I'm a Whole Foods employee, having one of those rare (for me) moments where I can reasonably be considered very well-informed on the subject of a news article, and it's a little bit disturbing just how misinformed and one-sided the article is.
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.
> I'm a Whole Foods employee, having one of those rare (for me) moments where I can reasonably be considered very well-informed on the subject of a news article, and it's a little bit disturbing just how misinformed and one-sided the article is.
"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."
Ok, and..? So what about this story is not accurate? Is your store seeing this issue? Even if your branch is doing fine, what makes this story about other location inaccurate?
You left us all hanging. Why is this the top comment?
Maybe she should have reached out to Whole Foods corporate and asked for comments?
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)
I worked at an Amazon-Apple-Google-Facebook company when this type of article was published about our project. Our management vigorously denied what was in the article and pointed us to details that were clearly false. Ultimately, as time went by, we realized that although some of the details in the article were false, the general spirit of it was actually correct.
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 find it funny/odd that the eye of sauron has focused its attention at Whole Foods. Depending on the day of the week, especially late Sunday afternoon/evening but also random weekdays when I run in after work, my local Kroger looks very barren in the produce department. So much so that I have sent picture texts commenting about it.
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"?
Businesss Insider is a clickbait website that takes little snippets of comments and spins fanciful stories about them, and wraps them in junk titles with "how" and "why" but never deliver explanations. It's a shame this site allows that website to be posted here.
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?
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.
> 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?
> "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.
Whether or not there is an actual stock crisis at WF, this reminds me of Nassim Taleb's general observation that systems that are hyper efficient (no redundancy) are more fragile when faced with unforeseen circumstances.
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.
Empty shelves are a way bigger problem in retail grocery than spoilage. If you lose a box of cauliflower, OK, it costs money, but if you lose an entire customer, even just for a few months, that's a loss of revenue in the thousands of dollars. And you will lose that customer. "The audience ams a fickles mistress, Toki." And nobody goes to the "super" market to feel like Soviet Russia or the apocalypse.
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.
you lose a case of cauliflower to spoilage, you lose $5. lose a case-worth of sold cauliflower, you lose out on $100 of revenue. this systems sounds penny-wise and pound-short.
We've had this problem at the Whole Foods near me in Raleigh. It's likely we'll switch grocery stores soon if they don't fix it. For the past 3-4 months, most of the time we do our weekly shopping trip, the shelves are basically bare in the produce section and often there are other popular ingredients we no longer can rely on finding there. It's pretty annoying and has been a frequent topic of conversation between my wife and me.
Spoilage due to overstocking isn't just problematic because they have too much stuff sitting in the backroom that will never get sold. It also means they spent too much money buying and shipping that food, with shipping sometimes being the more expensive part (in addition to it being hard on the environment if you think of the fuel used to ship it and emissions it produces).
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.
Wow, I wonder how new this system is - I've been to Whole foods in the last 3 days and it looked nothing like that picture. I wonder if these images are extreme cases that happened after 1 strange situation, and the article makes it look like a nationwide epidemic.
Increase investment into labor costs. Hire people who actually know a thing or two about cooking (that would mean hiring people with culinary training, not just people who perform well in the interview process.) You can convert pretty much all that's going to waste into sellable products on the store shelves. You might have to sacrifice consistency over time in that, your stock or broths made in house will differ per what's available.. but that could be sold as "authentic in house made". Same goes with soups, stews, pies etc.
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.
In our local Tesco, in a relatively poor UK city, the saving on "last day" food is about 10-20%, it used to be much higher. Presumably they're more wary of self-cannabilising. Except bread products after 8pm, it's almost never worth buying the reduced items now. I imagine they have much more waste. Mind you most ready food retailers, like Greggs (high-street bakery) don't do reductions preferring to dump unsold food rather than let people get them cheaply.
Refuse bin areas getting covers and locks is some sort of r/latestagecapitalism indicator.
Economics behind it mean throwing them out is the most cost effective thing they can do. It would probably require something like a government penalty or incentive around food waste to change.
