Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
The author seems to have talked with 10-20 disgruntled employees at a few stores nationwide, and a few customers on top of that. Maybe she should have reached out to Whole Foods corporate and asked for comments?
About the only thing she did get right was that Amazon isn't behind this. They haven't really messed with our supply chains much yet.
There are a few details about it that can be irritating, but the comments from employees in the article are extremely misleading. If they're having a hard time passing their inspections it's because they're doing something very wrong - no one is failing an inspection for having 1 box facing the wrong way like it says in the article.
Usually when I see (or say) something like that it's an exaggeration with a significant amount of truth behind it.
So by your logic, any accusation has the cachet of a significant amount of truth behind it?
The press needs clicks. Their needs (more click and revenue) is diametrically opposed to our needs (a somewhat unbiased view of reality).
Just by saying "<outlandish accusation> has to be backed by something" is ridiculous. It can be backed by nothing. As long as you click through, they get what they want.
Redundant, you are reading Business Insider.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
Where is the quote from? Edit: from another comment: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Michael Crichton. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann#Quotes_about_...
So he basically did the same thing he criticizes reporters for.
(Which isn't totally fair imo, because the news should be held to a higher standard than a book about a dinosaur park)
When the fire was reported by the student newspaper, the only details they got correct was the date and that there was a fire. The journalist spoke with me and with the student whose dorm room burned. Nothing we said made it into the article. It was far more interesting to invent a story about how nobody knew if he was in his room when the fire started, than the prosaic truth that I knew he was in the library.
This happened in 1990 and the cause of the fire was a pc catching fire while engaged in the slow and perilous task of reformatting a hard drive.
I'm not convinced I understand what purpose being informed of global politics or local dramas serves, other than maybe having something to talk about with friends and colleagues.
With regard to not having a voice, probably doesn't matter if I don't, but I'll concede it's probably a poor choice for the populace at large.
You are basically asking what it would be like to live like most of Humanity before the advent of mass media. Did not seem they had far worse problems than we do or that they were incapable to adapt. I'd return the question to you, how was mass media improved your life in any meaningful way and can you prove it was not just noise?
The printing press, like writing before it and phone/telegram/TV/internet after it, was a fairly transformational technology, but it's hard for me to imagine living without large-scale reliable distribution of knowledge. The concept of history as an accessible field of study for the average person is a pretty big one.
The ideas that led to modern democracy spread through a network that utilized the printing press and discussed the nature of existing society quite a bit. The general view of the vast majority of the pre-modernity era is summed up with well-known cliches like "dark ages" or "nasty, brutish, and short." There's some dispute about what the true "happiness" level was in early societies, but it's interesting to note that very few anti-technological movements achieved much of note, speaking to the definite appeal of technology.
My own personal talents never would've had a chance to flourish in a hunter/gatherer, agrarian, or feudal type society. So no thanks from me. I'm glad every day I was born where/when I was. Maybe a hundred years later would've been an interesting gamble if I could choose, but now's good. :)
I don't read news and don't watch TV for at least 3-4 years and I became much happier person because of this decision.
Printing press availability and mass media are two distinct events in History. I'd say mass media pretty much started in the 20th century with Radio and TV. Paper was not something that everyone purchased before for news. TV/Radio made information pretty much free in that regard.
Most news coverage is relevant to someone, but utterly irrelevant for the majority. As a non-US citizen, the US presidential election can be summarized by who won and what changes they intend to make. I don't need 24-hour coverage of he-said/she-said style reporting.
On the other hand, it can be useful to subscribe to some industry-specific news source to be aware of general trends. But then you're not following the news in general, but just the tiny sliver that actually affects you, which makes it much easier (not less) to stay informed.
Most general news articles are actually much more useful once they are archived (and no longer news), since then you can just seek them out when their topic has become relevant to you, and it lets you make actual use of the constant recaps the news cycle tends to include for context.
IMO the correct response is not to reject the source but to give it less weight, add other sources and realise you'll only ever get an approximation of the truth at best.
So true. Back in the 1950s, a fighter plane off an aircraft carrier had its wings fall off and fall into the ocean. That model of aircraft had had a couple incidents before where the wings came off. Numerous experienced and educated witnesses were interviewed, including the captain of the carrier, who all said the wings fell off.
Except for one lowly seaman on the deck, who said the aircraft was intact when it hit the water.
