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Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages
- iokevins 9y agoFrom the article, it seems like issues with their "order-to-shelf" system: "Order-to-shelf, or OTS, is a tightly controlled system designed to streamline and track product purchases, displays, storage, and sales. Under OTS, employees largely bypass stock rooms and carry products directly from delivery trucks to store shelves. It is meant to help Whole Foods cut costs, better manage inventory, reduce waste, and clear out storage." ... "A reduced back stock means that any unexpected increase in shopper demand or a product-shipment delay can result in out-of-stock items across every department, multiple employees said."
- cratermoon 9y agoTarget's attempt to expand into Canada failed for a similar reason -- they couldn't get product onto shelves. http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/ http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...
- adam 9y agoI suspect this will smooth out as they collect more data about what's going empty, etc. If as the article states there was millions in inventory sitting in the stock rooms, each store probably wasn't doing very good inventory management and demand planning, so didn't have good data to begin with to inform a new system.
- ljf 9y agoSurely though there were human people in each store who could have helped them with this, you know the ones that have been ordering the stocks and fulling the shelves for years?
- cratermoon 9y agoYou might think that, but reality is more complicated, and unwinding from the new inventory management system could be no better than sticking out it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16189733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16189733
- thrill 9y agoOne might think that such a new process could have been rolled in gradually - i.e. start with 20% backroom overhead, and begin reducing a percent a week until there is indication of overreaction. Why jump into the deep end of the just-in-time logistics pool right away?
- Spooky23 9y agoBecause “transformation” like this only meets its ROI nut if you adopt the religion in full. This is all about eliminating a few hundred man-hours a week. Instead of having 2-3 guys unloading trucks and staging inventory, the whole staff is engaged, and is wasting a lot of time unless the trucks are loaded perfectly. It’s insane. Instead of the fish or cheese guy selling me high margin product, he’s hunting for cartons. When I worked at a computer store in college, they did something similar, and same store weekday sales of premium products (which drove profitabilty) dropped 25%. But they saved 160 man hours of labor, or about $1,600, which was much less than the lost sales.
- analog31 9y agoI'm sure there will be a learning curve. Anybody who has been through a company switching to a complex new business system will not be in the least bit surprised that it has brought WF to a standstill.
- HelloNurse 9y agoI find it very hard to believe that a sane inventory management system can run out of popular items that spoil very slowly. Are they optimizing not only for minimum waste but also for minimum back stock, denying a store a few sacks of potatoes and onions?
- taoooopl 9y agoWhole Foods had $471M in inventory on their most recent balance sheet, so millions in the stock rooms and distribution centers would be normal. Edit: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=865436&accession_number=0000865436-17-000238&xbrl_type=v# https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=865436&ac...
- dekhn 9y agobusiness insider is a click farm, this is not a crisis of food shortages, that's just click bait.
- ksenzee 9y agoSure, 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.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoFunny bit is, Bezos is an investor in Business Insider. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-insider-blodget-bezos https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-...
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- tinfins 9y agoI'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 Foods corporate and asked for comments? About the only thing she did get right was that Amazon isn't behind this. They haven't really messed with our supply chains much yet.
- jwn 9y agoCan you offer any more insights? What's the reality behind OTS?
- tinfins 9y agoI'll add some more info in a few hours.
- tinfins 9y agoOTS 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 because they're doing something very wrong - no one is failing an inspection for having 1 box facing the wrong way like it says in the article.
- macintux 9y ago> 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.
- 9y ago
- dexwiz 9y agoA bad inventory system could kill Wholefoods. It killed the launch of Target Canada.
- kps 9y agoPartly, but not entirely. Most of Canada lives within a hundred miles of the border, and many have shopped at Target in the US. People familiar with Target wanted to see (a) particular store-branded products, and (b) equivalent prices (accounting for the exchange rate). They got neither.
- coding123 9y agoWow, 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.
- slothguy72 9y agoOn how new the system is - "... a buying system called order-to-shelf that Whole Foods implemented across its stores early last year."
- euyyn 9y agoBusiness Insider would NEVER do such a thing!
- tinfins 9y agoThere are a few things that happen every New Year that combine to contribute to shortages: - Distributors have changed delivery schedules to work around New Year's Eve and Day. - There's a large increase in demand for produce and some other ingredients (resolutions) - Employees at the store and regional level take a few more vacations than usual, since we aren't able to during much of the holiday season. People also tend to plan the hell out of ordering for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but relax too much by New Year's since they figure crunch time is over. This is made worse by the relatively short tenures of most store buyers, since they either move up or quit relatively quickly. So I would say there probably was a nationwide spike in out-of-stocks spread out over a few days. But it isn't really because of OTS.
