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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

#141

Post by noetic_techy »

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…

Ok, and..? So what about this story is not accurate? Is your store seeing this issue? Even if your branch is doing fine, what makes this story about other location inaccurate?

You left us all hanging. Why is this the top comment?

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

#143

Post by Jemmeh »

phkahler wrote: post #51
WillyF wrote: post #43

I 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…

Whole foods has a lot of very niche specialty food. That is what they are probably scaling back on.

For example there's a small organic food store near my house that no longer sells cocoa butter because it's very expensive and rarely purchased. And it's more common now, but I used to have to go to Whole Foods foods for things like almond flour, coconut flour, dairy-free products, and gluten-free products. (I used to date someone with digestive issues.) It was nice to be able to buy them somewhere instead of having to special order it online. But I can't imagine they sell nearly as much of those foods.

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

#144

Post by trevyn »

Animats wrote: post #19

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.

>All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.

Holding inventory has an economic cost, even if the inventory has infinite shelf life — the money that bought or manufactured the inventory could be used elsewhere.

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

#145

Post by pbhjpbhj »

notatoad wrote: post #123
gist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Did you find everything that you were looking for?" They don't do that at the store I go to anymore either but it has nothing to do with inventory (which as I mentioned in another comment is the same as it's always been). Could be that they just discovered that it had little upside but some downside. As a customer I sometimes get annoyed being asked that question all the time.

i've always wondered who actually answers "no" to that question. If i've made it to the checkout, i've made the decision that i've found everything i'm going to purchase today. even if it wasn't everything i originally came for. If i needed help finding something, i would have asked for help before i got to the checkout. I'm not going to stand in line at the checkout only to not actually check out, and hold up the li…

I have - they pressed the light to call a supervisor (whilst they continued scanning my items) who found me the item, like finding a replacement for a damaged item, and returned before I'd finished packing the bags. Delay was <1 minute.

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

#146

Post by ethbro »

dingaling wrote: post #116
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.

Why are they resetting a section during shopping hours? Even 30 years ago when I was a student worker in a food store that sort of task only happened after 22:00 when the last customers had left.

If store sales > shelf capacity, you have to intraday restock.

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

#147

Post by bearcobra »

onli wrote: post #122
tinfins wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that's exactly the problem the article describes: That the moment something goes wrong the stores don't have any reserves anymore, because the system is too strictly set on reducing costs and spoilage, seemingly with a total disregard to consumer satisfaction and overall profit. Add to that crazy-sounding control schemes - which maybe is kinda normal in a country like the US without real employee protection laws,…

Anecdotally, I have experienced the same phenomenon at several major grocery chains in Canada. City gets hit with a winter storm and Safeway, SuperStore, & Walmart all had empty produce & bread sections. I've also seen it in certain stores during summer months in the run up to a long weekend. Not saying the new supply chain software can't be the cause, but there does seem to be other reasonable explanations.

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

#148

Post by oh_sigh »

briandear wrote: post #136
foobarbazetc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work in a store or at HQ? Because the article is right. At least in some stores around SF the stock situation is dire. Some days I can’t even buy whole milk.

Could you buy two half-milks?

Sure, or buy half and half and use your personal centrifuge to separate it

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

#149

Post by majormajor »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #127
ju-st wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've gone for months and years long periods of avoiding the news , including sites like this, and live has always been qualitatively better during those periods. I'm not convinced I understand what purpose being informed of global politics or local dramas serves, other than maybe having something to talk about with friends and colleagues.

Serious question: What do you picture the long-term extrapolation of ignoring events around you looks like? Are you so independent of other people's actions that you can't imagine any events that would impact you in a way that you'd want to try to have a voice in, or at least be informed about? Isn't that how people end up in dead end jobs where 15 years later the industry has moved on and they no longer have skills companies are looking for?

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

#150

Post by Natsu »

caseysoftware wrote: post #124
irrational wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My wife was a political reporter in DC, covering the Hill, the Pentagon and White House at various times. One time we were watching CNN and they mentioned a briefing at the Pentagon and she noted she was in the same one. Halfway through the coverage, she jumped up and said "that's not what they said!" I was confused.. she went back to her bag and handed me her notebook which contradicted their coverage. It's not uniq…

This is why I assume most political coverage, especially that from partisans of either party, is mostly nonsense. To get the real story you have to find and read primary sources. Any "news" sites that don't give those I assume are lying, at best, until I have sources to corroborate what they said. The "news" these days is mostly made up of opinion pieces and it spends entirely too much time looking to troll us with cheap outrage articles as clickbait.

Random independent coverage from bloggers, e.g. Popehat, tends to be much better informed than people rushing to incite us on a deadline. This goes double for anything the least bit technical, like law.

Sadly, there just aren't enough sources like that to actually dig into most stories.

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