The airplane was eventually retrieved from the sea floor, and it was proven the wings were on it when it hit the water.
The other experienced officers all (quite sincerely) observed what they expected to see.
I'll believe forensic evidence every time before I believe eyewitness accounts.
Or are you concerned that you'll move towards the apex of the Dunning Kruger chart?
That's not a good metric. A better metric would be, "are they trustworthy and correct?"
> Or are you concerned that you'll move towards the apex of the Dunning Kruger chart?
Disqus is over there.
So well-meaning idiots trump experts that might be trying to trick you?
The Dunning Kruger joke was only partially a joke - I was trying to explain that there are levels of expertise. My view is that anything that increases my knowledge is good; I was trying to elicit a response as to why someone might think otherwise.
It's not unique to any particular medium, news source, or person. Many, many people have an agenda and/or ignorance and portray things accordingly.. not always malicious but incomplete at best, wrong at worst.
Random independent coverage from bloggers, e.g. Popehat, tends to be much better informed than people rushing to incite us on a deadline. This goes double for anything the least bit technical, like law.
Sadly, there just aren't enough sources like that to actually dig into most stories.
Facebook and Twitter would be ghost towns without this disconnect.
The trick, which people seem to be generally bad at, is:
a) limiting the scope of authority you attribute to someone
b) not immediately discounting contradictory evidence but using it to judge whether you need to pry deeper yourself or to discount some of that authority you've vested in them
c) actually remembering how authoritative the source was when repeating the information or using it as the basis for other assumptions
d) actually looking into issues deeper that you decide to care about and find the truth, not just was some semi-authoritative mouth piece repeated to you
For example, I try to make a habit of prefixing or postfixing statements in conversation with disclaimers ("At least that's what I heard or seem to remember reading, but I'm not sure how that I'm not sure how true it is.") if I'm not fairly certain of the information.
Examine their voting record, lobby donations, and primary information and action. Decide from there.
Without that, we get the barely binary system that we have. The MSM can be lazy and non-journalistic because no one bothers to notice. No one cares.
Granted, there are definitely things that aren't amenable to this, but it's not exactly hopeless, either.
The umbrage taken by the mainstream media in the last year being called "fake news" is a bit amusing. I've often wondered what percentage of it all (and what we know of history) is complete nonsense.
So... likely quite a lot. I trust verifiable sources a lot more than I trust any outlet, even the supposedly reputable ones. I mean, just how long did it take for Jayson Blair to get caught fabricating stories in the NYT? [1]
What am I missing?
And a more facile analysis obscures the fact that there is yet a bit of fact-based reporting getting lost in the noise. Authors who normally link to actual primary sources and do real analysis instead of only cheap opinion, albeit sometimes imperfectly. So more Glenn Grenwald, Popehat or Groklaw and less Fox/Buzzfeed/CNN.
There are real problems here, but political partisans tend to make more fake news instead of doing anything useful to solve it.
Almost like people believe the same thing said very much the same way but from a completely different source. Thanks, I'm here all weekend. ;)
> FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!
He doesn't use the intellectual tone when he talks about it.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows.
For a certain type of person -- the type that reads HN -- this scholarly style is what we expect. It lays out the biases and beliefs we hold in a manner we expect. It backs it up with some seemingly solid logic that we can relate to. We've all seen at least one badly written scientific article where we know the facts better. So we take it as fact and agree with it.
Is there any difference between them? Of course not, they're saying the same thing, but in a different linguistic style. It does take a bit of work to recognize that as most people have fairly deep biases towards linguistic style that are difficult to suppress. As an exercise to prove this to yourself, try sum up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in a way that would appeal to a non-academic.
Here's the interesting part: Trump picked up this linguistic style only in the last few years. While we don't like it, his voter base probably wouldn't have voted for him if he started his sentences "briefly stated". Know your audience, often the presentation of your argument is far more important than the argument itself.
But even that is wrong.
Firstly fake news is exactly that - actually fabricated websites designed to look like “the Sacramento beast” or what have you, filled with content that will sound legitimate to an American conservative and trick them into clicking on ads.
That’s fake news and it’s actually not even news, it’s more like surprise literature/acting to con people.
Trump on the other hand argues for example that he has the biggest crowds, when he doesn’t by every device that recorded images of the subject.
Fake news is in this case is just a term that relies on the audience to impute meaning to it.
