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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

#51

Post by phkahler »

WillyF wrote: post #43

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 stockin…

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 satisfaction, people will be forced to go somewhere else when they're in need, and that will hurt loyalty and keep people looking at alternatives.

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

#52

Post by slyall »

donarb wrote: post #46
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?

They say most of the pictures of bare shelves are from customers

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

#53

Post by jrowley »

donarb wrote: post #46
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?

Here's an anecdote.

This week I was sick and went to whole foods like 3 times over 5 days to get soup. The soup shelf became more and more empty over time and didn't seem to be getting restocked which struck me as odd.

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

#54

Post by ceejayoz »

Our local food chain here in Rochester NY is Wegmans, and they've had a bunch of produce shortages recently due to bad weather in California. They've also dropped their line of soy milk because the supplier couldn't keep up.

This may not be entirely a Whole Foods issue.

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

#57

Post by throwaway5752 »

coding123 wrote: post #9

Wow, I wonder how new this system is - I've been to Whole foods in the last 3 days and it looked nothing like that picture. I wonder if these images are extreme cases that happened after 1 strange situation, and the article makes it look like a nationwide epidemic.

I shop at two near where I live almost weekly, and have only seen shelves like that during restocking, if ever.

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

#58

Post by nkrisc »

WillyF wrote: post #43

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 stockin…

> 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?

Lest they remind you that you did not...

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

#59

Post by defo_nonconvex »

colmvp wrote: post #45
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.

If you were searching for ice-cream with real vanilla, then its possibly understandable. A cyclone clobbered the Madagascan crop in 2017, multiplying the price. Some gelaterias in London didn't even run vanilla this winter as a result.

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

#60

Post by RGamma »

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.

I mostly fare well with uMatrix and a ruleset that starts with

  * * * block
  * * css allow #(or "* 1st-party css allow" for the more paranoid)
  * 1st-party image allow
This will unfuck BI as well (and breaks many sites, use exceptions if necessary).
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