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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

#81

Post by yuhong »

outworlder wrote: post #75
dajohnson89 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for someone who is well-informed on the the subject, it's amusing that you offered zero information in your comment.

At many companies, unless you have “PR” in your job description, it’s a violation of policy to do such a thing, or even comment after identifying that you work for the company, even if it is to defend or otherwise comment positively.

I dislike the forum posting approval policy for Whole Foods executives (in the code of conduct). It was not a good solution to the problem.

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

#82

Post by gist »

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…

I was thinking that the article didn't come close to describing the Whole Foods store where I am which is as well stocked as ever.

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

#83

Post by nrjames »

We've had this problem at the Whole Foods near me in Raleigh. It's likely we'll switch grocery stores soon if they don't fix it. For the past 3-4 months, most of the time we do our weekly shopping trip, the shelves are basically bare in the produce section and often there are other popular ingredients we no longer can rely on finding there. It's pretty annoying and has been a frequent topic of conversation between my wife and me.

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

#84

Post by 52-6F-62 »

btown wrote: post #42
52-6F-62 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That was my thinking.

BI has a lot of fluff content, but they do some good work.

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

#85

Post by notyourday »

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…

Well, the article has photos. So unless it is your claim that the photos are fake or were taken during the time the store was closed to customers, I can tell you it looks worse than a 4th grade chain that sells barely passable products.

Wegmans/Fairway/Shoprite would destroy WF unless it quickly fixes this issue.

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

#86

Post by princekolt »

laurentoget wrote: post #78

This kind of system is notoriously difficult to switch to. In theory a centralized system with a good algorithm should easily do better than the local employee who only has local information, however before you switch the system on, you only have the data which has been collected before and this is probably incomplete and inaccurate data, so the algorithm will miss some peaks and suffer out of stock issues, which wil…

If the problem is too much spoiled stock, wouldn't it be simpler and easier to implement a dynamic-pricing system, where the price of a product starts going down automatically (say, every 6 hours) starting two weeks before the product is marked to be spoiled? I've seen shops do this manually, but it usually only happens when they have a lot of stock of the same product that's about to go bad, so they sell 2-for-1 or something like that.

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

#87

Post by phil21 »

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.

We don't have a sweet corn glut that I'm aware of. We do of course have a dent corn glut - but you're not buying that at a grocery store.

Sweet fresh corn on the cob is pretty perishable item. Worse than Apples at least.

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

#88

Post by gist »

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…

> "Did you find everything that you were looking for?"

They don't do that at the store I go to anymore either but it has nothing to do with inventory (which as I mentioned in another comment is the same as it's always been). Could be that they just discovered that it had little upside but some downside. As a customer I sometimes get annoyed being asked that question all the time.

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

#89

Post by princekolt »

joemaller1 wrote: post #31

How much food was allowed to rot too keep the shelves stocked? I’m fine with a few empty shelves if it means less wasted food.

That's true, but the system seems to be a lot more controlling than just that:

> "Out of 400 boxes in your cooler, if you have one of those boxes facing the wrong way, you are penalized," said one employee, who described the system as "militaristic."

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

#90

Post by foobarbazetc »

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…

Do you work in a store or at HQ?

Because the article is right. At least in some stores around SF the stock situation is dire. Some days I can’t even buy whole milk.

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