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 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.
> 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.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
Heh, it is amusing that the quote ends with "far-off Palestine". In the mid-90s I returned from living in the middle east for 6 months as a student (Jordan, Israel and Egypt). I personally witnessed an event and upon returning I was reading about said event in a US newspaper and was shocked at how wrong it was. This was the first time I experienced this effect. However, instead of turning to other parts of the paper and trusting what they said, I lost all faith in newspapers on that day and have not read one since. If I know they lied or, more generously, misunderstood what happened about something I know personally about, how can I ever trust anything they write about things I don't know about personally? I can't, I won't, and I haven't.
My wife was a political reporter in DC, covering the Hill, the Pentagon and White House at various times. One time we were watching CNN and they mentioned a briefing at the Pentagon and she noted she was in the same one. Halfway through the coverage, she jumped up and said "that's not what they said!" I was confused.. she went back to her bag and handed me her notebook which contradicted their coverage.
It's not unique to any particular medium, news source, or person. Many, many people have an agenda and/or ignorance and portray things accordingly.. not always malicious but incomplete at best, wrong at worst.
This is why I assume most political coverage, especially that from partisans of either party, is mostly nonsense. To get the real story you have to find and read primary sources. Any "news" sites that don't give those I assume are lying, at best, until I have sources to corroborate what they said. The "news" these days is mostly made up of opinion pieces and it spends entirely too much time looking to troll us with cheap outrage articles as clickbait.
Random independent coverage from bloggers, e.g. Popehat, tends to be much better informed than people rushing to incite us on a deadline. This goes double for anything the least bit technical, like law.
Sadly, there just aren't enough sources like that to actually dig into most stories.
It is nonsense. The problem is it's not something most people realize and/accept. They hear "The sky is purple" on the channel they usually watch, said by the pleasant looking and sounding talking head they're so fond of. No need to look up and double ckeck. Yup! The sky is purple. Case closed.
Facebook and Twitter would be ghost towns without this disconnect.
Well, that's because the only way to get through life in this day and age is to pick some people you accept as authorities on sobjects, and listen to their opinion and use it to form an initial basis for your own if you haven't already got one.
The trick, which people seem to be generally bad at, is:
a) limiting the scope of authority you attribute to someone
b) not immediately discounting contradictory evidence but using it to judge whether you need to pry deeper yourself or to discount some of that authority you've vested in them
c) actually remembering how authoritative the source was when repeating the information or using it as the basis for other assumptions
d) actually looking into issues deeper that you decide to care about and find the truth, not just was some semi-authoritative mouth piece repeated to you
For example, I try to make a habit of prefixing or postfixing statements in conversation with disclaimers ("At least that's what I heard or seem to remember reading, but I'm not sure how that I'm not sure how true it is.") if I'm not fairly certain of the information.
Why is that? Why can't you keep an open mind, traverse multiple sources and draw your own conclusions? Think of it as a diversified portfolio. I'm not asking for more time, just that it we spread out.
Without that, we get the barely binary system that we have. The MSM can be lazy and non-journalistic because no one bothers to notice. No one cares.
No it's not hopeless, but when done right it becomes indistinguishable from true investigative and research work; wouldn't be nice if you could share the results of that extensive effort put into uncovering the truth so that others could benefit? Oh, wait...
I also know of a news event first hand, and then watched with shock the news coverage of it later. It wasn't remotely political, it was clearly just sloppy "get it in the can and move on".
The umbrage taken by the mainstream media in the last year being called "fake news" is a bit amusing. I've often wondered what percentage of it all (and what we know of history) is complete nonsense.
A lot of our news reports are quick summaries written up in a few minutes by a busy person who quickly gathered whatever info was at hand and not so much of the long, in-depth investigations of the past.
So... likely quite a lot. I trust verifiable sources a lot more than I trust any outlet, even the supposedly reputable ones. I mean, just how long did it take for Jayson Blair to get caught fabricating stories in the NYT? [1]
This conversation has progressed for a while without anyone mentioning that the sentiments expressed are essentially in support of Trump's accusations of fake news. So we can have a conversation on HN in support of Trump's "fake news" and in recognition of severe bias in media that would indicate "fake news" isn't as much a slur as it is a matter of fact statement.
A dismissal of something as 'fake news' is a bit too facile, that's mere namecalling without more backing. A better analysis is to note what sources of information were drawn upon, how they can be corroborated (or not), and whether they're sufficient to make the case the author wants. I admit to using a simplistic heuristic of "if I can't see any of your sources, your 'news' is just a rumor" but I use it even on news I would be inclined to agree with. The articles that pass this filter are far fewer than those which fail it for any remotely partizan subject. There's just so much noise of the form "my inside sources say that X will finally put [Trump|Hillary] in jail!"
And a more facile analysis obscures the fact that there is yet a bit of fact-based reporting getting lost in the noise. Authors who normally link to actual primary sources and do real analysis instead of only cheap opinion, albeit sometimes imperfectly. So more Glenn Grenwald, Popehat or Groklaw and less Fox/Buzzfeed/CNN.
There are real problems here, but political partisans tend to make more fake news instead of doing anything useful to solve it.
