I used to be a regular at Whole Foods.
That was until a couple of years back, when an oasis appeared in the downtown Boston food desert and a Roche Brothers opened not far from where I live. It’s about the same distance as the Whole Foods is, but Roche Bros. has the benefit of offering food that’s every bit as good and varied as Whole, while also providing the shopper an opportunity to buy items like Cheerios and paper towels that are actually absorbent.
But I was a Whole shopper for many years, and I still drop by if I’m walking in that direction and need a couple of things.
I haven’t, however, been there in a while, so I’ve missed out on the big grocery news: since the recent acquisition by Amazon, the cupboards at Whole have apparently grown bare:
Whole Foods customers in Bellingham have been struggling to find English cucumbers and sweet onions. In Newton, shoppers have been disgusted to realize that the organic celery they purchased was mostly rotten. Shoppers in Hingham have complained about half-rotten bags of clementines, while those in Newtonville say they were unable to purchase tofu all last week. (Source: Boston Globe)
I’m not quite sure what an English cucumber is. Something that goes on a watercress and cuke sandwich on white bread with the crusts cut off? But I do like me some sweet onions and, hey, if I want a half-rotten bag of those darling clementines, I can get some at the twee, fake-quaint grocery store on Charles Street (which will go unnamed), that is an excellent source of expired items like two-weeks-past-sell-by milk and cucumbers (English or not) that look okay in the store but which turn into a suppurating mess on the one-minute trip home.
Turns out, though, that the problema at Whole Foods is not the fault of Amazon. Turns out they have a new inventory management system that’s to blame.
No new system, especially one as complex as inventory management in the grocery biz, ever rolls out without multiple hiccups. At one large company I worked for, the deployment of an all-things-to-all-employees ERP system brought the place to its knees. Admittedly, Genuity was doing a fine job of bringing itself to its knees even without the lousy new system. Still, the mega-ERP didn’t help.
My primary use of the system was for reporting expenses and managing expense reports for my team. I dreaded doing both, so much so that I considered putting a halt to all travel to avoid having to use the beast.
After the system was rolled out – and, it’s probably not necessary to mention that it cost a kabillion dollars in software and consultancy fees – they sent around some of the consultants to interview employees about how they were “enjoying” it. I was one of the lucky, randomly chosen interviewees.
What I pretty much told them was that, if it were up to me, I would only use the system if the company president were standing in my doorway with a gun trained on me, telling me to log in. And then only after he’d demonstrated to me that the gun were loaded.
So, yeah, I know that big, complex new systems take a while to work the kinks out of.
But with Wegman’s (and I’m no Wegman’s fan) popping up on every corner, Whole had better watch its back. Empty shelves are not what you want to see in Whole Foods, which is known for its superabundant fruit and veggie displays. Empty shelves seems so Eastern European before the fall of communism.
On a trip to Berlin just as the wall was falling (over New Year of 1989), after one of our many checks through Checkpoint Charlie, we stopped at a grocery store in East Berlin. Now if you recall, East Berlin was the supposed jewel in the crown of the Evil Empire. But the stores were grim, with food displays featuring rotting produce. Given how rotten the food was, it may seem ridiculous to point out that the stores were sparsely stocked – kind of like bitching about the small portions in a restaurant where the meals were awful – but there you have it. The stores were the antithesis of Whole Food. Before they ran low on English cucumbers and tofu.
While the first-world crisis - oh, the humanity! - currently being visited upon Whole Foods isn’t being caused by its new owners, Whole-Amazon may not be a marriage made in heaven:
Industry analysts say the increased scrutiny on both Amazon and Whole Foods doesn’t bode well for either company, and may benefit other grocers.
Whole Foods has long been hampered by logistical woes, part of the reason the company was for sale in the first place, said Burt Flickinger, a retail analyst with Strategic Resource Group.
“Amazon does not understand the details involved in fresh food retail,” he said. “This is going to be Amazon’s retail version of Vietnam; it’s going to take three to five years to fix and at a really really high cost.”
Retail version of Vietnam, huh?
As analogies go, there could be worse ones. Retail version of the Holocaust? Retail version of bubonic plague?
Nonetheless, if I were Burt Flickinger, I might avoid this kind of appropriation of Vietnam.
For one thing, logistics wasn’t the problem in Vietnam. We did a bang up job ferrying our boys and war materiel and politicians in and out. And it took more than “three to five years to fix”. Agreed, Vietnam was “at a really high cost.” But I would argue that the cost of Vietnam was a tad bit higher than someone doing without tofu or non-GMO sweet onions.
Like 58,000 Americans (mostly kids) killed. And, when everything’s toted up – civilian deaths, South Vietnam military, North Vietnam military, et al. – we’re talking about 1.3 million+ deaths. And that’s just the death toll.
Whatever analogy Burt chooses to use in the future, his current point is that Amazon needs to focus on fixing the Whole Food inventory system rather than focusing on what they do best, which is a Walmartian lowering of prices. Higher prices are, in fact, one of the reasons people shop at Whole Foods, given that higher prices do equate somewhat to quality – fresher produce, more interesting choices. Higher prices also bring with them the halo effect. I.e., higher prices confer the notion of higher quality, whether it’s true or not. I know nothing about grocery stores – the one crummy job I never had was cashier at Stop & Shop – but I didn’t spend all those years working for companies that had the most expensive tech whatever on the market without picking up this bit of wisdom. Then there’s the health halo, which I hadn’t really thought about:
For 25 years, Whole Foods was out in front of other retailers when it came to big ideas in grocery shopping, but now it has let competitors catch up, said William Masters, an economics professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
“I’m a little surprised but not completely shocked that of all the retailers, Whole Foods would be the one that would go off the rails,” he said. “They had a pretty sweet deal for a while, with high markups because of quality perceptions, and store atmospheres that gave a health halo.”
When I was a regular Whole Foods shopper, I never really thought about it being “healthy”, other than knowing that having access to fresh produce, decent meat and fish, and foods that aren’t processed to death is something that folks who live in actual food deserts live without – to the detriment of their health.
Anyway, it’s hard to get too worked up about having to settle for a non-English cucumber.
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*Country Joe McDonald’s “I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” (1965).
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