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Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

businessinsider.com

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Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#101

Post by robryan »

princekolt wrote: post #86
laurentoget wrote: post #78

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 wil…

If the problem is too much spoiled stock, wouldn't it be simpler and easier to implement a dynamic-pricing system, where the price of a product starts going down automatically (say, every 6 hours) starting two weeks before the product is marked to be spoiled? I've seen shops do this manually, but it usually only happens when they have a lot of stock of the same product that's about to go bad, so they sell 2-for-1 or…

Yeah stores must spend a lot of time on manually marking things down. Plenty of room for innovation, would just need to move to digital price displays.

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#102

Post by charlieflowers »

donarb wrote: post #46
tinfins wrote: post #7

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…

How about the real pictures from customers of bare shelves? Those should count just as much, or are they disgruntled as well?

Yes, with catchy slogans, like "Hole Foods". Turn them into memes, let some go viral. That will get some attention.

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#104

Post by coupdejarnac »

irrational wrote: post #77
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What was the event you witnessed?

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#105

Post by dmix »

throwwwwaway9 wrote: post #95
tinfins wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Corporate could at least explain why this might be happening and what they are doing.

A PR department is still better in my books compared to a few disgruntled employees from a few high traffic stores after a major change in both store traffic and company processes.

All companies go through growing pains and scaling issues, and I hardly expect much insight on those issues from the teenage stock boy at a Whole Foods.

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#106

Post by kps »

dexwiz wrote: post #8

A bad inventory system could kill Wholefoods. It killed the launch of Target Canada.

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.

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#107

Post by odammit »

verbatim wrote: post #103
odammit wrote: post #91

Crisis... You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

This sure looks like a crisis for a grocery store. It didn't say it was a crisis for the population.

I’m gonna upvote that because you’re right, but I still feel there is a better word than “crisis.”

Words still have meaning.

Except “literally.”

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#108

Post by tinfins »

gamblor956 wrote: post #93
tinfins wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I took another look at the pictures. Notice all those stores where whole sections are out are in the Northeast. Probably they missed a delivery or two because of the weather. Plus during extreme weather grocery stores get shopped hard.

There was one picture of an empty banana set with a pineapple in the wrong spot - that's what I was referring to before.

The sole picture in San Francisco was the reset I mentioned.

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#109

Post by ju-st »

irrational wrote: post #77
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

From where do you get information when you don't read news articles?

Re: Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages

#110

Post by bovine3dom »

irrational wrote: post #77
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Surely the metric should be "Do they know more than me?"

Or are you concerned that you'll move towards the apex of the Dunning Kruger chart?

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