Trump uses this to promote a worldview that facts are whatever you want them to be. As with most things Trump, any kernel of truth is immediately ruined by some even more false, stupid and incompetent idea he wants to promote.
Becuase trump attacks facts which people know are true from multiple corroborated sources.
But even that is wrong.
Firstly fake news is exactly that - actually fabricated websites designed to look like “the Sacramento beast” or what have you, filled with content that will sound legitimate to an American conservative and trick them into clicking on ads.
That’s fake news and it’s actually not even news, it’s more like surprise literature/acting to con people.
Trump on the other hand argues for example
that he has the biggest crowds, when he doesn’t by every device that recorded images of the subject.
Fake news is in this case is just a term that relies on the audience to impute meaning to it.
There is grass on the National Mall. During the Obama inauguration, people walked on it as you would expect. The damage cost several $million to fix. In photos of the Trump inauguration crowd, notice that the sparsely-occupied area is white. It was covered in translucent boxes to protect the grass. (the boxes were borrowed from stadiums that use them for events like concerts) The boxes can be walked on, but people would hesitate. They are not inviting like grass. This kept many people out of the photos.
Another issue is that the central area of the photo was blocked off into different security sectors. Due to violence, entry was often blocked. Many people showed up for the inauguration but were unable to get to where they could see it, which would be the empty areas of the photos.
In the usual pair of photos, the Trump photo is cropped relative to the Obama photo. The physical area seems to differ by roughly a factor of two.
There is also the question of time when the photos were taken.
The physical area is virtually the same. They merely appear to be taken from slightly different vantage points. Both show the area where you might reasonably expect people to observe from. They are taken at the same time of day differing by a matter of 5-20 minutes.
You aren't even nitpicking your statement about the area differing by a factor of 2 is a clear lie designed to sow doubt. Please don't bring your alternative facts here.
Its a pair of photos taken at the height of each event. Its also the ones I saw in the news at the time. If you are familiar with some that look like its fudged to show trump in a bad light its probably from stuff conservatives shared on facebook where they picked 2 dissimilar pics, made up a story surrounding them about how the news is out to disrespect trump, and yelled about fake news.
To be fair it is out to disrespect Trump, because he disrespects them. They chose to make a big deal out of the election crowd because they knew it would tweak him.
You seem to focus on the pictures, but completely ignore the fact that Trumps use of the term "fake news" is in itself, "fake news" by his updated definition.
It's not the same way though, is it? Trump has the whole 'average American' speech pattern down. Headline grabbing, 'high energy', and a call to action.
> FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!
He doesn't use the intellectual tone when he talks about it.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows.
For a certain type of person -- the type that reads HN -- this scholarly style is what we expect. It lays out the biases and beliefs we hold in a manner we expect. It backs it up with some seemingly solid logic that we can relate to. We've all seen at least one badly written scientific article where we know the facts better. So we take it as fact and agree with it.
Is there any difference between them? Of course not, they're saying the same thing, but in a different linguistic style. It does take a bit of work to recognize that as most people have fairly deep biases towards linguistic style that are difficult to suppress. As an exercise to prove this to yourself, try sum up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in a way that would appeal to a non-academic.
Here's the interesting part: Trump picked up this linguistic style only in the last few years. While we don't like it, his voter base probably wouldn't have voted for him if he started his sentences "briefly stated". Know your audience, often the presentation of your argument is far more important than the argument itself.
Seeing something like a football play, a highly trained, alert, well positioned observer like a referee gets it wrong a pretty significant percentage of the time.
Now suppose someone reported on a game without seeing it and getting the narrative from different fans up in the stands.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but of course, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Why is that a better metric? There are levels of correctness. Do you sincerely believe that each article you read will push you backwards in knowledge? Even an untrustworthy source can contain valuable information; just ask an historian.
The Dunning Kruger joke was only partially a joke - I was trying to explain that there are levels of expertise. My view is that anything that increases my knowledge is good; I was trying to elicit a response as to why someone might think otherwise.
Here’s an example: while in college, I was in a building that was on fire. A passerby ran into the entrance and asked us if we knew the building was in fire (we didn’t).
When the fire was reported by the student newspaper, the only details they got correct was the date and that there was a fire. The journalist spoke with me and with the student whose dorm room burned. Nothing we said made it into the article. It was far more interesting to invent a story about how nobody knew if he was in his room when the fire started, than the prosaic truth that I knew he was in the library.
This happened in 1990 and the cause of the fire was a pc catching fire while engaged in the slow and perilous task of reformatting a hard drive.
The only outlet I trust is the Economist, even though I don’t always 100% agree with their editorial stance, for the simple reason that when they report on things I know about they DO get it right, but simplified in a reasonable way. I think the weekly format helps too.
One can be wrong about events that you witness yourself. We witness things through physical limitations and the biased lens of our own minds.
IMO the correct response is not to reject the source but to give it less weight, add other sources and realise you'll only ever get an approximation of the truth at best.
> One can be wrong about events that you witness yourself.
So true. Back in the 1950s, a fighter plane off an aircraft carrier had its wings fall off and fall into the ocean. That model of aircraft had had a couple incidents before where the wings came off. Numerous experienced and educated witnesses were interviewed, including the captain of the carrier, who all said the wings fell off.