There is grass on the National Mall. During the Obama inauguration, people walked on it as you would expect. The damage cost several $million to fix. In photos of the Trump inauguration crowd, notice that the sparsely-occupied area is white. It was covered in translucent boxes to protect the grass. (the boxes were borrowed from stadiums that use them for events like concerts) The boxes can be walked on, but people would hesitate. They are not inviting like grass. This kept many people out of the photos.
Another issue is that the central area of the photo was blocked off into different security sectors. Due to violence, entry was often blocked. Many people showed up for the inauguration but were unable to get to where they could see it, which would be the empty areas of the photos.
In the usual pair of photos, the Trump photo is cropped relative to the Obama photo. The physical area seems to differ by roughly a factor of two.
There is also the question of time when the photos were taken.
The physical area is virtually the same. They merely appear to be taken from slightly different vantage points. Both show the area where you might reasonably expect people to observe from. They are taken at the same time of day differing by a matter of 5-20 minutes.
You aren't even nitpicking your statement about the area differing by a factor of 2 is a clear lie designed to sow doubt. Please don't bring your alternative facts here.
Those are not the usual pair of photos.
Now suppose someone reported on a game without seeing it and getting the narrative from different fans up in the stands.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but of course, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I hate to be so skeptical of the mainstream media, but it's hard not to whenever they report on something I know about they seem to get it all wrong.
The Paul Krugman model (PhD, nobel prize winner, professor at MIT/Princeton, writing for the NYT) is quite rare. And even then, he doesn't exclusively write about his field of expertise.
You mentioned reporting though... reporting facts is actually the one thing that journalists do often get right, and that's largely viewed as something holy. Analysis of journalism often finds that western journalists are incredibly accurate in their reporting, but they (un)wilfully frame stories, omit (sometimes by ignorance) important details or focus on meaningless anecdotes.
For example, there was a time when in my region the local news kept reporting that 'real estate boom: 60% of homes are being sold for or above the asking price'. All news agencies took it over, a rare few even omitting 'for or' and just reported '60% above asking price'. If you looked carefully, they cited data from a RE agent association that had an interest in making it seem as if you could make an easy buck by buying a home before it rose even more. The association's media reports focused on the 60% figure, but didn't mention the flipside of the underlying data: about 40% of homes were sold below the asking price and 40% were sold for approximately the asking price. In other words, news agencies could have also reported the exact same data by stating '80% of homes were sold for or below the asking price'.
I'd been reading these news reports (among others) for a year before I decided to buy a home and had a certain impression of the RE market going into it (a sellers market, had to bid aggressively and wave various rights to recourse to convince a seller). Not until I dove into the data did I find the reporting mischaracterised the market, despite citing factual data. The reason I think in this case and others, is that the journalists aren't RE agents, they're mostly just 29 year-olds with a journalism degree reporting on the 8 different industries they were assigned to, from RE to dairy to, relying heavily on industry associations' brief media reports and representatives to shape a narrative.
We remember the times when you're sure an article is wrong, we have amnesia towards all the of the other times.
And lo! Polls say that Journalists are less trusted than politicins and used car salesmen. And I know that must be true because I read it in a newspaper somewhere.
I stopped assuming any veracity in reporting from _any_ source and quite quickly saw that there was very little accuracy anywhere. There were of course opinions - or voiced ‘opinions’ I understood the motivation for, but with the facts missing, that’s all I was consuming. The opinions of reporters or the ‘opinions’, carefully guided by the media bosses or governments. Interesting? Not when they were so predictable.
That’s when I became one of those hipster/snob/weirdo people who doesn’t consume standard news anymore, and can only barely stand some tech publishing.
Nearly everyone who has personal knowledge of something reported is similarly disturbed. That they rarely then remember that the same level of error applies to all the other things reported, outside their areas of personal knowledge, has been termed the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect by Michael Crichton:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
As one gets older (& a bit more cynical), you learn to apply this credibility discount to more journalism. But don't just use this insight as a synergizer for confirmation bias! That is, don't just remember, "this is mostly bungled reporting" on stories with details/implications that go against what you wish were the case. The stories supporting your cherished beliefs are mostly bungled reporting, too.
This week I was sick and went to whole foods like 3 times over 5 days to get soup. The soup shelf became more and more empty over time and didn't seem to be getting restocked which struck me as odd.