- framebit 9y agoNot to mention that winter often brings big weather events that can disrupt supply chains.
- Chaebixi 9y ago> So I would say there probably was a nationwide spike in out-of-stocks spread out over a few days. But it isn't really because of OTS. Is it though? If OTS drastically decreases the backstock, wouldn't it also decrease the ability of a store to respond to these kinds of changes?
- javadocmd 9y agoA business perfectly optimized w.r.t. waste will have zero inventory and zero sales.
- ashelmire 9y agoExactly. That or custom building/sourcing every customer's purchases are the only way you can optimize purely for waste reduction. What they should be optimizing for is maximum profit, not minimum waste.
- ves 9y agoThat state is a local minimum; “zero sales” is a sufficient but not necessary condition, taken with “zero inventory,” which is necessary but not sufficient.
- dahdum 9y agoYep, 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".
- 40acres 9y agoHmm, pretty shocking photos. I live right across the street from a whole foods, it's basically my pantry, and I've never noticed any items being low on stock like shown in the photos.
- squozzer 9y agoSounds like a JIT system with its settings set to "extra miserly."
- Animats 9y agoI 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.
- Isamu 9y ago> Corn stores just fine, so that's quite unusual. Frozen corn, sure. Not corn on the cob. I admit some bias, having started as a farm boy. But nothing is as horrifying as old corn on the cob.
- maxerickson 9y agoI disagree about sweet corn storing well. The stuff they truck up from further south early in the season is noticeably lower quality than more local harvests. (in the Midwest availability is pretty seasonal even)
- noer 9y agoI 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.
- ReinholdNiebuhr 9y agoI've seen my grocery store sell corn from Argentina and other places. So maybe the original commenter is thinking of out of season stuff shipped from other countries?
- colmvp 9y agoI 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.
- com2kid 9y agoI 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.
- camtarn 9y agoDon'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.
- RGamma 9y agoI 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).
- joemaller1 9y agoHow 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.
- asciimo 9y agoAbsolutely. If the algorithm were perfect, shelves would be empty moments before the restock arrives. But I wonder how the endless bounty effect of fully stocked shelve affects customers' shopping habits. For example, I might not buy the pineapple if it were the last one on the shelf, because surely there must be something wrong with it. Then again, three rotting pineapples that no one would buy is better than three cases of rotting pineapples in the back room.
- princekolt 9y agoThat'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."
- leroy_masochist 9y agoOne of the interesting pieces of info from the article is that the ordering process is getting de-federated from regions and centralized in Austin. Regardless of the whether this new TPS-esque system works out in terms of stocked shelves, it will be interesting to see how this affects WF's ability to source local meat and produce.
- majormajor 9y agoThere's been a lot of bad storms recently in a lot of the country (including Houston, pictured there), which will screw with inventory. Throw the holidays in there too, and I don't see enough data here to draw any real conclusions.
- WillyF 9y agoI 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?
- phkahler 9y agoFrom 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.
- robryan 9y agoHere in Australia if a supermarket was regularly out of things that they normally stock I would shop elsewhere. Are people in the US more accustomed to going to multiple shops to get groceries?
- mikeash 9y agoNot 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!
- brndnmtthws 9y agoI'd love it if we could ban BI from HN due to their extremely low quality content.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoWe'd have to ban most of the other news sources for the same reason. Personally, I assume such articles are bullshit until proven otherwise, but accept them as social objects. What's orders of magnitude more informing is the on-topic and off-topic HN comments under such articles.
- ceejayoz 9y agoOur 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.
- intrasight 9y agoI love Wegmans :)
- donarb 9y agoInteresting in that one of the reasons that industry professionals gave for Amazon buying Whole Foods was that WF had so much more supply chain experience than just about anyone in the grocery business.
- sebringj 9y agoMaybe example of AI narrow intelligence gone wrong?, well, assuming its AI, I can't see implementation and Amazon is obviously behind this. Seems like the model is borked.
- gamegoblin 9y agoThe article states that this was going on before the Amazon purchase. Many customers are blaming Amazon, which bought Whole Foods in August for $13.7 billion. Analysts have speculated that the shortages could be due to a spike in shopper traffic in the wake of the acquisition. But Whole Foods employees say the problems began before the acquisition. They blame the shortages on a buying system called order-to-shelf that Whole Foods implemented across its stores early last year.
