Hmm, pretty shocking photos. I live right across the street from a whole foods, it's basically my pantry, and I've never noticed any items being low on stock like shown in the photos.
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
#12business insider is a click farm, this is not a crisis of food shortages, that's just click bait.
Sure, BI is a bit of a click farm, but this does sound like a crisis to me. Not for society in general, but definitely for Whole Foods. Even their loyal customers will get disgusted and leave if the shelves are empty.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#13Sounds like a JIT system with its settings set to "extra miserly."
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#14I 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?
You might think that, but reality is more complicated, and unwinding from the new inventory management system could be no better than sticking out it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16189733
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#15I'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 Food…
Can you offer any more insights? What's the reality behind OTS?
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#16I'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 Food…
"Whole Foods did not respond to several requests for comment on this story."
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#17I 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?
One might think that such a new process could have been rolled in gradually - i.e. start with 20% backroom overhead, and begin reducing a percent a week until there is indication of overreaction. Why jump into the deep end of the just-in-time logistics pool right away?
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#18business insider is a click farm, this is not a crisis of food shortages, that's just click bait.
Sure, BI is a bit of a click farm, but this does sound like a crisis to me. Not for society in general, but definitely for Whole Foods. Even their loyal customers will get disgusted and leave if the shelves are empty.
Funny bit is, Bezos is an investor in Business Insider.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-...
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#19I 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.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#20Wow, 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.
Business Insider would NEVER do such a thing!