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

#221

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

tinfins wrote: post #186

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good point, but I'm not necessarily disagreeing that there were a few days with high out-of-stocks, just that the employees criticizing the OTS system in the article are being very misleading and exaggerating.

Fair. At worst, it sounds like it could work, and they didn't put in the brainpower to sort it out.

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

#222

Post by gersh » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:06 AM UTC

I worked on a grocery store inventory system a while back, and it was very hard to get it rolled out. Produce can go bad, and get thrown out, so it is very hard to accurately predict how much you will need. Further, your predictions depend upon how quickly it goes bad, which may not be easy to predict. Further, your predictions and orders depend upon people entering accurate data into the system. It is clear the employees are resisting putting accurate data into the system. Further, when you design the system you need to determine a probability of running out. The naive answers seems to be about 0%, but from an analytics standpoint a higher number may seem preferable.

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

#223

Post by dgacmu » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:10 AM UTC

tinfins wrote: post #108

gamblor956 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that a few stores ran out of bananas or one item for the day. Take a look at the pictures: entire sections like produce are basically empty. The only time I've seen shelves that bare were at Kmart and Sears locations before they went bankrupt and shut down.

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.

The article came out a day or so after I went to the Whole Foods in Pittsburgh, and for the first time, when the cashier asked if I'd found everything, I said quite strongly: "No!". There were really surprising gaps in availability -- there was no soy milk (fresh or shelf-stable), no rice milk, no stock of several types of yogurt, surprisingly slim pickings in several of the veggie sections, no vegetable stock, only the most expensive types of diced tomatoes left (no 365 brand), and a few other things. The cashier said it was probably because the delivery truck didn't make it the previous day because of snow, but was surprised because the truck had made it earlier that day. IANA whole foods employee, but this certainly jibes with reduced stocking levels increasing fragility under delivery misses. I've never seen my WFM that empty before.

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

#224

Post by tinfins » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

onli wrote: post #206

tinfins wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think stores should just keep a huge backstock of fresh produce just in case an extreme weather event or some other rare issue hits? That's going to lead to less fresh produce for the 350 days a year when everything goes smoothly. The OTS system in the article also allows for exceptions - if there were bananas available the store could have stocked up on them. It's just so wrong on many levels - I could spend…

> So you think stores should just keep a huge backstock of fresh produce just in case an extreme weather event or some other rare issue hits? Strawman. I said nothing of the sort. I'm taking the article at face value. The article reports that regularly, stores of your chain are understocked that much that you are losing money and customer loyalty. It is not saying those are special rare issues. Now, there are two opt…

I jumped ahead there and left a step of my reasoning out. The article describes a lack of backstock, due to OTS, causing out-of-stocks when stores have to miss a delivery or two. But if you assume that the vast majority of these issues were in fact caused by unpredictable events, then the only possible solution would be to keep large amounts of extra stock at all times, which is worse for the customer and the company in the end. Obviously the goal is for neither extreme to occur.

The article is wrong about the regularity of the issue, the "weird control systems" (not sure what connection you're seeing with employee protection laws), and the causes.

But you misunderstand me if you think I'm burying my head in the sand. I don't deny that Whole Foods has issues with its ordering processes. In fact, I think the company has been going in the wrong direction there for a long time. The article is just so, so off-base - originally I didn't intend to argue with it, but now I've become this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/

It will be interesting to see if Amazon can improve the situation through automation. Generally I've seen stores that use automated ordering systems be far worse with their out-of-stocks (Kroger, for instance).

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

#225

Post by drtillberg » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:28 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #160

krinchan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whole Foods whittled down the list of items that are "never" out-of-stock. Now that tier of redundancy is reserved for a select group of core items explicitly called "never-outs." In doing so, HQ implicitly reclassified the remainder of the inventory as "sometimes-outs."

Having a lot of "sometimes-out" items predictably will lead to "sometimes-all-out-at-the-same-time" categories and "some-stores-are-always-out" items. The outages are clumping, in terms of categories, timing, and location. Which is a bad and apparently unanticipated mode of failure for the procurement system.

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

#226

Post by jdminhbg » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:29 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #99

robryan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not at all. A grocery store being out of any normally stocked product is really unusual. If it happened with any regularity for stuff I wanted to buy, I’d stop going to that store. The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!

> The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!

Definitely not; plenty of items are seasonal and therefore only available at certain times. One of the reasons I prefer WF to e.g. Safeway is that they stock certain vegetables, fruits, and seafood without requiring that they be available year round. WF has persimmons in the fall; Safeway never does.

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

#227

Post by ci5er » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:36 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?

No.

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

#228

Post by taoooopl » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:39 AM UTC

adam wrote: post #3

I suspect this will smooth out as they collect more data about what's going empty, etc. If as the article states there was millions in inventory sitting in the stock rooms, each store probably wasn't doing very good inventory management and demand planning, so didn't have good data to begin with to inform a new system.

Whole Foods had $471M in inventory on their most recent balance sheet, so millions in the stock rooms and distribution centers would be normal.

Edit: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=865436&ac...

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

#229

Post by Natsu » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:50 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #214

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…

I also know of a news event first hand, and then watched with shock the news coverage of it later. It wasn't remotely political, it was clearly just sloppy "get it in the can and move on". The umbrage taken by the mainstream media in the last year being called "fake news" is a bit amusing. I've often wondered what percentage of it all (and what we know of history) is complete nonsense.

A lot of our news reports are quick summaries written up in a few minutes by a busy person who quickly gathered whatever info was at hand and not so much of the long, in-depth investigations of the past.

So... likely quite a lot. I trust verifiable sources a lot more than I trust any outlet, even the supposedly reputable ones. I mean, just how long did it take for Jayson Blair to get caught fabricating stories in the NYT? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

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

#230

Post by mikeash » Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 3:52 AM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #226

mikeash wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. A grocery store being out of any normally stocked product is really unusual. If it happened with any regularity for stuff I wanted to buy, I’d stop going to that store. The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!

> The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything! Definitely not; plenty of items are seasonal and therefore only available at certain times. One of the reasons I prefer WF to e.g. Safeway is that they stock certain vegetables, fruits, and seafood without requiring that they be available year round. WF has persimmons in the fall; Safeway never does.

That’s why I said “normally stocked products.” Seasonally available products are fine. The problem is products which are supposed to be available but can’t be purchased when I’m there because the store is cutting their JIT delivery too close.