- sebringj 9y agoI stand corrected. Thank you.
- microtherion 9y agoOn the upside, paperclip inventory is really great now! [Everybody in the article agrees, though, that Amazon is NOT behind this].
- mml 9y agogreetings, clip maker.
- ReinholdNiebuhr 9y agoIncrease investment into labor costs. Hire people who actually know a thing or two about cooking (that would mean hiring people with culinary training, not just people who perform well in the interview process.) You can convert pretty much all that's going to waste into sellable products on the store shelves. You might have to sacrifice consistency over time in that, your stock or broths made in house will differ per what's available.. but that could be sold as "authentic in house made". Same goes with soups, stews, pies etc. I worked for a Safeway for a bit and would see how many bananas they'd trash of which you could easily make a few things on mass in house.. banana cream pie, banana ice cream... if regulations were to be cut back some you could even make banana rum in store. I don't think that'll happen anytime soon. It's also a shame there isn't a system set up where you freeze the wasted product in bulk and ship it out to a facility that could process it into animal feed.
- robryan 9y agoEconomics behind it mean throwing them out is the most cost effective thing they can do. It would probably require something like a government penalty or incentive around food waste to change.
- ReinholdNiebuhr 9y agoIncentives are certainly skewed currently with write offs for losses etc not necessarily encouraging prevention of food waste. For the in store products, I think automation could eventually be the key but obviously we're sometime away from a full automated kitchen. Once that happens we should be able to savage a good bit. Thinking more about stuff that wouldn't be savageable .. freezing might not be the best option as you'd be required to keep it frozen during shipment. So investing in dehydration or freeze drying would be key,... dehydration probably is cheaper over freeze drying. Changing the write off rules would be useful. Not taxing products made in store would be a possible incentive temporarily at least. If we were able to save a lot of stuff from going into the trash and instead going into feed.. maybe we could get cheaper animal products..but I sense that's probably more complicated than it seems. Idk.. just ideas.
- 9y ago
- laurentoget 9y agoThis 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 will generate more garbage data as you cannot measure demand of an out of stock item.
- princekolt 9y agoIf 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.
- robryan 9y agoYeah stores must spend a lot of time on manually marking things down. Plenty of room for innovation, would just need to move to digital price displays.
- bradknowles 9y agoActually, as a customer, I can confirm that all the Whole Foods Markets I’ve seen do have digital pricing displays for most things - they are based on e-paper technology. But you don’t want prices changing between the time a customer has picked up a product and the time they get to the checkout. And then there’s the whole problem of the in-store prices not matching the published circular prices. So, lots of issues to work out there before dynamic pricing can work well in a physical store.
- yorwba 9y agoIf the price drops between picking up an item and paying for it, I don't think anyone would complain.
- StanislavPetrov 9y agoAs a frequent customer at (New York area) Whole Foods I can echo the experiences shared in this article. Many items I have been buying regularly for years are now regularly out of stock. Not just produce - items of all types. Its gotten so bad and persisted for so long that I've shifted my shopping habits to other stores.
- nrjames 9y agoWe'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.
- d357r0y3r 9y agoCan't say the Harris Teeter in Raleigh is ever out of anything.
- odammit 9y agoCrisis... You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
- siruncledrew 9y agoOTS sounds like a good thing overall if it is less wasteful and lower cost. With Amazon's logistics, they should be able to use the data from these food shortages to better inform the OTS system of what to order and when to order it. Maybe it's bad in the short-term, but the insights are still valuable for better logistics.
- TheAdamist 9y agoTrain your customers to shop elsewhere, and it becomes bad in the long term too.
- Spooky23 9y agoIn the long term, I’m likely to enjoy skipping Whole Foods and shopping at a store like Wegmans that is run better.
- jxramos 9y agoGoodness, the only time I've personally seen shelves looking bare like these was when the employees of some supermarket chains banded together for a multiweek strike. The local Trader Joes wound up being flooded with all the customers who wouldn't cross the picket line. It lead me and my roommate to actually discover Trader Joes, which was a great find. However the shelves in Trader Joes were ravaged by a mob of hungry customers taking everything in sight just about. The strike went on so long we kept shopping Trader Joes and then were transformed into loyal customers sampling all their exotic and quirky goods.
