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Re:Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a cris... by pbhjpbhj on Friday January 19, 2018 @07:03PM (#16191086)
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.

Re:Whole Foods employees reveal why stores are facing a cris... by drtillberg on Friday January 19, 2018 @10:28PM (#16191893)
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.