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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

#271

Post by casefields »

phyller wrote: post #62
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…

I wish I could upvote this twice. I know its just anecdotal data, but the rare occasions I have had personal knowledge of news articles they have been grossly inaccurate, every time. Where is the quote from? Edit: from another comment: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

It comes from his amazing essay called 'Why Speculate' which you can read here: http://docdro.id/4wgVecr

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

#272

Post by specialist »

hueving wrote: post #232
specialist wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michael_Crichton

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

#273

Post by macintux »

jimmywanger wrote: post #248
macintux wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one is failing an inspection for having 1 box facing the wrong way like it says in the article Usually when I see (or say) something like that it's an exaggeration with a significant amount of truth behind it.

> Usually when I see (or say) something like that it's an exaggeration with a significant amount of truth behind it. So by your logic, any accusation has the cachet of a significant amount of truth behind it? The press needs clicks. Their needs (more click and revenue) is diametrically opposed to our needs (a somewhat unbiased view of reality). Just by saying " has to be backed by something" is ridiculous. It can be…

No, my point was merely that dismissing that accusation because it’s ridiculous doesn’t mean you can assume there is no merit to the point at all. I have no idea whether the system is as employee-hostile as the sources indicate.

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

#274

Post by danans »

danans wrote: post #199

Whether or not there is an actual stock crisis at WF, this reminds me of Nassim Taleb's general observation that systems that are hyper efficient (no redundancy) are more fragile when faced with unforeseen circumstances. This is familiar to anyone in tech who has built a computer system with replication to achieve high availability and minimize data load risk, but it's rarely discussed in the context of human resourc…

s/data load/data loss/

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

#275

Post by kemiller »

irrational wrote: post #77
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…

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…

The only outlet I trust is the Economist, even though I don’t always 100% agree with their editorial stance, for the simple reason that when they report on things I know about they DO get it right, but simplified in a reasonable way. I think the weekly format helps too.

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

#276

Post by notyourday »

tinfins wrote: post #191
jwn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you offer any more insights? What's the reality behind OTS?

OTS is really just a collection of pretty common-sense guidelines like don't have more than a certain percentage of inventory in backstock, don't have backstock of stuff that doesn't sell well, keep your backstock organized, etc. There are a few details about it that can be irritating, but the comments from employees in the article are extremely misleading. If they're having a hard time passing their inspections it's…

This reminds me of a SaaS product roll outs where customers are complaining, revenue is falling, sales people are complaining but the bosses point out at the great new metric they found which says "Everything is great as long as the day name ends with a 'Y'"

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

#277

Post by notyourday »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #139
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!

It sounds like they're trying to optimise their just-in-time delivery. I think Lidl/Aldi do this, they have a very small "back area" so almost all goods are on the shelves. This presumably optimises so floor usage and reduces storage costs/wastage and such.

Aldi's business model is "few things that you need, cheap".

Whole Foods business models is "Look at the stuff we have that you never knew about so you have no idea of what the price on it should be or what to use it for. Buy it!" The entire thing was based on a blow job with a smile level customer service. Do you know that employees of Whole Foods carried sharpies so if a customer looked lost trying to figure out if the customer wanted to try this or that item, the sharpie came out to wipe off the UPC code of the item and that item went into customer's bag for free because Whole Foods determined that losing $3-10 on the item is perfectly fine as they made $300 on a basket that this person was likely to buy on average a month? Or how about a knife that everyone in produce carried? So if a customer was not quite sure about that apple, the knife came out the apple was cut right in front of him or her, a piece was given to them and the rest became sample?

That's why Whole Foods had insane revenue. It was the level of service one only got at specialty stores delivered to the masses.

Drop that and Wegmans would destroy it.

Source: Wife used to work at Whole Foods.

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

#278

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

yorwba wrote: post #238
majormajor wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you, this is a lot more like what I would have written in my initial comment had I not been feeling so laconic.

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

#279

Post by burfog »

michaelmrose wrote: post #260
burfog wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crowd images don't tell the whole story. There is grass on the National Mall. During the Obama inauguration, people walked on it as you would expect. The damage cost several $million to fix. In photos of the Trump inauguration crowd, notice that the sparsely-occupied area is white. It was covered in translucent boxes to protect the grass. (the boxes were borrowed from stadiums that use them for events like concerts)…

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media/white-hou... The physical area is virtually the same. They merely appear to be taken from slightly different vantage points. Both show the area where you might reasonably expect people to observe from. They are taken at the same time of day differing by a matter of 5-20 minutes. You aren't even nitpicking your statement about the area differing by a factor of 2 is a…

"In the usual pair of photos"

Those are not the usual pair of photos.

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

#280

Post by michaelmrose »

burfog wrote: post #279
michaelmrose wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media/white-hou... The physical area is virtually the same. They merely appear to be taken from slightly different vantage points. Both show the area where you might reasonably expect people to observe from. They are taken at the same time of day differing by a matter of 5-20 minutes. You aren't even nitpicking your statement about the area differing by a factor of 2 is a…

"In the usual pair of photos" Those are not the usual pair of photos.

Its a pair of photos taken at the height of each event. Its also the ones I saw in the news at the time. If you are familiar with some that look like its fudged to show trump in a bad light its probably from stuff conservatives shared on facebook where they picked 2 dissimilar pics, made up a story surrounding them about how the news is out to disrespect trump, and yelled about fake news.
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