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Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

businessinsider.com

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Re: Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

#51

Post by saas_co_de »

carterehsmith wrote: post #49
saas_co_de wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the writer is genuinely shocked as to how the leading luxury food retailer can have their grocery stores looking like Venezuela. They are just trying to make sense of it. The answer seems to be that management is grossly incompetent and totally out of touch with reality which are pretty important facts for investors to be aware of. Of course, there are a lot of people who would very much like Amazon to fail h…

>> management is grossly incompetent They did build the big, succefull business in a super-competitive market that is grocery. You cannot possibly achieve that if you are incompetent.

"they" didn't build it by having their shelves empty. management turns over all the time so who knows whether the people responsible for this debacle had anything to do with whole food's earlier success.

WFM stock had been way down from its highs because the business was doing poorly prior to the amazon acquisition.

Re: Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

#52

Post by dawnerd »

sjg007 wrote: post #40
dawnerd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed they’ve been pretty bad about keeping certain things in stock. Their soda isle is probably the worst, almost always picked clean.

It seems strange not to have a back stock of soda.. that stuff never spoils. Maybe it’s a space issue. Same with dry or canned goods. Produce should be cheap enough at wholesale to have some spoilage and they also have these seconds supermarkets that take not quite perfect fresh food and close to expiration date foods. I’d open another store selling those.

Problem is the stores here at least don’t seem to restock unless you ask - instead waiting for the coke/Pepsi person to do it.

What’s interesting is the increased bottle fee doesn’t seem to have affected sales.

Re: Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

#54

Post by mindcrime »

batbomb wrote: post #43
mindcrime wrote: post #37

If you live by just-in-time-inventory, you will die by just-in-time-inventory. It's one of those things that sounds good on paper, and can work, but it's damn hard to get right in real-life. The JIT model assumes you have the necessary data and models to predict when things need to be ordered, how long they'll take to be shipped out by the supplier, how long they'll take to arrive, etc. In reality, there are a LOT of…

That's not what this is about at all. It's about making sure things that are out are reordered and moving, and punishing stores that have historically made things look "presentable" by hiding the fact they are out of things and playing around with shelf space, thinking they know better than the people who set the shelves/corporate on what items actually sell. When you have people that monkey around with things like t…

That's not what this is about at all. It's about making sure things that are out are reordered and moving

Those things aren't an issue if you avoid outages to begin with. And while this specific link may have been referring more specifically to the re-facing issue, there is a broader story in play here, including another, different article about Whole Foods, which is more about their general ability to keep items in stock. I'm addressing the broader issue in my post above.

Re: Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

#55

Post by carterehsmith »

saas_co_de wrote: post #51
carterehsmith wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> management is grossly incompetent They did build the big, succefull business in a super-competitive market that is grocery. You cannot possibly achieve that if you are incompetent.

"they" didn't build it by having their shelves empty. management turns over all the time so who knows whether the people responsible for this debacle had anything to do with whole food's earlier success. WFM stock had been way down from its highs because the business was doing poorly prior to the amazon acquisition.

>> so who knows

Yes, these are the key words. "Who knows". I don't know who made these decisions, do you?

Re: Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

#56

Post by quadrangle »

PeterisP wrote: post #39
quadrangle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this isn't a problem that stores have or not, it's just a corporate policy: when a product sells out, do you fill the shelf with something or leave it empty? People have different opinions on the pros and cons here. But it's not like Walmart always has every single product in stock 100% of the time, that would be super unlikely. If you never see empty shelves, then they just are using the "put something on the shelf"…

It is a problem that stores have or not - some stores have situations where bananas or lettuce are sold out only in exceptional cases i.e. basically never, while others have to decide on a corporate policy on what to do because that's a common occurrence.

The only way to never sell out of bananas is to order enough that a portion always goes bad before selling. No matter how much sales you do, there's an inherent trade-off between the amount waste and amount of temporary sell-outs. That is a problem all stores have to deal with, and they have to choose some policy for it.

Similarly, stores have a policy about what to do when there is a sell-out (leave the shelf empty or put something else there).

Each policy decision has pros and cons, and no store is immune to these issues.

Re: Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

#57

Post by saas_co_de »

carterehsmith wrote: post #55
saas_co_de wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they" didn't build it by having their shelves empty. management turns over all the time so who knows whether the people responsible for this debacle had anything to do with whole food's earlier success. WFM stock had been way down from its highs because the business was doing poorly prior to the amazon acquisition.

>> so who knows Yes, these are the key words. "Who knows". I don't know who made these decisions, do you?

> I don't know who made these decisions, do you?

No, but I do know they are incompetent, don't understand the fundamentals of their business, and are out of touch with their employees and customers.

This empty shelf scheme fails hard in two important and obvious ways:

1) negative effects on customer perceptions from seeing empty shelves.

2) stores are in the business of selling stuff and shelf space is a scare and precious resource. Empty shelves means no sales and lost revenue for that space. If you run a store empty shelves is a 100% sign of incompetence.

Now, the overall scheme seems to be based on a theory that having empty shelves will lead to them being restocked with the correct items more quickly. That is plausibly rational on the surface but actually comes down to magical thinking.

If you lack the organizational ability to get shelves stocked correctly in the first place leaving them empty will not magically change that.

What you have here is management trying to increase revenue and instead of having a real plan for how to do that they have put in place a set of policies that rely on it happening by magic and then blame people on the floor when it fails.

This is pretty much the definition of incompetent and out of touch management.

Re: Documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

#58

Post by uniacid »

pixl97 wrote: post #29
uniacid wrote: post #19

Funny how walmart (neighborhood stores) never seems to have this problem? at least that's what I see locally.. it's always stocked for the most part unless say we have a Hurricane coming our way!

Maybe your store just isn't that busy. It's pretty common for our walmart to be out of some grocery items, especially produce.

No they are generally very busy... Not to say they are never out of things but not like this lol.
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