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Reminds me of Soviet Russia. Bad central planning + strict bureaucratic rules & penalties causes empty store shelves.
That being said, I have almost never seen empty shelves at any Whole Foods store. And I go to several of them pretty regularly. Maybe my local ones are just well managed. Or maybe they have an easier time in California since some produce can be sourced locally.
Stock/inventory management seems like a great, although tough application for computer vision. A decent way to estimate how much broccoli is left without human intervention would facilitate automated ordering and eliminate rules like this one. The title of the article is also misleading - they're not halting restocking of goods, they've just instructed employees not to patch over gaps with other products.
Kroger seems to follow the same playbook from what I can see. Locally, they are often sold out of common produce such as lettuce. Even dry and canned goods are a crap shot. The other night I was looking for canned white beans and the entire shelf section was empty. It's frustrating. They are basically the only grocery option in the area and they do enough business to carry a little extra inventory. As it is now, if I…
Stock/inventory management seems like a great, although tough application for computer vision. A decent way to estimate how much broccoli is left without human intervention would facilitate automated ordering and eliminate rules like this one. The title of the article is also misleading - they're not halting restocking of goods, they've just instructed employees not to patch over gaps with other products.
Reminds me of Soviet Russia. Bad central planning + strict bureaucratic rules & penalties causes empty store shelves.
Central planning was dictating how much of every item to produce and where to distribute it and what price it would be sold for. For whole country for 5 years. This is exactly opposite of OTS. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan
This is what happens when you mix data with people. From what I can see you have top down management that wants to use data to make decisions. Those decisions affect people, the customers. What few big data companies understand is that you cannot always approach things like this. It does look sloppy, and it looks stupid. As a consumer I would go somewhere else.
If a product is out of stock, then the most immediate way to show that is by having an empty shelf.
Instead companies like Walmart prefer to face across products, and cover up barcodes. You would spend a good 10 minutes looking for something very specific, only to have an employee point at something similar, with an obscured SEL (shelf edge label) and say 'if we had them, they would be here'.
There was a big trend when I worked for Walmart to focus on stats like 'Basket Spend', and comparing regional scores. It felt like all the worst examples of AB testing.
There was quite a humorous one where 'key lines' were checked by visitors, so to counteract this, we kept spares of those lines in the back to put out when they visited, later taking them off and putting them back in the warehouse. The end result was these lines never dipped under the restock threshold and were always out of stock... except when they visited.
As another reader has remarked, “the title hints at some ulterior dark motive” or somesuch, and implies that consumers should be alarmed and horrified by this change of practice. I fail to see how plugging a hole with something else actually makes any shopper’s life better: it doesn’t resolve the scarcity and it induces shoppers to buy things they didn’t intend.
So why the implied scandal?
(Note: I’ve been to Whole Foods perhaps five or ten times in the past decade, because I don’t live in the U.S.)
Funny how walmart (neighborhood stores) never seems to have this problem? at least that's what I see locally.. it's always stocked for the most part unless say we have a Hurricane coming our way!
People have different opinions on the pros and cons here. But it's not like Walmart always has every single product in stock 100% of the time, that would be super unlikely. If you never see empty shelves, then they just are using the "put something on the shelf" policy instead of the "leave it empty" policy.