It's interesting if the intent really is to have employees unload directly to shelves. The creates a very small buffer with limited ability to handle supply problems or spiky customer demand. Also your store begins to look kinda crappy if your shelves are maybe even 50% stocked so your realistic queue is maybe 1/2 shelf space. Maybe they think their logistics and prediction tech are good enough to not need the buffer.
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.
Absolutely. If the algorithm were perfect, shelves would be empty moments before the restock arrives. But I wonder how the endless bounty effect of fully stocked shelve affects customers' shopping habits. For example, I might not buy the pineapple if it were the last one on the shelf, because surely there must be something wrong with it. Then again, three rotting pineapples that no one would buy is better than three cases of rotting pineapples in the back room.
That's true, but the system seems to be a lot more controlling than just that:
> "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."
One of the interesting pieces of info from the article is that the ordering process is getting de-federated from regions and centralized in Austin. Regardless of the whether this new TPS-esque system works out in terms of stocked shelves, it will be interesting to see how this affects WF's ability to source local meat and produce.
I suspect this will smooth out as they collect more data about what's going empty, etc. If as the article states there was millions in inventory sitting in the stock rooms, each store probably wasn't doing very good inventory management and demand planning, so didn't have good data to begin with to inform a new system.
Surely though there were human people in each store who could have helped them with this, you know the ones that have been ordering the stocks and fulling the shelves for years?
I find it very hard to believe that a sane inventory management system can run out of popular items that spoil very slowly.
Are they optimizing not only for minimum waste but also for minimum back stock, denying a store a few sacks of potatoes and onions?
I'm sure there will be a learning curve. Anybody who has been through a company switching to a complex new business system will not be in the least bit surprised that it has brought WF to a standstill.
This kind of system is notoriously difficult to switch to. In theory a centralized system with a good algorithm should easily do better than the local employee who only has local information, however before you switch the system on, you only have the data which has been collected before and this is probably incomplete and inaccurate data, so the algorithm will miss some peaks and suffer out of stock issues, which will generate more garbage data as you cannot measure demand of an out of stock item.
One of the biggest factors in me leaving a business: wasting my time. If I repeatedly go to a store and the items I'm looking for aren't there, I stop going. Life's too short to put up with a poorly run business.
huh. On the other hand,there's costco, which quite often doesn't have the same things they had the last time you were there, not because they are out, but because they switched to a different product for that section.
I found a Whole Foods out of corn on the cob. Corn stores just fine, so that's quite unusual. But Safeway was out, too. Strange, because the US has a corn glut.
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.
Partly, but not entirely. Most of Canada lives within a hundred miles of the border, and many have shopped at Target in the US. People familiar with Target wanted to see (a) particular store-branded products, and (b) equivalent prices (accounting for the exchange rate). They got neither.
OTS sounds like a good thing overall if it is less wasteful and lower cost. With Amazon's logistics, they should be able to use the data from these food shortages to better inform the OTS system of what to order and when to order it. Maybe it's bad in the short-term, but the insights are still valuable for better logistics.
As a frequent customer at (New York area) Whole Foods I can echo the experiences shared in this article. Many items I have been buying regularly for years are now regularly out of stock. Not just produce - items of all types. Its gotten so bad and persisted for so long that I've shifted my shopping habits to other stores.
[+] [-] tinfins|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|8 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] noetic_techy|8 years ago|reply
You left us all hanging. Why is this the top comment?
[+] [-] dbatten|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Johnny555|8 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] dajohnson89|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dylan604|8 years ago|reply
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"?
[+] [-] goialoq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donarb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillyF|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] phkahler|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nkrisc|8 years ago|reply
Lest they remind you that you did not...
[+] [-] gist|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danans|8 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] danans|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdiddly|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mml|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrjames|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudosteph|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coding123|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReinholdNiebuhr|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|8 years ago|reply
Refuse bin areas getting covers and locks is some sort of r/latestagecapitalism indicator.
[+] [-] robryan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] siliconc0w|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kvanderd|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] javadocmd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemaller1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asciimo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] princekolt|8 years ago|reply
> "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."
[+] [-] leroy_masochist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adam|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HelloNurse|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taoooopl|8 years ago|reply
Edit: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=865436&ac...
[+] [-] analog31|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laurentoget|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dexwiz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kps|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siruncledrew|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAdamist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|8 years ago|reply