The only time I've seen shelves that bare were at Kmart and Sears locations before they went bankrupt and shut down.
There was one picture of an empty banana set with a pineapple in the wrong spot - that's what I was referring to before.
The sole picture in San Francisco was the reset I mentioned.
Not sure why you defend your employer here. If the problem is real - which I'm in no position to judge - it would be in his best interest to notice it.
But I agree, absolutely possible that there are other explanations (including that there is no problem at all), but a wrongly prioritized supply chain scheme/software fits very well to the shown and described issues.
The OTS system in the article also allows for exceptions - if there were bananas available the store could have stocked up on them. It's just so wrong on many levels - I could spend all day pointing them out, but this thread is getting bigger than I thought and I don't know if I can spend much more time on it. I was going to edit my original comment with more information but it doesn't look like I can anymore.
Strawman. I said nothing of the sort. I'm taking the article at face value. The article reports that regularly, stores of your chain are understocked that much that you are losing money and customer loyalty. It is not saying those are special rare issues.
Now, there are two options: The article is wrong, or it is right. If it is wrong, then you need to change nothing internally. Customers will see in their nearest store that the stock is alright, some might even come out in support, a small welcome challenge for PR. But looking at this thread, at the comments not being a discussion about journalistic objectivity below your top-comment, there is some support for the thesis of the article. If the article is right, the system needs to be changed if you want to compete with the other stores that actually succeed in stocking the items customers came to the shop for. In that case, the impression I would get from the attitude you are reflecting here (and which according to the article is the one of management) is that parts of WF are burying the head in the sand, which would likely be disastrous for your company.
It is easy to optimize for the wrong metrics, especially big corporations. Short term shareholder value, cost reductions - cost reductions were echoed by management in the article as motivation for the OTS system. Combine that with a good portion of institutional inertia and wrongly placed respect for authority, and this is how companies die. Which, again, might not be at all what is happening here (and Amazon and stuff, I know). It just looks like an example of it, which I think is interesting.
The article is wrong about the regularity of the issue, the "weird control systems" (not sure what connection you're seeing with employee protection laws), and the causes.
But you misunderstand me if you think I'm burying my head in the sand. I don't deny that Whole Foods has issues with its ordering processes. In fact, I think the company has been going in the wrong direction there for a long time. The article is just so, so off-base - originally I didn't intend to argue with it, but now I've become this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/
It will be interesting to see if Amazon can improve the situation through automation. Generally I've seen stores that use automated ordering systems be far worse with their out-of-stocks (Kroger, for instance).
Edit: Just to clarify, the connection with the control scheme and the supply issues as laid out in the article is that it forces employees and store manager to blindly follow the system. Employee protection laws in other countries would prevent "three strikes out" schemes, if the strikes are for "infractions" as small as having one of 400 boxes facing the wrong side, which is one example in the article. That just wouldn't fly in a german court of law, for example, where something like this definitely would end up.
It's not a regional issue, it's systemic.
Even 30 years ago when I was a student worker in a food store that sort of task only happened after 22:00 when the last customers had left.
The thing is too, it's a snapshot. We don't know how long it looked like that, what time of the day it was, whether someone called out sick, etc.
Wegmans/Fairway/Shoprite would destroy WF unless it quickly fixes this issue.
Because the article is right. At least in some stores around SF the stock situation is dire. Some days I can’t even buy whole milk.
>>Maybe she should have reached out to Whole Foods corporate and asked for comments?
When ever you want the truth, just call their PR department.
A PR department is still better in my books compared to a few disgruntled employees from a few high traffic stores after a major change in both store traffic and company processes.
All companies go through growing pains and scaling issues, and I hardly expect much insight on those issues from the teenage stock boy at a Whole Foods.
The stock boy probably has more insight to that than any of us, and anyone at corporate. Indeed I'd expect only their direct manager, if anyone, to have a better insight on what is on the actual shelves.
Corporate will tell you what should be there; stock check will tell you after the fact what was there, ...
PR has their own bias but if they tell lies they can be sued for hiding/misrepresenting the truth, because they represent the company's official stance. Unless the company is doing something wrong that they need to cover up, I can't think why a PR answer could not be close to a honest answer.
If even one store did ok, we could see an employee from there posting here. Not sure that is information; more like a data point.
You left us all hanging. Why is this the top comment?
