Comment by WillyF | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillyF | Hacker News Reader

I live less than a five minute walk from a Whole Foods (Chicago - North Ave), so I shop there quite a bit even though I'm not a huge fan of the store. While I haven't seen empty shelves like the photos from the article, I have become frustrated by how often they are out of the items that I'm looking for. Four or five straight trips they didn't have rosemary, and it took a third trip and asking someone who was stocking vegetables to get parsnips (requests from previous trips resulted in "Sorry, we're out"). The last time that I shopped there, they were out of maybe 5 of the 6 things that I was looking for. My wife and I agreed that this was one of the more useful Business Insider articles that we've read. It's not a great article, but it answered a mystery that had been bugging us over the past few months.

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?

From the article:

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.

Here in Australia if a supermarket was regularly out of things that they normally stock I would shop elsewhere. Are people in the US more accustomed to going to multiple shops to get groceries?

Not at all. A grocery store being out of any normally stocked product is really unusual. If it happened with any regularity for stuff I wanted to buy, I’d stop going to that store.

The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!

It sounds like they're trying to optimise their just-in-time delivery. I think Lidl/Aldi do this, they have a very small "back area" so almost all goods are on the shelves. This presumably optimises so floor usage and reduces storage costs/wastage and such.

That's a great thing to do as long as you don't take it to the point where you end up with products out of stock. The moment you do, you're encouraging your customers to patronize the competition instead.

Aldi's business model is "few things that you need, cheap".

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.

> The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!

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.

That’s why I said “normally stocked products.” Seasonally available products are fine. The problem is products which are supposed to be available but can’t be purchased when I’m there because the store is cutting their JIT delivery too close.

Absolutely not but some people do shop around. Everyone has a store they go to more often then not. If the usual store was out of things had sub par quality I won’t go back. There are a couple on my black list around me.

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.

Sometimes I do, for specialty items. I think we were just giving the stores the benefit of the doubt because of the hurricanes and blizzards(I'm in the Boston area).

This is my frustration. I'd prefer to shop elsewhere, but the convenience of walking to Whole Food and grabbing whatever I need (or at least trying to) is hard to pass up when the alternative likely requires getting in the car. My strong preference would be to go to multiple shops (butcher, fishmonger, produce store, etc.), but the convenience of Whole Foods usually wins out.

No.

That's normally the case. Whole Foods is not a normal grocery store and has an extremely loyal customer base. Many of their customers already go out of their way to go to the store and pay higher prices for the same items that other stores have.

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.

Whole foods has a lot of very niche specialty food. That is what they are probably scaling back on.

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.

>> Whole foods has a lot of very niche specialty food. That is what they are probably scaling back on.

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.

It’s why I go there. If they drop my SKUs I’ll drop them.

And I did too, but I can already buy a lot of those foods elsewhere now. Even Walmart carries almond and coconut flour now, grassfed beef and butter, humane local eggs, generic brand almond milk, etc. Whole Foods does have a few more options, but I don't think I have very much reason to step into the organic food store/whole foods anymore. And it's lessening by the day as their competitors pick up those niche items more.

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.

> 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?

Lest they remind you that you did not...

> "Did you find everything that you were looking for?"

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.

i've always wondered who actually answers "no" to that question.

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.

I would never tell the cashier because they don't appear to be asking in a way to actually use the reply. I have complained at customer service and generally get something like "I will tell the bakery" or "I will tell the seafood manager".

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.

Providing feedback that gets lost in the hierarchy is very demoralizing.

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.

I have - they pressed the light to call a supervisor (whilst they continued scanning my items) who found me the item, like finding a replacement for a damaged item, and returned before I'd finished packing the bags. Delay was <1 minute.

The correct answer would always be "yes" because it is highly improbably that what it in stock would not meet your basic nutrition needs. They may not have what you "want" - but that's a different matter.

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