I live in a pretty large major city, and I recall that during Thanksgiving my responsibility was to get vanilla ice cream to complement the dessert. I was like, no biggie it's the most common boring flavor, shouldn't be hard to find. Every single supermarket I went to was out of vanilla ice cream.
If you were searching for ice-cream with real vanilla, then its possibly understandable. A cyclone clobbered the Madagascan crop in 2017, multiplying the price. Some gelaterias in London didn't even run vanilla this winter as a result.
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 Food…
I'm surprised Amazon isn't behind this; I assumed this was their warehouse fulfillment algorithm applied to supermarket retail, for everyone to witness firsthand.
How about the real pictures from customers of bare shelves? Those should count just as much, or are they disgruntled as well?
Here's an anecdote. This week I was sick and went to whole foods like 3 times over 5 days to get soup. The soup shelf became more and more empty over time and didn't seem to be getting restocked which struck me as odd.
You just explained that your behavior itself was odd (you are sick.) Have you considered that you've not normally done this and so you've never noticed that this is always what happens? My local grocery store has premade foods, like soups, and they get made in bursts and slowly run out over several days. So what you observed could be the norm.
Funny bit is, Bezos is an investor in Business Insider. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-...
If anything, this shows that journalistic integrity is still working properly, at least on these shorter timescales. Unless, of course, that's just what Bezos wants you to believe...
"integrity" is not a word that matches "Business Insider", even if they are willing to poke at their investor's investments.
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 Food…
for someone who is well-informed on the the subject, it's amusing that you offered zero information in your comment.
At many companies, unless you have “PR” in your job description, it’s a violation of policy to do such a thing, or even comment after identifying that you work for the company, even if it is to defend or otherwise comment positively.
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.
I don't know where you're located, but isn't fresh corn on the cob pretty seasonal? mid-late summer to early fall? I know commodity corn stores well, but I didn't realize that human consumable sweet corn stored for long period of time.
I've seen my grocery store sell corn from Argentina and other places. So maybe the original commenter is thinking of out of season stuff shipped from other countries?
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 Food…
> 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 b…
Heh, it is amusing that the quote ends with "far-off Palestine". In the mid-90s I returned from living in the middle east for 6 months as a student (Jordan, Israel and Egypt). I personally witnessed an event and upon returning I was reading about said event in a US newspaper and was shocked at how wrong it was. This was the first time I experienced this effect. However, instead of turning to other parts of the paper and trusting what they said, I lost all faith in newspapers on that day and have not read one since. If I know they lied or, more generously, misunderstood what happened about something I know personally about, how can I ever trust anything they write about things I don't know about personally? I can't, I won't, and I haven't.
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.
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.
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.
There are a few things that happen every New Year that combine to contribute to shortages: - Distributors have changed delivery schedules to work around New Year's Eve and Day. - There's a large increase in demand for produce and some other ingredients (resolutions) - Employees at the store and regional level take a few more vacations than usual, since we aren't able to during much of the holiday season. People also…
Not to mention that winter often brings big weather events that can disrupt supply chains.