Except for one lowly seaman on the deck, who said the aircraft was intact when it hit the water.
The airplane was eventually retrieved from the sea floor, and it was proven the wings were on it when it hit the water.
The other experienced officers all (quite sincerely) observed what they expected to see.
I'll believe forensic evidence every time before I believe eyewitness accounts.
I've gone for months and years long periods of avoiding the news, including sites like this, and live has always been qualitatively better during those periods.
I'm not convinced I understand what purpose being informed of global politics or local dramas serves, other than maybe having something to talk about with friends and colleagues.
Serious question: What do you picture the long-term extrapolation of ignoring events around you looks like? Are you so independent of other people's actions that you can't imagine any events that would impact you in a way that you'd want to try to have a voice in, or at least be informed about? Isn't that how people end up in dead end jobs where 15 years later the industry has moved on and they no longer have skills companies are looking for?
There is a difference between following the news and being informed about events around you. That difference is in the specificity of the information you receive.
Most news coverage is relevant to someone, but utterly irrelevant for the majority. As a non-US citizen, the US presidential election can be summarized by who won and what changes they intend to make. I don't need 24-hour coverage of he-said/she-said style reporting.
On the other hand, it can be useful to subscribe to some industry-specific news source to be aware of general trends. But then you're not following the news in general, but just the tiny sliver that actually affects you, which makes it much easier (not less) to stay informed.
Most general news articles are actually much more useful once they are archived (and no longer news), since then you can just seek them out when their topic has become relevant to you, and it lets you make actual use of the constant recaps the news cycle tends to include for context.
> What do you picture the long-term extrapolation of ignoring events around you looks like?
You are basically asking what it would be like to live like most of Humanity before the advent of mass media. Did not seem they had far worse problems than we do or that they were incapable to adapt. I'd return the question to you, how was mass media improved your life in any meaningful way and can you prove it was not just noise?
To answer that I'll need to pick a media cut off point. Let's say before the printing press? Seems like a good place to start, although of course unwritten news traveled before. This might not be what you had in mind as "mass media" but I think it's a more useful cutoff point for modernity.
The printing press, like writing before it and phone/telegram/TV/internet after it, was a fairly transformational technology, but it's hard for me to imagine living without large-scale reliable distribution of knowledge. The concept of history as an accessible field of study for the average person is a pretty big one.
The ideas that led to modern democracy spread through a network that utilized the printing press and discussed the nature of existing society quite a bit. The general view of the vast majority of the pre-modernity era is summed up with well-known cliches like "dark ages" or "nasty, brutish, and short." There's some dispute about what the true "happiness" level was in early societies, but it's interesting to note that very few anti-technological movements achieved much of note, speaking to the definite appeal of technology.
My own personal talents never would've had a chance to flourish in a hunter/gatherer, agrarian, or feudal type society. So no thanks from me. I'm glad every day I was born where/when I was. Maybe a hundred years later would've been an interesting gamble if I could choose, but now's good. :)
Distribution of knowledge is not equal to distribution of lies and propaganda. I think that fear of missing "important" information from media is highly overrated. Besides, it's very hard to avoid this unless you live in the woods.
I don't read news and don't watch TV for at least 3-4 years and I became much happier person because of this decision.
Printing press availability and mass media are two distinct events in History. I'd say mass media pretty much started in the 20th century with Radio and TV. Paper was not something that everyone purchased before for news. TV/Radio made information pretty much free in that regard.
I wish I could upvote this twice. I know its just anecdotal data, but the rare occasions I have had personal knowledge of news articles they have been grossly inaccurate, every time.
He vocally let his political ideology direct his selective interpretation of facts around climate change. So it's perhaps a little ironic that he would make an observation about biased reporting coming from other people or organizations. I would argue that it's not ironic, it's expected. IMO people most easily observe the faults in others that they themselves exhibit.
I have never seen a "news" report where I personally knew what happened reported accurately. I am sure we have reporters here so I have a question for you - why is this? Do you just not care about the details, are too rushed and it is faster to just make up crap, or something else I have not considered?
Devil's in the details, I guess. It's really hard to be a subject matter expert at everything, yet we find journalists are often required to write pieces about topics in fields they've never worked.
The Paul Krugman model (PhD, nobel prize winner, professor at MIT/Princeton, writing for the NYT) is quite rare. And even then, he doesn't exclusively write about his field of expertise.
You mentioned reporting though... reporting facts is actually the one thing that journalists do often get right, and that's largely viewed as something holy. Analysis of journalism often finds that western journalists are incredibly accurate in their reporting, but they (un)wilfully frame stories, omit (sometimes by ignorance) important details or focus on meaningless anecdotes.
For example, there was a time when in my region the local news kept reporting that 'real estate boom: 60% of homes are being sold for or above the asking price'. All news agencies took it over, a rare few even omitting 'for or' and just reported '60% above asking price'. If you looked carefully, they cited data from a RE agent association that had an interest in making it seem as if you could make an easy buck by buying a home before it rose even more. The association's media reports focused on the 60% figure, but didn't mention the flipside of the underlying data: about 40% of homes were sold below the asking price and 40% were sold for approximately the asking price. In other words, news agencies could have also reported the exact same data by stating '80% of homes were sold for or below the asking price'.
