Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 291 posts

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

#111

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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…

Not sure I'm convinced. Your store does ok; that's certain. But you know about exactly one more store than I do; do you know the article is wrong for all stores? For a majority? For any? Not sure how far that induction can go.

If even one store did ok, we could see an employee from there posting here. Not sure that is information; more like a data point.

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

#112

Post by tinfins »

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…

There's no centralized replenishment system yet at Whole Foods, OTS is just a collection of guidelines enforced by inspections. 99% of ordering is done manually at the store level for now.

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

#113

Post by redleggedfrog »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #37
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…

> 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…

IkmoIkmo, that's an exceptionally insightful and informative reply. I've never heard of that effect before, but the gist of the idea has bothered me for a long time. I was about to reply to tinfins "And now realize that most news stories are probably just as misinformed."

I hate to be so skeptical of the mainstream media, but it's hard not to whenever they report on something I know about they seem to get it all wrong.

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

#114

Post by TheAdamist »

siruncledrew wrote: post #92

OTS sounds like a good thing overall if it is less wasteful and lower cost. With Amazon's logistics, they should be able to use the data from these food shortages to better inform the OTS system of what to order and when to order it. Maybe it's bad in the short-term, but the insights are still valuable for better logistics.

Train your customers to shop elsewhere, and it becomes bad in the long term too.

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

#115

Post by wil421 »

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?

Absolutely not but some people do shop around. Everyone has a store they go to more often then not. If the usual store was out of things had sub par quality I won’t go back. There are a couple on my black list around me.

My regular grocery store will be out a handful of times of years when I winter storm is coming. It will only take a day to recover stock in this case.

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

#116

Post by dingaling »

tinfins wrote: post #63
donarb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#117

Post by jxramos »

asciimo wrote: post #66
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…

Amen. Because it would be terrifying to admit that very few of the people who inform the world actually know what they're talking about.

"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things." Bob Knight

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

#118

Post by jxramos »

Goodness, the only time I've personally seen shelves looking bare like these was when the employees of some supermarket chains banded together for a multiweek strike. The local Trader Joes wound up being flooded with all the customers who wouldn't cross the picket line. It lead me and my roommate to actually discover Trader Joes, which was a great find. However the shelves in Trader Joes were ravaged by a mob of hungry customers taking everything in sight just about. The strike went on so long we kept shopping Trader Joes and then were transformed into loyal customers sampling all their exotic and quirky goods.

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

#119

Post by ReinholdNiebuhr »

robryan wrote: post #96
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…

Economics behind it mean throwing them out is the most cost effective thing they can do. It would probably require something like a government penalty or incentive around food waste to change.

Incentives are certainly skewed currently with write offs for losses etc not necessarily encouraging prevention of food waste.

For the in store products, I think automation could eventually be the key but obviously we're sometime away from a full automated kitchen. Once that happens we should be able to savage a good bit. Thinking more about stuff that wouldn't be savageable .. freezing might not be the best option as you'd be required to keep it frozen during shipment. So investing in dehydration or freeze drying would be key,... dehydration probably is cheaper over freeze drying.

Changing the write off rules would be useful. Not taxing products made in store would be a possible incentive temporarily at least. If we were able to save a lot of stuff from going into the trash and instead going into feed.. maybe we could get cheaper animal products..but I sense that's probably more complicated than it seems.

Idk.. just ideas.

Post reply on HN