I work in a warehouse that restocks 9 stores. We replaced FaceTime ordering with an app I built. Here's what changed.

It's the morning and I'm on three phones.

One propped against a metal shelf in the warehouse, on speaker. One in my hand. One buzzing in my back pocket. Three different stores trying to read out three different orders at the same time, and me trying to write all of it down.

This is how mornings used to work here.

Nine stores. One warehouse in San Diego. We open at 6:30. By 7am every store manager who got in early enough was on the phone with us walking through what they were low on. Some used FaceTime. Some just called. Some texted a list and then called to clarify the list. None of it was the same format twice.

The problem was never the picking. The problem was getting the list of what to pick.

Some mornings we were on the phone for 30 minutes per store. Some mornings 45. By the time we'd worked through all 9, it was past 11 and we hadn't pulled a single item. The truck didn't load until 2. The drivers didn't get rolling until 3. Stores got their restock around closing time, when they'd already been short for a full sales day on whatever was selling fastest.

That was the part nobody talked about. The morning wasn't fulfillment. The morning was transcription.

The mistakes came from the transcription too. 6 cases of Strawberry Watermelon went out when the order was Strawberry Banana — which we don't even carry in the same SKU, it's a totally different model. Geek Bar Pulse 15k got pulled when the store had said Geek Max 30k. The flavor names get close enough that on a bad connection, with fluorescent buzz overhead and yesterday's handwriting on the clipboard, you just write down the wrong thing. Three times a week. Maybe more.

We were running an inventory operation by reading lists of products aloud over a bad phone line.

I went home one night and opened my laptop. The first version was barely software — a list of products on a phone screen with quantity buttons next to each one. The store employees would tap what they needed and it would dump into a Google Sheet I'd refresh on my own phone in the warehouse. No login, no logo, no nothing.

It worked the first morning we tried it.

One store submitted the night before at 11. Another at 11:30. The third around 12:15. I walked into the warehouse at 7am and there was a clean list waiting. No phone calls. No texts. No "are you sure that's what you said." Just products and quantities and which store wanted them.

The pick that used to take till 11 was done by 9:30.

That was the moment I knew this thing was real. Not because the software was good — it was barely software. But because the morning had gone from chaos to quiet, and the only thing that had changed was the store employees were typing what they needed instead of saying it out loud over a bad connection.

You'd think the time savings would be the headline. It's not.

The headline is what the warehouse feels like at 7:15 now. Quiet. One person walking the aisles with a phone, picking off a list. No yelling, no callbacks, no "let me put you on hold." Just picking. The thing the warehouse is actually for.

The orders take store employees under 2 minutes now. They tap a category, tap a product, tap a flavor, tap a quantity, hit submit. Geek Bar, Lost Mary, Foger, UT Bar — all of it just lives in a list they scroll through. They do their order at 4pm before they leave. They do it at midnight after close if they're a late spot. The warehouse doesn't care when. The warehouse cares that there's a clean pick list waiting in the morning that someone actually typed instead of mouthing into a phone.

We track what got pulled. We track what didn't. We know which stores forgot to order until the customer was already at the counter asking for something. We know which flavors move and which sit. None of that existed when it was all phone calls, because nothing got written down. The orders weren't data. They were vibes.

It took about two weeks for every store to switch over. There was one holdout who kept saying he'd rather just call. So we let him call. And every morning he was still on the phone for 35 minutes while the other 8 stores were already sitting there as a clean line item on the screen, and eventually he was the only one calling, and one morning he just used the app instead. Never said anything about it. Just stopped calling.

Two years in, this is what I can tell you. The hardest part of restocking 9 stores wasn't the picking. It wasn't the truck. It wasn't the shelves. It was the half-day of transcription at the start of every morning — extracting a list of products from a series of bad phone calls and turning it into something we could actually act on.

The product is just that. A way for the store employee to type what they need so the warehouse doesn't have to listen to it being said.

If your operation looks anything like ours did — backstockapp.com. Or just text me.