Then they'd talk to a PR person who is only interested in guiding the narrative to whatever makes the company look better.
So yeah, employees aren't fully informed, and while Corporate may be fully informed, they are rarely going to tell the full story -- the truth probably lies somewhere between what employees are saying and what Corporate says (if they say anything at all, and in this case, it seems they did not respond to requests for comment)
This is quite normal behavior when weather events in the area are expected, but lately it has been occurring regardless of weather. From my outside observer position, it could be a simple miscalculation of how much to order, someone getting burned by ordering too much and stock went bad, or any other reason of which I have no inside knowledge.
Is this attention to "Whole Paycheck" unfair or are people just super attentive due to the new ownership and judgements being rushed to be "ahead of the curve"?
I wouldn't say I even particularly care about Whole Foods' reputation, it's more the false narrative that bothered me and I just happened to know how wrong it was. Must be so much worse for employees at the big tech companies or others that are in the news all the time.
From the article, "Whole Foods did not respond to several requests for comment on this story."
Because it doesn't mean anything. No large company will respond to supply chain questions.
> But are you store employee or a corporate headquarters employee?
What is the relevance?
One of the points of the article is that corporate isn't aware of these problems.
Let's take this from the other side. Your employees have gone to the press, and the press is asking you for your side of the story. Why would you give the press anything to write about? Pictures of empty shelves have much more impact than in-stock statistics. You clam up, try to find the employee (probably disgruntled) and terminate him/her.
In other words, corporate not responding is not a signal one way or another, it's the sign of a mature company. Not to kick a dog, but Uber might have responded and made things worse.
So please take the skepticism that your management is feeding you with a grain of salt. The news media's business model hinges on its reputation of being truthful and accurate. If it was regularly publishing "disturbingly misinformed and one-sided" articles, it would be out of business.
I seem to remember that the Whole Foods employees who would check us out used to always ask, "Did you find everything that you were looking for?" I haven't heard that in a while. Maybe that's related to the changes in stocking?
Order-to-shelf "has transformed the inventory levels that we have in the back room, essentially clearing them out so that we're mainly focusing on what we call our never-outs, the key items that we need to have in stock all the time in our stores,"
If your item isn't on the "never out" list I suppose they don't really care about gaps in availability. The problem with that isn't just customer satisfaction, people will be forced to go somewhere else when they're in need, and that will hurt loyalty and keep people looking at alternatives.
The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!
Whole Foods business models is "Look at the stuff we have that you never knew about so you have no idea of what the price on it should be or what to use it for. Buy it!" The entire thing was based on a blow job with a smile level customer service. Do you know that employees of Whole Foods carried sharpies so if a customer looked lost trying to figure out if the customer wanted to try this or that item, the sharpie came out to wipe off the UPC code of the item and that item went into customer's bag for free because Whole Foods determined that losing $3-10 on the item is perfectly fine as they made $300 on a basket that this person was likely to buy on average a month? Or how about a knife that everyone in produce carried? So if a customer was not quite sure about that apple, the knife came out the apple was cut right in front of him or her, a piece was given to them and the rest became sample?
That's why Whole Foods had insane revenue. It was the level of service one only got at specialty stores delivered to the masses.
Drop that and Wegmans would destroy it.
Source: Wife used to work at Whole Foods.
Definitely not; plenty of items are seasonal and therefore only available at certain times. One of the reasons I prefer WF to e.g. Safeway is that they stock certain vegetables, fruits, and seafood without requiring that they be available year round. WF has persimmons in the fall; Safeway never does.
My regular grocery store will be out a handful of times of years when I winter storm is coming. It will only take a day to recover stock in this case.
This is probably why Whole Foods is trying to cut back on inventory, so they can lower prices to compete with every other grocery store.
For example there's a small organic food store near my house that no longer sells cocoa butter because it's very expensive and rarely purchased. And it's more common now, but I used to have to go to Whole Foods foods for things like almond flour, coconut flour, dairy-free products, and gluten-free products. (I used to date someone with digestive issues.) It was nice to be able to buy them somewhere instead of having to special order it online. But I can't imagine they sell nearly as much of those foods.
A lot of people go there because of those items. But hey, if they want to compete on price with Kroger more power to them.
That was with my ex so I don't have to deal with it anymore, but when you have a limited budget and strict diet requirements in addition to medical bills we just looked for the cheapest place that sells what didn't kill him.
