Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
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Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#2From the article, it seems like issues with their "order-to-shelf" system:
"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."
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"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."
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#3I 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.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#4business insider is a click farm, this is not a crisis of food shortages, that's just click bait.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#5I 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?
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#6From the article, it seems like issues with their "order-to-shelf" system: "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…
Target's attempt to expand into Canada failed for a similar reason -- they couldn't get product onto shelves.
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#7I'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.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#8A bad inventory system could kill Wholefoods. It killed the launch of Target Canada.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#9Wow, 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.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#10A business perfectly optimized w.r.t. waste will have zero inventory and zero sales.