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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

#41

Post by noer »

Animats wrote: post #19

I found a Whole Foods out of corn on the cob. Corn stores just fine, so that's quite unusual. But Safeway was out, too. Strange, because the US has a corn glut. The thin-inventory thing is getting excessive. The local CVS has been out of distilled water twice, and only had one pack of small paper cups. All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.

I don't know where you're located, but isn't fresh corn on the cob pretty seasonal? mid-late summer to early fall? I know commodity corn stores well, but I didn't realize that human consumable sweet corn stored for long period of time.

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

#42

Post by btown »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #18
ksenzee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, BI is a bit of a click farm, but this does sound like a crisis to me. Not for society in general, but definitely for Whole Foods. Even their loyal customers will get disgusted and leave if the shelves are empty.

Funny bit is, Bezos is an investor in Business Insider. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-...

If anything, this shows that journalistic integrity is still working properly, at least on these shorter timescales. Unless, of course, that's just what Bezos wants you to believe...

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

#43

Post by WillyF »

I live less than a five minute walk from a Whole Foods (Chicago - North Ave), so I shop there quite a bit even though I'm not a huge fan of the store. While I haven't seen empty shelves like the photos from the article, I have become frustrated by how often they are out of the items that I'm looking for. Four or five straight trips they didn't have rosemary, and it took a third trip and asking someone who was stocking vegetables to get parsnips (requests from previous trips resulted in "Sorry, we're out"). The last time that I shopped there, they were out of maybe 5 of the 6 things that I was looking for. My wife and I agreed that this was one of the more useful Business Insider articles that we've read. It's not a great article, but it answered a mystery that had been bugging us over the past few months.

I seem to remember that the Whole Foods employees who would check us out used to always ask, "Did you find everything that you were looking for?" I haven't heard that in a while. Maybe that's related to the changes in stocking?

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

#44

Post by gojomo »

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…

"…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."

Nearly everyone who has personal knowledge of something reported is similarly disturbed. That they rarely then remember that the same level of error applies to all the other things reported, outside their areas of personal knowledge, has been termed the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect by Michael Crichton:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

As one gets older (& a bit more cynical), you learn to apply this credibility discount to more journalism. But don't just use this insight as a synergizer for confirmation bias! That is, don't just remember, "this is mostly bungled reporting" on stories with details/implications that go against what you wish were the case. The stories supporting your cherished beliefs are mostly bungled reporting, too.

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

#45

Post by colmvp »

Animats wrote: post #19

I found a Whole Foods out of corn on the cob. Corn stores just fine, so that's quite unusual. But Safeway was out, too. Strange, because the US has a corn glut. The thin-inventory thing is getting excessive. The local CVS has been out of distilled water twice, and only had one pack of small paper cups. All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.

I live in a pretty large major city, and I recall that during Thanksgiving my responsibility was to get vanilla ice cream to complement the dessert. I was like, no biggie it's the most common boring flavor, shouldn't be hard to find.

Every single supermarket I went to was out of vanilla ice cream.

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

#46

Post by donarb »

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…

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

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

#48

Post by camtarn »

com2kid wrote: post #22

I hate to be that guy to complain about the website, but someone BI is making my entire scroll bar vanish and causing me to be unable to scroll the article at all, using arrow keys, mouse wheel, or page up/page down. That must be some truly impressive JS.

Don't know if this is the case for you, but for me that's what happens when the webpage pops up a modal dialog (often, a "please subscribe to read this article") and my adblocker blocks it. The modal gets blocked - but the website also locks down scrolling so you can't just read the article by looking around the modal, and that's what causes the scrollbar to disappear.

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

#49

Post by dahdum »

javadocmd wrote: post #10

A business perfectly optimized w.r.t. waste will have zero inventory and zero sales.

Yep, if I go to WF and they are out of potatoes, yogurt, and other staples I'm not apt to return the next time.

Another article referred to WF as the "Soviet Safeway".

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

#50

Post by dekhn »

ksenzee wrote: post #12
dekhn wrote: post #4

business insider is a click farm, this is not a crisis of food shortages, that's just click bait.

Sure, BI is a bit of a click farm, but this does sound like a crisis to me. Not for society in general, but definitely for Whole Foods. Even their loyal customers will get disgusted and leave if the shelves are empty.

A crisis, in terms of food, means that if there isn't food, people die, or enter starvation mode. It's not even a crisis for Whole Foods- this is a minor issue.
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