Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by anticodon » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 4:01 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #213

ekianjo wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you picture the long-term extrapolation of ignoring events around you looks like? You are basically asking what it would be like to live like most of Humanity before the advent of mass media. Did not seem they had far worse problems than we do or that they were incapable to adapt. I'd return the question to you, how was mass media improved your life in any meaningful way and can you prove it was not just no…

To answer that I'll need to pick a media cut off point. Let's say before the printing press? Seems like a good place to start, although of course unwritten news traveled before. This might not be what you had in mind as "mass media" but I think it's a more useful cutoff point for modernity. The printing press, like writing before it and phone/telegram/TV/internet after it, was a fairly transformational technology, bu…

Distribution of knowledge is not equal to distribution of lies and propaganda. I think that fear of missing "important" information from media is highly overrated. Besides, it's very hard to avoid this unless you live in the woods.

I don't read news and don't watch TV for at least 3-4 years and I became much happier person because of this decision.

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

#232

Post by hueving » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 4:55 AM UTC

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.

He's not purporting to report news. So no irony that I can see?

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

#233

Post by gwbas1c » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 4:56 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #94

phkahler wrote: post #51

Earlier 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?

That's normally the case. Whole Foods is not a normal grocery store and has an extremely loyal customer base. Many of their customers already go out of their way to go to the store and pay higher prices for the same items that other stores have.

This is probably why Whole Foods is trying to cut back on inventory, so they can lower prices to compete with every other grocery store.

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

#234

Post by gisely » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 5:01 AM UTC

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…

The article indicates she contacted Whole Foods corporate and they didn't respond. So what exactly is wrong with her coverage? Also, you say you are Whole Foods employee. But are you store employee or a corporate headquarters employee?

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

#235

Post by gwbas1c » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 5:04 AM UTC

One of the biggest factors in me leaving a business: wasting my time. If I repeatedly go to a store and the items I'm looking for aren't there, I stop going. Life's too short to put up with a poorly run business.

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

#236

Post by icelancer » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 5:14 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #194

chiefalchemist wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nonsense. The problem is it's not something most people realize and/accept. They hear "The sky is purple" on the channel they usually watch, said by the pleasant looking and sounding talking head they're so fond of. No need to look up and double ckeck. Yup! The sky is purple. Case closed. Facebook and Twitter would be ghost towns without this disconnect.

Well, that's because the only way to get through life in this day and age is to pick some people you accept as authorities on sobjects, and listen to their opinion and use it to form an initial basis for your own if you haven't already got one. The trick, which people seem to be generally bad at, is: a) limiting the scope of authority you attribute to someone b) not immediately discounting contradictory evidence but…

Or just judge them by their actions, not anything that is said.

Examine their voting record, lobby donations, and primary information and action. Decide from there.

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

#237

Post by ekianjo » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #213

ekianjo wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you picture the long-term extrapolation of ignoring events around you looks like? You are basically asking what it would be like to live like most of Humanity before the advent of mass media. Did not seem they had far worse problems than we do or that they were incapable to adapt. I'd return the question to you, how was mass media improved your life in any meaningful way and can you prove it was not just no…

To answer that I'll need to pick a media cut off point. Let's say before the printing press? Seems like a good place to start, although of course unwritten news traveled before. This might not be what you had in mind as "mass media" but I think it's a more useful cutoff point for modernity. The printing press, like writing before it and phone/telegram/TV/internet after it, was a fairly transformational technology, bu…

> The printing press

Printing press availability and mass media are two distinct events in History. I'd say mass media pretty much started in the 20th century with Radio and TV. Paper was not something that everyone purchased before for news. TV/Radio made information pretty much free in that regard.

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

#238

Post by yorwba » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 5:58 AM UTC

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…

There is a difference between following the news and being informed about events around you. That difference is in the specificity of the information you receive.

Most news coverage is relevant to someone, but utterly irrelevant for the majority. As a non-US citizen, the US presidential election can be summarized by who won and what changes they intend to make. I don't need 24-hour coverage of he-said/she-said style reporting.

On the other hand, it can be useful to subscribe to some industry-specific news source to be aware of general trends. But then you're not following the news in general, but just the tiny sliver that actually affects you, which makes it much easier (not less) to stay informed.

Most general news articles are actually much more useful once they are archived (and no longer news), since then you can just seek them out when their topic has become relevant to you, and it lets you make actual use of the constant recaps the news cycle tends to include for context.

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

#239

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 6:06 AM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #178

Natsu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It is nonsense. The problem is it's not something most people realize and/accept. They hear "The sky is purple" on the channel they usually watch, said by the pleasant looking and sounding talking head they're so fond of. No need to look up and double ckeck. Yup! The sky is purple. Case closed. Facebook and Twitter would be ghost towns without this disconnect.

[deleted]

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

#240

Post by bradknowles » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 6:17 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #101

princekolt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, as a customer, I can confirm that all the Whole Foods Markets I’ve seen do have digital pricing displays for most things - they are based on e-paper technology.

But you don’t want prices changing between the time a customer has picked up a product and the time they get to the checkout. And then there’s the whole problem of the in-store prices not matching the published circular prices.

So, lots of issues to work out there before dynamic pricing can work well in a physical store.