I'd been reading these news reports (among others) for a year before I decided to buy a home and had a certain impression of the RE market going into it (a sellers market, had to bid aggressively and wave various rights to recourse to convince a seller). Not until I dove into the data did I find the reporting mischaracterised the market, despite citing factual data. The reason I think in this case and others, is that the journalists aren't RE agents, they're mostly just 29 year-olds with a journalism degree reporting on the 8 different industries they were assigned to, from RE to dairy to, relying heavily on industry associations' brief media reports and representatives to shape a narrative.
IkmoIkmo, that's an exceptionally insightful and informative reply. I've never heard of that effect before, but the gist of the idea has bothered me for a long time. I was about to reply to tinfins "And now realize that most news stories are probably just as misinformed."
I hate to be so skeptical of the mainstream media, but it's hard not to whenever they report on something I know about they seem to get it all wrong.
I spent too long being exasperated at the clueless BBC ‘Technology reporting’ before I realised that if it was this wrong about tech (a domain I humbly believe I know fairly well - at least when it comes to hard facts) then how wrong might it be about other things it was reporting on?
I stopped assuming any veracity in reporting from _any_ source and quite quickly saw that there was very little accuracy anywhere. There were of course opinions - or voiced ‘opinions’ I understood the motivation for, but with the facts missing, that’s all I was consuming. The opinions of reporters or the ‘opinions’, carefully guided by the media bosses or governments. Interesting? Not when they were so predictable.
That’s when I became one of those hipster/snob/weirdo people who doesn’t consume standard news anymore, and can only barely stand some tech publishing.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is great and all, but you also have to factor in the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. How many news articles are you reading which comport with your pre-existing knowledge?
We remember the times when you're sure an article is wrong, we have amnesia towards all the of the other times.
Someone in the LA Times / union thread referred to journalists as "knowledge workers". With Gell-Mann Amnesia in mind, I thought, "Well, that's being generous".
Or, like me, you end up beleiving journalists are mendacious idiots.
And lo! Polls say that Journalists are less trusted than politicins and used car salesmen. And I know that must be true because I read it in a newspaper somewhere.
Ok, and..? So what about this story is not accurate? Is your store seeing this issue? Even if your branch is doing fine, what makes this story about other location inaccurate?
You left us all hanging. Why is this the top comment?
Maybe she should have reached out to Whole Foods corporate and asked for comments?
Then they'd talk to a PR person who is only interested in guiding the narrative to whatever makes the company look better.
So yeah, employees aren't fully informed, and while Corporate may be fully informed, they are rarely going to tell the full story -- the truth probably lies somewhere between what employees are saying and what Corporate says (if they say anything at all, and in this case, it seems they did not respond to requests for 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 worked at an Amazon-Apple-Google-Facebook company when this type of article was published about our project. Our management vigorously denied what was in the article and pointed us to details that were clearly false. Ultimately, as time went by, we realized that although some of the details in the article were false, the general spirit of it was actually correct.
So please take the skepticism that your management is feeding you with a grain of salt. The news media's business model hinges on its reputation of being truthful and accurate. If it was regularly publishing "disturbingly misinformed and one-sided" articles, it would be out of business.
I find it funny/odd that the eye of sauron has focused its attention at Whole Foods. Depending on the day of the week, especially late Sunday afternoon/evening but also random weekdays when I run in after work, my local Kroger looks very barren in the produce department. So much so that I have sent picture texts commenting about it.
This is quite normal behavior when weather events in the area are expected, but lately it has been occurring regardless of weather. From my outside observer position, it could be a simple miscalculation of how much to order, someone getting burned by ordering too much and stock went bad, or any other reason of which I have no inside knowledge.
Is this attention to "Whole Paycheck" unfair or are people just super attentive due to the new ownership and judgements being rushed to be "ahead of the curve"?
Yeah, I wonder. We definitely aren't used to all the media attention - honestly, I got a little carried away in the comments here.
I wouldn't say I even particularly care about Whole Foods' reputation, it's more the false narrative that bothered me and I just happened to know how wrong it was. Must be so much worse for employees at the big tech companies or others that are in the news all the time.
Businesss Insider is a clickbait website that takes little snippets of comments and spins fanciful stories about them, and wraps them in junk titles with "how" and "why" but never deliver explanations. It's a shame this site allows that website to be posted here.
I don't find it hard to believe that a few stores ran out of bananas or whatever for a day. That's all it would take for a customer to snap a picture. The picture of a meat department cooler with empty slide racks was obviously in the middle of a reset - notice the lack of price tags on all the racks because they were just installed.
The problem isn't that a few stores ran out of bananas or one item for the day. Take a look at the pictures: entire sections like produce are basically empty.
The only time I've seen shelves that bare were at Kmart and Sears locations before they went bankrupt and shut down.
I took another look at the pictures. Notice all those stores where whole sections are out are in the Northeast. Probably they missed a delivery or two because of the weather. Plus during extreme weather grocery stores get shopped hard.
There was one picture of an empty banana set with a pineapple in the wrong spot - that's what I was referring to before.
The sole picture in San Francisco was the reset I mentioned.
