June 2004 

Ever since the genesis of IBM (International Business Machines), and NCR (National Cash Register) before that, the computer industry has created its own language, primarily comprised of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). You can’t even define a computer without them:

• CPU (Central Processing Unit)
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
• CGI (Computer Generated Image)
• CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
• RAM (Random Access memory)
• ROM (Read Only Memory)
• FDD (Floppy Disk Drive)
• HDD (Hard Disk Drive)
• USB (universal Serial Bus)
• FSB (Front Side Bus – is it on the front or the side?)
• MHz (Megahertz)
• LAN (Local Area Network)
• WAN (Wide Area Network)
• PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect)

• SCSI (Small Computer System Interface)
• WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network)
• TWAIN (Technically Without An Interesting Name – seriously, it’s a scanner standard!)
• GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)
• HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)
• PICNIC (Problem in Chair Not In Computer!)
• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)

This alphabet soup almost seems reasonable when you start listening to technical people use whole words: Ethernet, bits, bytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes, and terabytes (it sounds like they should have gone extinct 60 million years ago).

But retail is the oldest profession (well, the second oldest), and it has it’s share of TLAs and FLAs too:

• IMU (Initial Mark Up)
• CMU (Cumulative Mark Up)
• ROI (Return on Investment) and GMROI (Gross Margin Return on Investment – pronounced “gym-roy”)
• CSS or LSS – (Comp or Like Store Sales)
• OTB (Hold your bets, its Open To Buy)
• AR, AP & GL (the accounting trio: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and General Ledger)
• PM (Push Money)
• LP (Loss Prevention)
• DOI (Date of Invoice)
• LIFO, FIFO, and FISH (Last In First Out, First In First Out, and First In Still Here)
• GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles)
• CLV – (Customer Lifetime Value)
• RFM – (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value of a customer)
• RIM (Retail Inventory Method)
• WTD, MTD, STD & YTD – (Week, Month, Season – no it isn’t contagious- and Year to Date)
• BOGOFF (Though it sounds like an insult, its Buy One Get One For Free)

You would have thought we had enough confusion of our own, but when these two industries combined, we had to create a whole new language. I guess we just couldn’t just KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid):

• The EAS (Electronic Article Surveillance) group:
  • UPC (Universal Product Code)
  • EAN (European Article Number)
  • UVM (Universal Vendor Marking – quite a dream considering we can’t even come up with a standard for this world)
• POS (Point of Sale)
• EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer)
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)
• OLAP and OLTP (On Line Analytical Processing and On Line Transaction Processing)
• PIN (Personal Identification Number, Number as it is redundantly called)
• POG (It sounds like a video game, but it’s a Plan-O-Gram)

And don’t call the Keystone cops to put away the rounder if he lays you away! Of course keystone refers to a markup when the margin equals the cost. A put-away is merchandise held in the warehouse as back stock, whereas a lay away is merchandise set aside for a customer. And no, a rounder is not a dissolute drunkard and we won’t even talk about what a display a 3-way is!