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The headline hints--to this non-industry reader--at a dark ulterior motive, like perhaps driving customer behavior by suggesting scarcity. But I would welcome
by sk5t 9y ago
The headline hints--to this non-industry reader--at a dark ulterior motive, like perhaps driving customer behavior by suggesting scarcity. But I would welcome a policy that leaves the cilantro shelf space empty rather than fill it with parsley.
- chisleu 9y agoIf it isn't available, that is scarcity.
- nsp 9y agoI
- Waterluvian 9y agoI think the suggestion is twofold: 1. Maybe they have plenty of cilantro and instead leave 90% of the cilantro shelf empty. "oh wow it's almost gone, I'd better get some!" 2. They're actually out of cilantro and maybe it's better to have an empty shelf rather than fill it with something else.
- sk5t 9y agoI was thinking more along the lines of a subconscious effect: "Hmm, an empty space at Whole Foods, that's a bit odd. Is a hurricane coming? Maybe I'd better get more canned goods/potatoes/coffee."
- saas_co_de 9y agoI 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 here, so that may have something to do with it to.
- carterehsmith 9y ago>> 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.
- saas_co_de 9y ago"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.
- carterehsmith 9y ago>> so who knows Yes, these are the key words. "Who knows". I don't know who made these decisions, do you?
- saas_co_de 9y ago> 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.