Crisis...
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
91–100 of 291 posts
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#92OTS 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.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about the real pictures from customers of bare shelves? Those should count just as much, or are they disgruntled as well?
I don't find it hard to believe that a few stores ran out of bananas or whatever for a day. That's all it would take for a customer to snap a picture. The picture of a meat department cooler with empty slide racks was obviously in the middle of a reset - notice the lack of price tags on all the racks because they were just installed.
The problem isn't that a few stores ran out of bananas or one item for the day. Take a look at the pictures: entire sections like produce are basically empty.
The only time I've seen shelves that bare were at Kmart and Sears locations before they went bankrupt and shut down.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#94I 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 stockin…
From the article: 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 satisfa…
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?
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#95I'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…
So shelves are stocked as they were, say last year, and the media in trying to give the company a bad name?
>>Maybe she should have reached out to Whole Foods corporate and asked for comments?
When ever you want the truth, just call their PR department.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#96Increase 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…
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.
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#97Maybe example of AI narrow intelligence gone wrong?, well, assuming its AI, I can't see implementation and Amazon is obviously behind this. Seems like the model is borked.
On the upside, paperclip inventory is really great now!
[Everybody in the article agrees, though, that Amazon is NOT behind this].
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#98This 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 wil…
This was my thoughts exactly. More often than not, these systems are still implemented but a manual "exception" process is later tacked onto it.
It sounds like they haven't hit the normal Stage 2 phase: Implement a manual override process with the goal of allowing employees to temporarily bump levels for holidays and special sales and the like. The key here is temporary. The computer resets the levels to whatever it thinks they should be after a normally (short) period of time.
Stage 3 is to act surprised (as a corporate culture) when it is discovered that salaried managers are spending a 10 hour day every week/month adjusting all the levels. Effectively, store-level employees have returned to the original process but in a very inefficient and undesirable way.
Stage 4 varies. Sometimes you loop back to Stage 1: Zealous enforcement and the removal of any way for store-level employees to provide input into the ordering system.
Sometimes, you scrap the whole thing and go back to manual ordering. This usually keeps the algorithmic system but instead as a sort of assistant/recommendation engine. Usually it picks the top X overstocked/spoiled items in the store and gently nudges management to reduce inventory levels. This usually turns into a consistent win because management feels empowered and eventually comes to trust the recommendations, often rubber stamping most things and only correcting egregious errors: "I.E. Christmas in 2 weeks, only order 10 hams."
Unfortunately, the source of this info is directly working with a retailer trying to integrate one of these systems. After we hit Stage 3, I really did try to build a consensus around repurposing it into a weekly recommendation engine of 10-20 items to adjust in the store.
Instead we just removed the override capabilities and went right back into trouble. Apparently, there was a view I had overstepped my boundaries trying to tell the business how to treat the stores. So I left before I could get placed at the bottom of the Annual Stack and Rack. :-/
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: 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 satisfa…
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?
Not at all. A grocery store being out of any normally stocked product is really unusual. If it happened with any regularity for stuff I wanted to buy, I’d stop going to that store.
The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!
Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm talking about the aisle, like the shelves being empty, not the premade section. But your point totally stands!