But that's exactly the problem the article describes: That the moment something goes wrong the stores don't have any reserves anymore, because the system is too strictly set on reducing costs and spoilage, seemingly with a total disregard to consumer satisfaction and overall profit. Add to that crazy-sounding control schemes - which maybe is kinda normal in a country like the US without real employee protection laws, but is unthinkable in less free market capitalist societies.
Not sure why you defend your employer here. If the problem is real - which I'm in no position to judge - it would be in his best interest to notice it.
So you think stores should just keep a huge backstock of fresh produce just in case an extreme weather event or some other rare issue hits? That's going to lead to less fresh produce for the 350 days a year when everything goes smoothly.
The OTS system in the article also allows for exceptions - if there were bananas available the store could have stocked up on them. It's just so wrong on many levels - I could spend all day pointing them out, but this thread is getting bigger than I thought and I don't know if I can spend much more time on it. I was going to edit my original comment with more information but it doesn't look like I can anymore.
> So you think stores should just keep a huge backstock of fresh produce just in case an extreme weather event or some other rare issue hits?
Strawman. I said nothing of the sort. I'm taking the article at face value. The article reports that regularly, stores of your chain are understocked that much that you are losing money and customer loyalty. It is not saying those are special rare issues.
Now, there are two options: The article is wrong, or it is right. If it is wrong, then you need to change nothing internally. Customers will see in their nearest store that the stock is alright, some might even come out in support, a small welcome challenge for PR. But looking at this thread, at the comments not being a discussion about journalistic objectivity below your top-comment, there is some support for the thesis of the article. If the article is right, the system needs to be changed if you want to compete with the other stores that actually succeed in stocking the items customers came to the shop for. In that case, the impression I would get from the attitude you are reflecting here (and which according to the article is the one of management) is that parts of WF are burying the head in the sand, which would likely be disastrous for your company.
It is easy to optimize for the wrong metrics, especially big corporations. Short term shareholder value, cost reductions - cost reductions were echoed by management in the article as motivation for the OTS system. Combine that with a good portion of institutional inertia and wrongly placed respect for authority, and this is how companies die. Which, again, might not be at all what is happening here (and Amazon and stuff, I know). It just looks like an example of it, which I think is interesting.
I jumped ahead there and left a step of my reasoning out. The article describes a lack of backstock, due to OTS, causing out-of-stocks when stores have to miss a delivery or two. But if you assume that the vast majority of these issues were in fact caused by unpredictable events, then the only possible solution would be to keep large amounts of extra stock at all times, which is worse for the customer and the company in the end. Obviously the goal is for neither extreme to occur.
The article is wrong about the regularity of the issue, the "weird control systems" (not sure what connection you're seeing with employee protection laws), and the causes.
But you misunderstand me if you think I'm burying my head in the sand. I don't deny that Whole Foods has issues with its ordering processes. In fact, I think the company has been going in the wrong direction there for a long time. The article is just so, so off-base - originally I didn't intend to argue with it, but now I've become this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/
It will be interesting to see if Amazon can improve the situation through automation. Generally I've seen stores that use automated ordering systems be far worse with their out-of-stocks (Kroger, for instance).
Ah, now I think I do understand your position. Best of luck :)
Edit: Just to clarify, the connection with the control scheme and the supply issues as laid out in the article is that it forces employees and store manager to blindly follow the system. Employee protection laws in other countries would prevent "three strikes out" schemes, if the strikes are for "infractions" as small as having one of 400 boxes facing the wrong side, which is one example in the article. That just wouldn't fly in a german court of law, for example, where something like this definitely would end up.
Anecdotally, I have experienced the same phenomenon at several major grocery chains in Canada. City gets hit with a winter storm and Safeway, SuperStore, & Walmart all had empty produce & bread sections. I've also seen it in certain stores during summer months in the run up to a long weekend. Not saying the new supply chain software can't be the cause, but there does seem to be other reasonable explanations.
During a canadian winter storm to have more than usual empty shelves is of course very reasonable ;) And I'm also used to having less products available in some supermarkets when nearing night time. The images shown in the article though seem ridiculous to me.
But I agree, absolutely possible that there are other explanations (including that there is no problem at all), but a wrongly prioritized supply chain scheme/software fits very well to the shown and described issues.
The article came out a day or so after I went to the Whole Foods in Pittsburgh, and for the first time, when the cashier asked if I'd found everything, I said quite strongly: "No!". There were really surprising gaps in availability -- there was no soy milk (fresh or shelf-stable), no rice milk, no stock of several types of yogurt, surprisingly slim pickings in several of the veggie sections, no vegetable stock, only the most expensive types of diced tomatoes left (no 365 brand), and a few other things. The cashier said it was probably because the delivery truck didn't make it the previous day because of snow, but was surprised because the truck had made it earlier that day. IANA whole foods employee, but this certainly jibes with reduced stocking levels increasing fragility under delivery misses. I've never seen my WFM that empty before.
The header image where the veggie section is basically empty is actually from Houston, so I'm going to assume that you're being willfully blind about the issues raised in the article.
Well, it's the result of a decision made by a company that was, at the time, having some difficulty competing, and was desperately trying to cut prices, and then soon thereafter, sold itself to Amazon. So the resemblance is not altogether coincidental.
