Whole Foods' Food Holes
So I don't shop at whole foods but we had better keep an eye on them now that Amazon owns them and wants to take over all grocery sales. Probably in the future Amazon/Whole Foods will be like Taco Bell in Demolition Man. So I was pretty interested to read this article about them.
In the past, if a Whole Foods store ran out of a specific product, employees would fill the hole on the shelf by putting another item — typically one of the store's top sellers — in its place. The grocery industry calls this practice a "face over" or "re-facing."
That way, even when stores are short on products, the shelves still appear well-stocked and organized.
But under an inventory system called order-to-shelf, or OTS, Whole Foods has banned that practice — leaving what one employee described as "gaping holes" on store shelves.
"Never 'face over' or cover holes," the company instructs employees in a 42-page internal manual reviewed by Business Insider. The document describes standard operating procedures for order-to-shelf. The system also bans the use of "temporarily out" tags, it says.
"Temporarily out tags are often inaccurate and clutters shelves," the manual states. Employees "can communicate with customers on status of product rather than a tag."
The manual explains why employees should leave holes empty, saying it "helps ensure that OOS [out-of-stock] items get reordered because hole is visible, increases the likelihood that OOS [out-of-stock] items will return to in-stock position when available, eliminates confusion for both customers and [employees]," and "makes stock position obvious to customers, [employees], and store leadership."
Employees say the system makes stores look sloppy and empty.
"OTS forbids employees from temporarily re-facing shelves to make out-of-stocks less visually glaring," said Julia Rogers, who cited OTS as the reason for leaving her job an employee at a Toronto Whole Foods in November. "Admittedly there is nothing to be done when an entire produce set — like the lettuce wall — is out of stock, but for smaller situations, re-facing would enhance the shopping experience, by calling attention to what is in stock as opposed to what is not."
It's pretty bad when you have to quit your job at a grocery store over creative differences.