- rwc 9y agoPhoto rings true for East Dallas Whole Foods. I've stopped going, even though it's a mile away. Central Market forever!
- gpsx 9y agoI usually go to Whole Foods in Mountain View and I don't see shelves like that. In fact, I used to complain that some of their things like meat and dairy are not as fresh as I'd like. It has been better roughly since the time of the Amazon acquisition, which surprised me. Maybe it is because of this stock keeping system. I had never noticed those freshness problems at the Cupertino Whole Foods store, which is one of the nicer ones I have been to.
- chx 9y agoOne super strange data point: this Monday, a Whole Foods in Vancouver, Canada (Whole Foods Canada is independent, isn't it?) was out of brownies around 5pm or so. Completely. I was astounded. Related? I have no idea. But it was weird.
- rdiddly 9y agoEmpty shelves are a way bigger problem in retail grocery than spoilage. If you lose a box of cauliflower, OK, it costs money, but if you lose an entire customer, even just for a few months, that's a loss of revenue in the thousands of dollars. And you will lose that customer. "The audience ams a fickles mistress, Toki." And nobody goes to the "super" market to feel like Soviet Russia or the apocalypse. Ahh but wait, now multiply that dollar figure by 50 customers who tried to buy cauliflower that day. Add 50 more for every subsequent day during which you're still out of cauliflower. Assume they each used to spend $1,000 a month with you, but now they all stay mad at you for 5 months each. After four days you're literally out a million dollars. Though you won't realize that loss until the end of the five months. If you're out of tunafish too, you don't just lose lovers of cauliflower and tuna, you lose everybody who loves cauliflower, everybody who loves tuna, and everybody who loves both. Unfortunately for you as the grocery store that can't keep the shelves stocked, it's an OR, not an AND, and there is definitely a type of network effect at work. The costs you incur by having inventory around, and having some of it go bad, are like insurance payments, to avoid the costs you would incur by the much worse problem of losing customers.
- adolph 9y agoA recent EconTalk podcast covered a related topic: food waste. It turns out that getting it just right is near impossibly hard. You can choose between famine or waste (hopefully the least of either) but aren’t going to get it just right. http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/12/rachel_laudan_o_1.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/12/rachel_laudan_o_1.h...
- Chaebixi 9y agoIf you take the slack out of a system you make it more "efficient" but also more fragile in the face of the unexpected.
- trhway 9y ago>Whole Foods gets stores to comply with OTS by instructing managers to regularly walk through store aisles and storage rooms with checklists looks like somebody is ripe for digital transformation with IOT, predictive analytics and machine learning on top of it.
- sudosteph 9y agoSpoilage due to overstocking isn't just problematic because they have too much stuff sitting in the backroom that will never get sold. It also means they spent too much money buying and shipping that food, with shipping sometimes being the more expensive part (in addition to it being hard on the environment if you think of the fuel used to ship it and emissions it produces). I'm not their ideal customer, mostly because I prefer cheap, processed, easy to store and make food (think mac-and-cheese). But if I was the type to shop at whole foods due to concerns about ethics and environmental friendliness, I'd be OK with this from that perspective. So long as there are some sort of options available, changing up dinner plans for the week isn't really a huge inconvenience. Maybe they can pitch it that way until they get it better optimized.
- overgard 9y agoAs a customer I don't really care about that kind of thing -- if a store consistently doesn't have stuff I need I'm just going to go somewhere else. This issue strikes me as short sighted thinking by bean counters. It might save money in the short term, but you're going to lose customers and employees this way.
- IncRnd 9y ago> Spoilage due to overstocking isn't just problematic because they have too much stuff sitting in the backroom that will never get sold. It also means they spent too much money buying and shipping that food, with shipping sometimes being the more expensive part (in addition to it being hard on the environment if you think of the fuel used to ship it and emissions it produces). That doesn't matter to consumers. One of the purposes of a local store is that they buffer enough stock, so they almost always have available stock to sell. Otherwise, I'll stop going to that store. ------ Q: What should you call an advice column for queueing theorists? A: Q-Tips! On a serious note, though, a store should understand how to queue stock, not just to minimize overages but to optimize sales. A store should never have an empty shelf, even if they have to put something else there temporarily.
- mesozoic 9y agoSounds like possibly growing pains as Amazon fixes WF logistics. I bet they come out the other side way more profitable and Amazon has a huge win from this.