Not particularly relevant to the article, but a fun fact is that in France -- there's no such thing as after hours reseting in grocery stores. When the store closes -- everyone goes home.
A lot of grocery stores have non-employees stocking shelves now, usually during the day. These are reps from the vendors, like potato chips or specialty foods that rent shelf space in the store are and responsible for maintaining them.
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.
You just explained that your behavior itself was odd (you are sick.) Have you considered that you've not normally done this and so you've never noticed that this is always what happens? My local grocery store has premade foods, like soups, and they get made in bursts and slowly run out over several days. So what you observed could be the norm.
"…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."
Nearly everyone who has personal knowledge of something reported is similarly disturbed. That they rarely then remember that the same level of error applies to all the other things reported, outside their areas of personal knowledge, has been termed the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect by Michael Crichton:
As one gets older (& a bit more cynical), you learn to apply this credibility discount to more journalism. But don't just use this insight as a synergizer for confirmation bias! That is, don't just remember, "this is mostly bungled reporting" on stories with details/implications that go against what you wish were the case. The stories supporting your cherished beliefs are mostly bungled reporting, too.
Since tinfins wrote, "Maybe she should have reached out to Whole Foods corporate and asked for comments," the answer is likely HQ. People don't say, "ask Whole Foods _corporate_" in the normal course of events.
Not sure I'm convinced. Your store does ok; that's certain. But you know about exactly one more store than I do; do you know the article is wrong for all stores? For a majority? For any? Not sure how far that induction can go.
If even one store did ok, we could see an employee from there posting here. Not sure that is information; more like a data point.
Good point, but I'm not necessarily disagreeing that there were a few days with high out-of-stocks, just that the employees criticizing the OTS system in the article are being very misleading and exaggerating.
The article indicates she contacted Whole Foods corporate and they didn't respond. So what exactly is wrong with her coverage? Also, you say you are Whole Foods employee. But are you store employee or a corporate headquarters employee?
I think it's very relevant. The article points out that store employees have tried to bring it up to the new Amazon Management team who was unaware of the problem and that everything looks good on paper, but the view "from the trenches" is very different.
One of the points of the article is that corporate isn't aware of these problems.
I don't think so, because corporate would especially not comment on employee complaints if they were aware of them.
Let's take this from the other side. Your employees have gone to the press, and the press is asking you for your side of the story. Why would you give the press anything to write about? Pictures of empty shelves have much more impact than in-stock statistics. You clam up, try to find the employee (probably disgruntled) and terminate him/her.
In other words, corporate not responding is not a signal one way or another, it's the sign of a mature company. Not to kick a dog, but Uber might have responded and made things worse.
OTS 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.
> Usually when I see (or say) something like that it's an exaggeration with a significant amount of truth behind it.
So by your logic, any accusation has the cachet of a significant amount of truth behind it?
The press needs clicks. Their needs (more click and revenue) is diametrically opposed to our needs (a somewhat unbiased view of reality).
Just by saying "<outlandish accusation> has to be backed by something" is ridiculous. It can be backed by nothing. As long as you click through, they get what they want.
No, my point was merely that dismissing that accusation because it’s ridiculous doesn’t mean you can assume there is no merit to the point at all. I have no idea whether the system is as employee-hostile as the sources indicate.
This reminds me of a SaaS product roll outs where customers are complaining, revenue is falling, sales people are complaining but the bosses point out at the great new metric they found which says "Everything is great as long as the day name ends with a 'Y'"
I'm surprised Amazon isn't behind this; I assumed this was their warehouse fulfillment algorithm applied to supermarket retail, for everyone to witness firsthand.
Corporate could at least explain why this might be happening and what they are doing.
A PR department is still better in my books compared to a few disgruntled employees from a few high traffic stores after a major change in both store traffic and company processes.
All companies go through growing pains and scaling issues, and I hardly expect much insight on those issues from the teenage stock boy at a Whole Foods.
The "teenage stock boy" isn't supposed to be providing insight, the thread was questioning the facts of whether the shelves are empty.
The stock boy probably has more insight to that than any of us, and anyone at corporate. Indeed I'd expect only their direct manager, if anyone, to have a better insight on what is on the actual shelves.
Corporate will tell you what should be there; stock check will tell you after the fact what was there, ...
> When ever you want the truth, just call their PR department.
PR has their own bias but if they tell lies they can be sued for hiding/misrepresenting the truth, because they represent the company's official stance. Unless the company is doing something wrong that they need to cover up, I can't think why a PR answer could not be close to a honest answer.
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.
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 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?
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.
Whole foods has a lot of very niche specialty food. That is what they are probably scaling back on.
For example there's a small organic food store near my house that no longer sells cocoa butter because it's very expensive and rarely purchased. And it's more common now, but I used to have to go to Whole Foods foods for things like almond flour, coconut flour, dairy-free products, and gluten-free products. (I used to date someone with digestive issues.) It was nice to be able to buy them somewhere instead of having to special order it online. But I can't imagine they sell nearly as much of those foods.
