf. “Why Does the Last Reduced Sandwich Stay on the Shelf?”, a research poster published today, asks the question of the chilled cabinet at closing time, and the University has carried its finding into the handling of its own surplus.
A shelf is a kind of attention, and we have learned something about where ours tends to go when the day is nearly over.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
The poster, by Edda Nwafor with Dr Sabel and Dr Thandiwe Solberg, follows 4,128 stickered sandwiches through eleven supermarkets, setting how far each was marked down against where it was put. The two settings are brought together in four named cells, and the School reads the cells as a single account of what a sticker can and cannot do on its own.
From the start of the next semester, a unit’s surplus will be marked down to a fixed ceiling and no further, and moved to a Reduced Shelf in the School foyer. Anything still on the shelf at close of the next working day is recorded as sold to the unit’s own cost centre, the last item included. Edda Nwafor said the team had come to the cabinet “expecting to find the answer in the price”, and was glad to be shown otherwise.
The release reflects the University’s continuing interest in the small decisions a shelf makes on behalf of everyone who walks past it. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xfdsx0.