- random3 9y agoThis brings back memories... http://predicthistunpredictpast.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-photographs-of-markets-revealed_18.html http://predicthistunpredictpast.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-pho... Maybe there's a solution :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing
- danepowell 9y agoI wonder to what degree is shrinkage a compounding factor. I used to work at an outdoor retailer where we only did inventory once a year, and by the end of the year the computer inventory would differ from actual inventory by an order of magnitude, simply due to the fact that things get lost, damaged, stolen, etc... and don't get marked as such in the computer. If you have enough backstock, this isn't a huge problem (I think most estimates put retail shrinkage at less than 5%). But if you are using a just-in-time stocking approach, those effects could quickly compound until you have nothing left on the shelf and no more inventory on the way.
- danans 9y agoWhether 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 resources and processes. If anything, that field seems dominated by a desire for maximal efficiency at all costs. Here's a blog post which provides examples: https://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/08/04/two-is-one-and-one-is-none-how-redundancies-increase-your-antifragility/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/08/04/two-is-one-and-one...
- danans 9y agos/data load/data loss/
- johan_larson 9y agoThis sounds like one of those just-in-time delivery systems that were all the rage in manufacturing back in the 90s, but applied to retailing. They always were brittle; there's little or no slack in the system, so if something unusual happens, the process breaks. If the system is new, and it seems to be, it probably needs some fine-tuning. Any workable system needs a little bit of slack in it to account for the variable and the unexpected. The question is how much. And it's not free.
- gwbas1c 9y agoOne of the biggest factors in me leaving a business: wasting my time. If I repeatedly go to a store and the items I'm looking for aren't there, I stop going. Life's too short to put up with a poorly run business.
- lsc 9y agohuh. On the other hand,there's costco, which quite often doesn't have the same things they had the last time you were there, not because they are out, but because they switched to a different product for that section.
- kvanderd 9y agoI have been waiting for this conversation. I do the grocery shopping in our house 90% in-store shopper (I like to pick out my produce and discover new stuff) 10% online delivery - San Francisco, Franklin Location. Here are the the things that they have gotten really wrong for me... 1. Quality Eggs. This is expensive. It requires sourcing locally and refrigeration at every step. I use to have options to buy from 3+ fantastic pasture raised egg options (almost farmers market quality). This has deteriorated to 1 option. I happily pay $9 a dozen. 2. Don't put the tofu with the dairy. They moved a lot of vegan/vegetarian favorites next to the milk and butter. Customers were complaining while I was in the store. They did not fix it. This might save on energy in the long run but is a tone def move. 3. Staying Local. I will stop shopping at WF if they don't carry local produce. This is expensive and managing each supply chain goes against lowering pricing. I don't think Amazon wants to keep the demographic. I think they will be a Ralphs or Safeway in 5 years. The next conversation will be quality and keeping the historical whole foods demographic, in these early days I am not sure that is their vision.
- siliconc0w 9y agoIt's interesting if the intent really is to have employees unload directly to shelves. The creates a very small buffer with limited ability to handle supply problems or spiky customer demand. Also your store begins to look kinda crappy if your shelves are maybe even 50% stocked so your realistic queue is maybe 1/2 shelf space. Maybe they think their logistics and prediction tech are good enough to not need the buffer. Anecdotally I shopped at a whole foods last week and it indeed had stocking issues. I had to stand on a shelf to reach far enough back to grab the last bottle of a salad dressing I was after. Sure your backrooms are empty but it's kinda a shitty customer experience.
- gersh 9y agoI worked on a grocery store inventory system a while back, and it was very hard to get it rolled out. Produce can go bad, and get thrown out, so it is very hard to accurately predict how much you will need. Further, your predictions depend upon how quickly it goes bad, which may not be easy to predict. Further, your predictions and orders depend upon people entering accurate data into the system. It is clear the employees are resisting putting accurate data into the system. Further, when you design the system you need to determine a probability of running out. The naive answers seems to be about 0%, but from an analytics standpoint a higher number may seem preferable.
- rurban 9y agoWhat does article describes us basically the systemic failure of communist economy. Centrally planned OTS might be considered superior amongst software hackers and esp their illuded managers, but it doesn't scale to the chaotic fluctuations down in the store, where the previous local decentralized ordering system worked fine. Only there you can anticipate the true number of stock to shelf. We saw that for centuries in the communist states. Google or Amazon will not be able to run groceries with lifestock and fresh veggies, only electronics, gifts and books. It's a systemic matter, and highly technocratic manager hierarchies make it only worse.