And I did too, but I can already buy a lot of those foods elsewhere now. Even Walmart carries almond and coconut flour now, grassfed beef and butter, humane local eggs, generic brand almond milk, etc. Whole Foods does have a few more options, but I don't think I have very much reason to step into the organic food store/whole foods anymore. And it's lessening by the day as their competitors pick up those niche items more.
That was with my ex so I don't have to deal with it anymore, but when you have a limited budget and strict diet requirements in addition to medical bills we just looked for the cheapest place that sells what didn't kill him.
Here 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?
Not 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!
It sounds like they're trying to optimise their just-in-time delivery. I think Lidl/Aldi do this, they have a very small "back area" so almost all goods are on the shelves. This presumably optimises so floor usage and reduces storage costs/wastage and such.
Aldi's business model is "few things that you need, cheap".
Whole Foods business models is "Look at the stuff we have that you never knew about so you have no idea of what the price on it should be or what to use it for. Buy it!" The entire thing was based on a blow job with a smile level customer service. Do you know that employees of Whole Foods carried sharpies so if a customer looked lost trying to figure out if the customer wanted to try this or that item, the sharpie came out to wipe off the UPC code of the item and that item went into customer's bag for free because Whole Foods determined that losing $3-10 on the item is perfectly fine as they made $300 on a basket that this person was likely to buy on average a month? Or how about a knife that everyone in produce carried? So if a customer was not quite sure about that apple, the knife came out the apple was cut right in front of him or her, a piece was given to them and the rest became sample?
That's why Whole Foods had insane revenue. It was the level of service one only got at specialty stores delivered to the masses.
That's a great thing to do as long as you don't take it to the point where you end up with products out of stock. The moment you do, you're encouraging your customers to patronize the competition instead.
> The concept of “never out” products doesn’t make any sense to me. That should describe everything!
Definitely not; plenty of items are seasonal and therefore only available at certain times. One of the reasons I prefer WF to e.g. Safeway is that they stock certain vegetables, fruits, and seafood without requiring that they be available year round. WF has persimmons in the fall; Safeway never does.
That’s why I said “normally stocked products.” Seasonally available products are fine. The problem is products which are supposed to be available but can’t be purchased when I’m there because the store is cutting their JIT delivery too close.
This is my frustration. I'd prefer to shop elsewhere, but the convenience of walking to Whole Food and grabbing whatever I need (or at least trying to) is hard to pass up when the alternative likely requires getting in the car. My strong preference would be to go to multiple shops (butcher, fishmonger, produce store, etc.), but the convenience of Whole Foods usually wins out.
That's normally the case. Whole Foods is not a normal grocery store and has an extremely loyal customer base. Many of their customers already go out of their way to go to the store and pay higher prices for the same items that other stores have.
This is probably why Whole Foods is trying to cut back on inventory, so they can lower prices to compete with every other grocery store.
Absolutely not but some people do shop around. Everyone has a store they go to more often then not. If the usual store was out of things had sub par quality I won’t go back. There are a couple on my black list around me.
My regular grocery store will be out a handful of times of years when I winter storm is coming. It will only take a day to recover stock in this case.
Sometimes I do, for specialty items. I think we were just giving the stores the benefit of the doubt because of the hurricanes and blizzards(I'm in the Boston area).
> 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?
> "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.
i've always wondered who actually answers "no" to that question.
If i've made it to the checkout, i've made the decision that i've found everything i'm going to purchase today. even if it wasn't everything i originally came for. If i needed help finding something, i would have asked for help before i got to the checkout.
I'm not going to stand in line at the checkout only to not actually check out, and hold up the line behind me while the cashier helps me find something.
I have - they pressed the light to call a supervisor (whilst they continued scanning my items) who found me the item, like finding a replacement for a damaged item, and returned before I'd finished packing the bags. Delay was <1 minute.
I would never tell the cashier because they don't appear to be asking in a way to actually use the reply. I have complained at customer service and generally get something like "I will tell the bakery" or "I will tell the seafood manager".
However they don't write anything down at all. I have had complaints about certain items being out or even things like tops for the oatmeal which they just started to offer or plastic bags and so on. So when I get angry enough and if there is more than 1 thing that upsets me I might say something. I get deer in headlights though.
My general attitude is that I am not going to be their quality assurance department and in particular if they don't have what appears to be a good way to even listen or note what I am saying.
At least at a restaurant when you complain you get something for free for doing so (redone meal, discount, take off bill etc). So they have a system (tell the manager he comes to the table) and you generally get something for your effort. So you don't feel that you are wasting your time or being taken advantage of.
Providing feedback that gets lost in the hierarchy is very demoralizing.
Last weekend I got a disinterested shrug from a hotel employee when I pointed out that the shower design in my room was idiotic; I have no confidence that'll get resolved, but at least they emailed me this week with a survey and I was able to unleash a healthy rant.
The correct answer would always be "yes" because it is highly improbably that what it in stock would not meet your basic nutrition needs. They may not have what you "want" - but that's a different matter.
Whether 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.
Empty 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.
you lose a case of cauliflower to spoilage, you lose $5. lose a case-worth of sold cauliflower, you lose out on $100 of revenue. this systems sounds penny-wise and pound-short.
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.
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).
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.
As 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.
> 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.
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.
There 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.
