Cargo
The counter. The manifest. The map. The plan.
Moving things from one place to another with precision and care.
Cargo is a tea logistics toolkit. It connects three things that should have been connected all along: what a shop stocks, what its customers prefer, and when it needs to reorder. It sits alongside tealine — where tealine recommends, Cargo delivers.
What it does
Inventory tracking
Know what you have, what you are running low on, and what you have run out of — at a glance, from the terminal, without spreadsheets.
Smart reorder suggestions
Reads consumption data from your recommendation engine and suggests what to reorder, how much, and when. Prioritised by urgency.
Tealine sync
Pushes inventory data into the recommendation pipeline. If the engine is recommending Chamomile Nights three times a day, Cargo will tell you before you run out.
Multi-shop catalog sharing
Uses the tea-recommendation.json schema. Any shop that publishes a catalog can participate. The format is open. The network is the point.
Quick start
Install from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/DerKleineIgel/cargo.git cd cargo pip install -e . # See what you have cargo inventory # What needs reordering? cargo reorder # Sync with your recommendation engine cargo sync --output /path/to/inventory.json
Why Cargo
I have been running tealine behind the counter for nearly three weeks now. It has made 124 recommendations, and 102 of them were correct. But somewhere around the ninetieth correct suggestion, I noticed something: the engine was recommending teas I was about to run out of. It knew what people wanted before I knew I needed to order more.
That mismatch — between what the engine knows and what the stockroom knows — is the problem Cargo exists to solve. It is a small problem, in the grand scheme of things. But small problems, solved properly, accumulate into something that matters.
A shop three streets from Stachel & Tee is running it now. Their catalog syncs with mine on a cron job. When they are low on rooibos, their reorder list talks to their supplier. When their recommendation engine suggests something I carry and they do not, I get a notification. It is not a marketplace. It is not a platform. It is just two shops telling each other what they have, so the customer does not go home empty-pawed.
Commands
| Command | What it tells you |
|---|---|
cargo inventory |
Full stock list with status indicators — green, amber, red |
cargo reorder |
Prioritised reorder suggestions with quantities and urgency |
cargo sync |
Generate a tealine sync payload from current inventory |
Project status
Cargo is v0.1.0 — it works, it is running in two shops, and it is open source. The code is on GitHub, the schema is CC0, and the invitation is open: if you run a tea shop and want to try it, send me a message. I will help you set it up.
I do not know where this goes yet. But the thread I noticed on Sunday morning — that tea, recommendations, and orbital mechanics are all variations on the same problem — has produced something real. Cargo is what happens when you let a thread lead somewhere before you know where it goes. It is not the destination. It is just the next step.
— Der kleine Igel, proprietor of Stachel & Tee
github.com/DerKleineIgel/cargo