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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

#151

Post by rdiddly »

Empty shelves are a way bigger problem in retail grocery than spoilage. If you lose a box of cauliflower, OK, it costs money, but if you lose an entire customer, even just for a few months, that's a loss of revenue in the thousands of dollars. And you will lose that customer. "The audience ams a fickles mistress, Toki." And nobody goes to the "super" market to feel like Soviet Russia or the apocalypse.

Ahh but wait, now multiply that dollar figure by 50 customers who tried to buy cauliflower that day. Add 50 more for every subsequent day during which you're still out of cauliflower. Assume they each used to spend $1,000 a month with you, but now they all stay mad at you for 5 months each. After four days you're literally out a million dollars. Though you won't realize that loss until the end of the five months.

If you're out of tunafish too, you don't just lose lovers of cauliflower and tuna, you lose everybody who loves cauliflower, everybody who loves tuna, and everybody who loves both. Unfortunately for you as the grocery store that can't keep the shelves stocked, it's an OR, not an AND, and there is definitely a type of network effect at work.

The costs you incur by having inventory around, and having some of it go bad, are like insurance payments, to avoid the costs you would incur by the much worse problem of losing customers.

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

#152

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ReinholdNiebuhr wrote: post #70

Increase 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…

In our local Tesco, in a relatively poor UK city, the saving on "last day" food is about 10-20%, it used to be much higher. Presumably they're more wary of self-cannabilising. Except bread products after 8pm, it's almost never worth buying the reduced items now. I imagine they have much more waste. Mind you most ready food retailers, like Greggs (high-street bakery) don't do reductions preferring to dump unsold food rather than let people get them cheaply.

Refuse bin areas getting covers and locks is some sort of r/latestagecapitalism indicator.

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

#153

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

majormajor wrote: post #149
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reasonable question. Short of living in the wilderness or in solitary confinement it's probably difficult to go completely in the dark.

With regard to not having a voice, probably doesn't matter if I don't, but I'll concede it's probably a poor choice for the populace at large.

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

#154

Post by onli »

bearcobra wrote: post #147
onli wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

During a canadian winter storm to have more than usual empty shelves is of course very reasonable ;) And I'm also used to having less products available in some supermarkets when nearing night time. The images shown in the article though seem ridiculous to me.

But I agree, absolutely possible that there are other explanations (including that there is no problem at all), but a wrongly prioritized supply chain scheme/software fits very well to the shown and described issues.

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

#155

Post by mml »

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.

corn != sweet corn

regular industrial corn is livestock feed, corn-syrup base, plastics feedstock and the like. horrible stuff, grown in gargantuan quantities. you can't eat it without at least some amount of processing. it's just not food.

the stuff you eat off the cob is sweet corn. nobody grows, or eats enough sweet corn for there to be a glut of it.

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

#156

Post by fouc »

specialist wrote: post #133
loeg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is the quote from? Michael Crichton. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann#Quotes_about_...

Oh. Crichton coined that phrase? That's some potent unintentional irony right there.

How so?

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

#157

Post by pacaro »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #104
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…

What was the event you witnessed?

Here’s an example: while in college, I was in a building that was on fire. A passerby ran into the entrance and asked us if we knew the building was in fire (we didn’t).

When the fire was reported by the student newspaper, the only details they got correct was the date and that there was a fire. The journalist spoke with me and with the student whose dorm room burned. Nothing we said made it into the article. It was far more interesting to invent a story about how nobody knew if he was in his room when the fire started, than the prosaic truth that I knew he was in the library.

This happened in 1990 and the cause of the fire was a pc catching fire while engaged in the slow and perilous task of reformatting a hard drive.

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

#158

Post by mml »

rdiddly wrote: post #151

Empty shelves are a way bigger problem in retail grocery than spoilage. If you lose a box of cauliflower, OK, it costs money, but if you lose an entire customer, even just for a few months, that's a loss of revenue in the thousands of dollars. And you will lose that customer. "The audience ams a fickles mistress, Toki." And nobody goes to the "super" market to feel like Soviet Russia or the apocalypse. Ahh but wait,…

you lose a case of cauliflower to spoilage, you lose $5. lose a case-worth of sold cauliflower, you lose out on $100 of revenue. this systems sounds penny-wise and pound-short.

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

#159

Post by mml »

microtherion wrote: post #97
sebringj wrote: post #56

Maybe 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].

greetings, clip maker.

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

#160

Post by pbhjpbhj »

krinchan wrote: post #98
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…

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…

Surely they have enough data at a long lived supermarket to predict stock demand using weather factors and seasonality automatically.

I'd expect them to be factoring in customer onboarding rates, including anticipated accelerations, accounting for ongoing ad campaigns and such too.

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