Lest they remind you that you did not...
They don't do that at the store I go to anymore either but it has nothing to do with inventory (which as I mentioned in another comment is the same as it's always been). Could be that they just discovered that it had little upside but some downside. As a customer I sometimes get annoyed being asked that question all the time.
If i've made it to the checkout, i've made the decision that i've found everything i'm going to purchase today. even if it wasn't everything i originally came for. If i needed help finding something, i would have asked for help before i got to the checkout.
I'm not going to stand in line at the checkout only to not actually check out, and hold up the line behind me while the cashier helps me find something.
However they don't write anything down at all. I have had complaints about certain items being out or even things like tops for the oatmeal which they just started to offer or plastic bags and so on. So when I get angry enough and if there is more than 1 thing that upsets me I might say something. I get deer in headlights though.
My general attitude is that I am not going to be their quality assurance department and in particular if they don't have what appears to be a good way to even listen or note what I am saying.
At least at a restaurant when you complain you get something for free for doing so (redone meal, discount, take off bill etc). So they have a system (tell the manager he comes to the table) and you generally get something for your effort. So you don't feel that you are wasting your time or being taken advantage of.
Last weekend I got a disinterested shrug from a hotel employee when I pointed out that the shower design in my room was idiotic; I have no confidence that'll get resolved, but at least they emailed me this week with a survey and I was able to unleash a healthy rant.
This is familiar to anyone in tech who has built a computer system with replication to achieve high availability and minimize data load risk, but it's rarely discussed in the context of human resources and processes. If anything, that field seems dominated by a desire for maximal efficiency at all costs.
Here's a blog post which provides examples:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/08/04/two-is-one-and-one...
Ahh but wait, now multiply that dollar figure by 50 customers who tried to buy cauliflower that day. Add 50 more for every subsequent day during which you're still out of cauliflower. Assume they each used to spend $1,000 a month with you, but now they all stay mad at you for 5 months each. After four days you're literally out a million dollars. Though you won't realize that loss until the end of the five months.
If you're out of tunafish too, you don't just lose lovers of cauliflower and tuna, you lose everybody who loves cauliflower, everybody who loves tuna, and everybody who loves both. Unfortunately for you as the grocery store that can't keep the shelves stocked, it's an OR, not an AND, and there is definitely a type of network effect at work.
The costs you incur by having inventory around, and having some of it go bad, are like insurance payments, to avoid the costs you would incur by the much worse problem of losing customers.
I'm not their ideal customer, mostly because I prefer cheap, processed, easy to store and make food (think mac-and-cheese). But if I was the type to shop at whole foods due to concerns about ethics and environmental friendliness, I'd be OK with this from that perspective. So long as there are some sort of options available, changing up dinner plans for the week isn't really a huge inconvenience. Maybe they can pitch it that way until they get it better optimized.
This issue strikes me as short sighted thinking by bean counters. It might save money in the short term, but you're going to lose customers and employees this way.
That doesn't matter to consumers. One of the purposes of a local store is that they buffer enough stock, so they almost always have available stock to sell. Otherwise, I'll stop going to that store.
------ Q: What should you call an advice column for queueing theorists? A: Q-Tips!
On a serious note, though, a store should understand how to queue stock, not just to minimize overages but to optimize sales. A store should never have an empty shelf, even if they have to put something else there temporarily.
- Distributors have changed delivery schedules to work around New Year's Eve and Day.
- There's a large increase in demand for produce and some other ingredients (resolutions)
- Employees at the store and regional level take a few more vacations than usual, since we aren't able to during much of the holiday season. People also tend to plan the hell out of ordering for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but relax too much by New Year's since they figure crunch time is over. This is made worse by the relatively short tenures of most store buyers, since they either move up or quit relatively quickly.
So I would say there probably was a nationwide spike in out-of-stocks spread out over a few days. But it isn't really because of OTS.
Is it though? If OTS drastically decreases the backstock, wouldn't it also decrease the ability of a store to respond to these kinds of changes?
Also, OTS allows backstock of top selling items or in emergencies. If you can predict a big storm like what probably caused most of the problems in the article, you are allowed to stock up on product.
That's why I have a problem with the article, it's just so factually incorrect.
I worked for a Safeway for a bit and would see how many bananas they'd trash of which you could easily make a few things on mass in house.. banana cream pie, banana ice cream... if regulations were to be cut back some you could even make banana rum in store. I don't think that'll happen anytime soon.
