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.
When I was at Cornell in the mid 2000s, one of the frats did a prank similar to this--though all it took was a roll of quarters. They loaded up the jukebox in the Ivy Room with quarters and set it to play Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on repeat. The brilliance was that the song faded out for about 30 seconds and with all of the noise in the dining hall, it sounded like the madness had finally ended. And then it would start again...
I used to go to a bar that had a 30 minute jethro tull song on the jukebox. It was internet connected and I could pay for songs from home. They eventually unplugged the thing.
My brother-in-law has Down Syndrome and is a sincere Rick Astley fan. (He went to a show in February and got a t-shirt signed, which he still wears.) He uses a jukebox app to play songs at one of our regular bars, and more often than not ends up picking Never Gonna Give You Up before the night is over. Every time I'm afraid to look around because I know everyone in the bar is eyeing each other wondering who the asshole is.
He's got a great sense of humor about it too. He live Rick Rolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade on a day so cold he had to do his performance in a heavy coat and gloves.
A punster friend of mine pun Rick Rolled himself in a dream. In the dream, someone gave him a bunch of movies, but withheld the movie Up. The dream ended on the pronouncement "I'm never gonna give you Up."
My old local supermarket had a "jukebox" at the entrance, where you could select a song. Every time I went there, I'd put Never Gonna Give You Up on the queue.
Last time I want there, however, they had removed the song. I guess I wasn't the only one putting the song on every time I walked in.
You guys need to tamper with the jukebox one unexpected evening and see if the RICK will do a live cameo for the man. That would be awesome, score a ton of YouTube views.
I was in a very popular bar with a group of friends one rather busy Friday / Saturday night. They were playing all kinds of great music and the crowd was thoroughly enjoying it until somebody* played Wham - Careless Whisper. I have vivid memory of one drunk guy about to smash the jukebox and swearing while the mood in the bar was destroyed for almost 8 minutes.
When those internet connected jukeboxes came out some bars in the area for some reason had the Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Body Workout on it. That one was always fun to put on.
My 9 roommates and I paid $60k a year for one of those decrepit old houses--and this was 10 years ago. At $500 per month each, it didn't seem that bad, but we really got ripped off. The density of college living (for instance I had to walk through a roommates room to get to mine) allows landlords in Ithaca to get a level of rent that they'd never get from families or older individuals.
A family friend was one of the people who helped develop the Lyme vaccine. He invited my Dad to be part of the trial because my Dad spends a lot of time outdoors. It turned out that my Dad got the placebo during the trial, but they let him get the vaccine after the trial was completed. That was a long time ago. The vaccine has certainly worn off at this point.
One thing that they don't talk about at all is meat quality. Whom you buy your brisket from can be much more important than optimizing every detail of the smoking process.
I ran a company in the college employment space for 7+ years. I recently shut it down. At our peak we had 150-200k unique visits per month and an email list around 10k. I was scraping by and making a living, but we weren't selling job postings directly for the most part. I've watched many dozens of startups in the space die. Although I learned a lot and helped a lot of people find jobs, I realize now that it's an exceptionally difficult space.
I wrote the company profiles myself. I found all kinds of companies with jobs that weren't posted on any other job boards. Growing an initial audience was the easy part for me because my site was very different from other job sites. Monetizing while continuing to grow the site was what killed me. I relied too much on SEO, and one of Google's whims essentially put me out of business. Most of the startups in the space that I saw fail couldn't even get an initial user base.
that's the key - you need a differentiator. Not everyone has one at all; among job boards, it's quite common for them to be aggregators that just scrape other job boards. I don't find them to be useful.
Yeah. That's why I think a site bringing unique value that happens to have jobs listed might have a fighting chance, whereas a site intended to be a job board that tries to make itself uniquely valuable will struggle.
I don't intend to make money from my job board, rather I hope to find a job myself, in part because the job board will help my SEO if it gets organic links, and in part because some of those who get jobs through my site, might one day hire me, or retain me as a consultant.
As for your own job board, it would be helpful were you to post technical articles for the CS students. Not so many people visit job boards unless they're actually looking for a job, but lots of people like to read articles. Once they're at your site, then they'll notice your job board at the same site.
One thing I don't understand is about Indeed.com. I think (not sure) that it was an aggregator. 2 points: 1) was/is that legal - to just scrape other sites and use it? 2) it supposedly sold to recruiter.com for $1B.
Can anyone confirm that? I was told it by someone.
I wonder if they could use the motion sensor to alert people of a low battery. I'd much rather hear a chirp every time that I walk by than while I'm half way through a good night's sleep.
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?