You wouldn't want backstock for produce of more than a day or two, because that's going to reduce freshness. You can't just constantly keep tons of backstock of everything year-round just in case there's a storm one week.
Also, OTS allows backstock of top selling items or in emergencies. If you can predict a big storm like what probably caused most of the problems in the article, you are allowed to stock up on product.
That's why I have a problem with the article, it's just so factually incorrect.
Increase 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.
In our local Tesco, in a relatively poor UK city, the saving on "last day" food is about 10-20%, it used to be much higher. Presumably they're more wary of self-cannabilising. Except bread products after 8pm, it's almost never worth buying the reduced items now. I imagine they have much more waste. Mind you most ready food retailers, like Greggs (high-street bakery) don't do reductions preferring to dump unsold food rather than let people get them cheaply.
Refuse bin areas getting covers and locks is some sort of r/latestagecapitalism indicator.
In Germany it's common that food that doesn't look like it's still worth the full price gets discounted. My department works on the discount label printing and I've visited a store to test it out.
In the mornings an employee looks through the fruits and vegetables, trashes spoiled stuff, but also picks away some and discounts them for 30-50% or so, depending on how good it still is.
It is usually gone in 20 minutes, some seemingly poor people got cheap food thanks to this.
Economics 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.
Incentives 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.
It'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.
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.
Exactly. 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.
That state is a local minimum; “zero sales” is a sufficient but not necessary condition, taken with “zero inventory,” which is necessary but not sufficient.
Absolutely. 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.
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."
One 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.
I 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.
Surely 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?
One 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?
Because “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.
You 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
I 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?
I'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.
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 will generate more garbage data as you cannot measure demand of an out of stock item.
This was my thoughts exactly. More often than not, these systems are still implemented but a manual "exception" process is later tacked onto it.
It sounds like they haven't hit the normal Stage 2 phase: Implement a manual override process with the goal of allowing employees to temporarily bump levels for holidays and special sales and the like. The key here is temporary. The computer resets the levels to whatever it thinks they should be after a normally (short) period of time.
Stage 3 is to act surprised (as a corporate culture) when it is discovered that salaried managers are spending a 10 hour day every week/month adjusting all the levels. Effectively, store-level employees have returned to the original process but in a very inefficient and undesirable way.
Stage 4 varies. Sometimes you loop back to Stage 1: Zealous enforcement and the removal of any way for store-level employees to provide input into the ordering system.
Sometimes, you scrap the whole thing and go back to manual ordering. This usually keeps the algorithmic system but instead as a sort of assistant/recommendation engine. Usually it picks the top X overstocked/spoiled items in the store and gently nudges management to reduce inventory levels. This usually turns into a consistent win because management feels empowered and eventually comes to trust the recommendations, often rubber stamping most things and only correcting egregious errors: "I.E. Christmas in 2 weeks, only order 10 hams."
Unfortunately, the source of this info is directly working with a retailer trying to integrate one of these systems. After we hit Stage 3, I really did try to build a consensus around repurposing it into a weekly recommendation engine of 10-20 items to adjust in the store.
Instead we just removed the override capabilities and went right back into trouble. Apparently, there was a view I had overstepped my boundaries trying to tell the business how to treat the stores. So I left before I could get placed at the bottom of the Annual Stack and Rack. :-/
Whole Foods whittled down the list of items that are "never" out-of-stock. Now that tier of redundancy is reserved for a select group of core items explicitly called "never-outs." In doing so, HQ implicitly reclassified the remainder of the inventory as "sometimes-outs."
Having a lot of "sometimes-out" items predictably will lead to "sometimes-all-out-at-the-same-time" categories and "some-stores-are-always-out" items. The outages are clumping, in terms of categories, timing, and location. Which is a bad and apparently unanticipated mode of failure for the procurement system.
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.
Yeah 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.
Actually, 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.
There's no centralized replenishment system yet at Whole Foods, OTS is just a collection of guidelines enforced by inspections. 99% of ordering is done manually at the store level for now.
One 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.
huh. 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.
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 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.
I'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?
I 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)
regular industrial corn is livestock feed, corn-syrup base, plastics feedstock and the like. horrible stuff, grown in gargantuan quantities. you can't eat it without at least some amount of processing. it's just not food.
the stuff you eat off the cob is sweet corn. nobody grows, or eats enough sweet corn for there to be a glut of it.
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.
>All those things have a very long shelf life; there's no need to maintain tight stock control.
Holding inventory has an economic cost, even if the inventory has infinite shelf life — the money that bought or manufactured the inventory could be used elsewhere.
Partly, 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.
OTS 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.
As 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.
I 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.
A 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.
What 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.
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.
I 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.
There'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.
Goodness, 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.
Interesting 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.
Hmm, 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.
This 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.
I 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.
One 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.
Sounds 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.
From 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."
The title is definitely misleadingly alarmist. A more sober look at the situation from Forbes[1] still points to order to shelf being the core problem, even if the reality of empty shelves is much less serious than BI screams.
Sure, 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.
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...
A crisis, in terms of food, means that if there isn't food, people die, or enter starvation mode. It's not even a crisis for Whole Foods- this is a minor issue.
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.
Don'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.
We'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.
Maybe 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.
The 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.
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.