It's also a shame there isn't a system set up where you freeze the wasted product in bulk and ship it out to a facility that could process it into animal feed.
For the in store products, I think automation could eventually be the key but obviously we're sometime away from a full automated kitchen. Once that happens we should be able to savage a good bit. Thinking more about stuff that wouldn't be savageable .. freezing might not be the best option as you'd be required to keep it frozen during shipment. So investing in dehydration or freeze drying would be key,... dehydration probably is cheaper over freeze drying.
Changing the write off rules would be useful. Not taxing products made in store would be a possible incentive temporarily at least. If we were able to save a lot of stuff from going into the trash and instead going into feed.. maybe we could get cheaper animal products..but I sense that's probably more complicated than it seems.
Idk.. just ideas.
Refuse bin areas getting covers and locks is some sort of r/latestagecapitalism indicator.
In the mornings an employee looks through the fruits and vegetables, trashes spoiled stuff, but also picks away some and discounts them for 30-50% or so, depending on how good it still is.
It is usually gone in 20 minutes, some seemingly poor people got cheap food thanks to this.
Anecdotally I shopped at a whole foods last week and it indeed had stocking issues. I had to stand on a shelf to reach far enough back to grab the last bottle of a salad dressing I was after. Sure your backrooms are empty but it's kinda a shitty customer experience.
I do the grocery shopping in our house 90% in-store shopper (I like to pick out my produce and discover new stuff) 10% online delivery - San Francisco, Franklin Location. Here are the the things that they have gotten really wrong for me...
1. Quality Eggs. This is expensive. It requires sourcing locally and refrigeration at every step. I use to have options to buy from 3+ fantastic pasture raised egg options (almost farmers market quality). This has deteriorated to 1 option. I happily pay $9 a dozen.
2. Don't put the tofu with the dairy. They moved a lot of vegan/vegetarian favorites next to the milk and butter. Customers were complaining while I was in the store. They did not fix it. This might save on energy in the long run but is a tone def move.
3. Staying Local. I will stop shopping at WF if they don't carry local produce. This is expensive and managing each supply chain goes against lowering pricing.
I don't think Amazon wants to keep the demographic. I think they will be a Ralphs or Safeway in 5 years. The next conversation will be quality and keeping the historical whole foods demographic, in these early days I am not sure that is their vision.
Another article referred to WF as the "Soviet Safeway".
> "Out of 400 boxes in your cooler, if you have one of those boxes facing the wrong way, you are penalized," said one employee, who described the system as "militaristic."
This is all about eliminating a few hundred man-hours a week. Instead of having 2-3 guys unloading trucks and staging inventory, the whole staff is engaged, and is wasting a lot of time unless the trucks are loaded perfectly.
It’s insane. Instead of the fish or cheese guy selling me high margin product, he’s hunting for cartons. When I worked at a computer store in college, they did something similar, and same store weekday sales of premium products (which drove profitabilty) dropped 25%. But they saved 160 man hours of labor, or about $1,600, which was much less than the lost sales.
Edit: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=865436&ac...
But you don’t want prices changing between the time a customer has picked up a product and the time they get to the checkout. And then there’s the whole problem of the in-store prices not matching the published circular prices.
So, lots of issues to work out there before dynamic pricing can work well in a physical store.
It sounds like they haven't hit the normal Stage 2 phase: Implement a manual override process with the goal of allowing employees to temporarily bump levels for holidays and special sales and the like. The key here is temporary. The computer resets the levels to whatever it thinks they should be after a normally (short) period of time.
Stage 3 is to act surprised (as a corporate culture) when it is discovered that salaried managers are spending a 10 hour day every week/month adjusting all the levels. Effectively, store-level employees have returned to the original process but in a very inefficient and undesirable way.
Stage 4 varies. Sometimes you loop back to Stage 1: Zealous enforcement and the removal of any way for store-level employees to provide input into the ordering system.
Sometimes, you scrap the whole thing and go back to manual ordering. This usually keeps the algorithmic system but instead as a sort of assistant/recommendation engine. Usually it picks the top X overstocked/spoiled items in the store and gently nudges management to reduce inventory levels. This usually turns into a consistent win because management feels empowered and eventually comes to trust the recommendations, often rubber stamping most things and only correcting egregious errors: "I.E. Christmas in 2 weeks, only order 10 hams."
