
Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a crisis of food shortages - deegles
http://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-employees-reveal-why-stores-are-facing-a-crisis-of-food-shortages-2018-1
======
tinfins
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.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
> 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."

~~~
irrational
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.

~~~
caseysoftware
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.

~~~
meri_dian
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.

What am I missing?

~~~
intended
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.

~~~
burfog
Crowd images don't tell the whole story.

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.

~~~
michaelmrose
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media/white-
hou...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media/white-house-
accuses-media-of-playing-down-inauguration-crowds-idUSKBN15600I)

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.

~~~
burfog
"In the usual pair of photos"

Those are not the usual pair of photos.

~~~
michaelmrose
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.

~~~
meri_dian
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.

------
WillyF
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?

~~~
phkahler
From 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
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?

~~~
mikeash
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!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
notyourday
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.

Drop that and Wegmans would destroy it.

Source: Wife used to work at Whole Foods.

------
danans
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.

Here's a blog post which provides examples:

[https://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/08/04/two-is-one-and-
one...](https://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/08/04/two-is-one-and-one-is-none-
how-redundancies-increase-your-antifragility/)

~~~
danans
s/data load/data loss/

------
rdiddly
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.

~~~
mml
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.

~~~
rdiddly
That too!

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

~~~
d357r0y3r
Can't say the Harris Teeter in Raleigh is ever out of anything.

------
sudosteph
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.

~~~
overgard
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.

------
coding123
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.

~~~
tinfins
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.

~~~
Chaebixi
> 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?

~~~
tinfins
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.

------
ReinholdNiebuhr
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
Moter8
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.

------
siliconc0w
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.

------
kvanderd
I 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.

------
javadocmd
A business perfectly optimized w.r.t. waste will have zero inventory and zero
sales.

~~~
dahdum
Yep, 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".

------
joemaller1
How much food was allowed to rot too keep the shelves stocked? I’m fine with a
few empty shelves if it means less wasted food.

~~~
asciimo
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.

------
leroy_masochist
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.

------
adam
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.

~~~
ljf
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?

~~~
thrill
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?

~~~
Spooky23
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.

------
laurentoget
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.

~~~
krinchan
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. :-/

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Surely they have enough data at a long lived supermarket to predict stock
demand using weather factors and seasonality automatically.

I'd expect them to be factoring in customer onboarding rates, including
anticipated accelerations, accounting for ongoing ad campaigns and such too.

~~~
drtillberg
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.

------
gwbas1c
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.

~~~
lsc
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.

------
Animats
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.

~~~
noer
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.

~~~
ReinholdNiebuhr
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?

------
dexwiz
A bad inventory system could kill Wholefoods. It killed the launch of Target
Canada.

~~~
kps
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.

------
siruncledrew
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.

~~~
TheAdamist
Train your customers to shop elsewhere, and it becomes bad in the long term
too.

------
StanislavPetrov
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.

------
danepowell
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.

------
Chaebixi
If you take the slack out of a system you make it more "efficient" but also
more fragile in the face of the unexpected.

------
adolph
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.

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/12/rachel_laudan_o_1.h...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/12/rachel_laudan_o_1.html)

------
rurban
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.

------
ceejayoz
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.

This may not be entirely a Whole Foods issue.

~~~
intrasight
I love Wegmans :)

------
gersh
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.

------
majormajor
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.

------
jxramos
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.

------
squozzer
Sounds like a JIT system with its settings set to "extra miserly."

------
donarb
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.

------
40acres
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.

------
johan_larson
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.

------
gpsx
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.

~~~
saithier
My local whole foods in SF (Noe Valley) is very frequently sold out of produce
I want. Broccoli, spinach, and onions in particular it seems.

Super frustrating.

------
random3
This brings back memories...
[http://predicthistunpredictpast.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-
pho...](http://predicthistunpredictpast.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-photographs-
of-markets-revealed_18.html)

Maybe there's a solution :)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing)

------
trhway
>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.

------
chx
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.

------
mesozoic
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.

------
rwc
Photo rings true for East Dallas Whole Foods. I've stopped going, even though
it's a mile away. Central Market forever!

------
iokevins
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."

~~~
cratermoon
Target'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-
cana...](http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-canada/)

------
dekhn
business insider is a click farm, this is not a crisis of food shortages,
that's just click bait.

~~~
ksenzee
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
Funny bit is, Bezos is an investor in Business Insider.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/business-
insider-blodget-bezos)

~~~
btown
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...

~~~
goialoq
"integrity" is not a word that matches "Business Insider", even if they are
willing to poke at their investor's investments.

------
com2kid
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.

That must be some truly impressive JS.

~~~
RGamma
I 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).

------
brndnmtthws
I'd love it if we could ban BI from HN due to their extremely low quality
content.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
odammit
Crisis...

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

~~~
verbatim
This sure looks like a crisis for a grocery store.

It didn't say it was a crisis for the population.

~~~
odammit
I’m gonna upvote that because you’re right, but I still feel there is a better
word than “crisis.”

Words still have meaning.

Except “literally.”

------
sebringj
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.

~~~
gamegoblin
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.

~~~
sebringj
I stand corrected. Thank you.

