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?
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.
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.
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.