Hadn't thought of the profanity thing. I guess that could be an issue, and a little surprising for a shopper.

I changed the code in my post above to:

@seed=qw(b c d f g h j k l m n p q r s t v w x y z 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9);

to keep the ids "clean". . .
The number of unique ids with this array is now (29^8) or around a half a trillion. Good enough!