Unfortunately, the source of this info is directly working with a retailer trying to integrate one of these systems. After we hit Stage 3, I really did try to build a consensus around repurposing it into a weekly recommendation engine of 10-20 items to adjust in the store.
Instead we just removed the override capabilities and went right back into trouble. Apparently, there was a view I had overstepped my boundaries trying to tell the business how to treat the stores. So I left before I could get placed at the bottom of the Annual Stack and Rack. :-/
I'd expect them to be factoring in customer onboarding rates, including anticipated accelerations, accounting for ongoing ad campaigns and such too.
Having a lot of "sometimes-out" items predictably will lead to "sometimes-all-out-at-the-same-time" categories and "some-stores-are-always-out" items. The outages are clumping, in terms of categories, timing, and location. Which is a bad and apparently unanticipated mode of failure for the procurement system.
The thin-inventory thing is getting excessive. The local CVS has been out of distilled water twice, and only had one pack of small paper cups. All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.
Frozen corn, sure. Not corn on the cob.
I admit some bias, having started as a farm boy. But nothing is as horrifying as old corn on the cob.
(in the Midwest availability is pretty seasonal even)
Every single supermarket I went to was out of vanilla ice cream.
Sweet fresh corn on the cob is pretty perishable item. Worse than Apples at least.
Holding inventory has an economic cost, even if the inventory has infinite shelf life — the money that bought or manufactured the inventory could be used elsewhere.
regular industrial corn is livestock feed, corn-syrup base, plastics feedstock and the like. horrible stuff, grown in gargantuan quantities. you can't eat it without at least some amount of processing. it's just not food.
the stuff you eat off the cob is sweet corn. nobody grows, or eats enough sweet corn for there to be a glut of it.
I used to work at an outdoor retailer where we only did inventory once a year, and by the end of the year the computer inventory would differ from actual inventory by an order of magnitude, simply due to the fact that things get lost, damaged, stolen, etc... and don't get marked as such in the computer.
If you have enough backstock, this isn't a huge problem (I think most estimates put retail shrinkage at less than 5%). But if you are using a just-in-time stocking approach, those effects could quickly compound until you have nothing left on the shelf and no more inventory on the way.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/12/rachel_laudan_o_1.h...
Google or Amazon will not be able to run groceries with lifestock and fresh veggies, only electronics, gifts and books. It's a systemic matter, and highly technocratic manager hierarchies make it only worse.
This may not be entirely a Whole Foods issue.
If the system is new, and it seems to be, it probably needs some fine-tuning. Any workable system needs a little bit of slack in it to account for the variable and the unexpected. The question is how much. And it's not free.
I had never noticed those freshness problems at the Cupertino Whole Foods store, which is one of the nicer ones I have been to.
Super frustrating.
Maybe there's a solution :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing
looks like somebody is ripe for digital transformation with IOT, predictive analytics and machine learning on top of it.
"Order-to-shelf, or OTS, is a tightly controlled system designed to streamline and track product purchases, displays, storage, and sales. Under OTS, employees largely bypass stock rooms and carry products directly from delivery trucks to store shelves. It is meant to help Whole Foods cut costs, better manage inventory, reduce waste, and clear out storage."
...
"A reduced back stock means that any unexpected increase in shopper demand or a product-shipment delay can result in out-of-stock items across every department, multiple employees said."
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-...
BI has a lot of fluff content, but they do some good work.
1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronaldholden/2018/01/11/stalkin...
That must be some truly impressive JS.
* * * block
* * css allow #(or "* 1st-party css allow" for the more paranoid)
* 1st-party image allow
Personally, I assume such articles are bullshit until proven otherwise, but accept them as social objects. What's orders of magnitude more informing is the on-topic and off-topic HN comments under such articles.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It didn't say it was a crisis for the population.
Words still have meaning.
Except “literally.”
Many customers are blaming Amazon, which bought
Whole Foods in August for $13.7 billion. Analysts
have speculated that the shortages could be due
to a spike in shopper traffic in the wake of the
acquisition.
But Whole Foods employees say the problems began
before the acquisition. They blame the shortages
on a buying system called order-to-shelf that Whole
Foods implemented across its stores early last year.[Everybody in the article agrees, though, that Amazon is NOT behind this].