veteran+ wrote: ↑July 6th, 2023, 9:10 am
HCal wrote: ↑July 5th, 2023, 11:04 pm
storewanderer wrote: ↑July 5th, 2023, 10:50 pm
Under the old Safeway that was prohibited and doing that would result in termination for club card fraud and the booth clerk who got the club card out of the safe and the cashier who gave the club card out would both be terminated; union could do nothing about terminations for club card fraud. That club card fraud would be caught when an unregistered club card was continually used. Eventually a report flagged the unregistered card being continually used and research via cameras was done to figure out how the card got into circulation and where the application went (policy was no card until application was filled out). If the customer actually signed up for it within a week or two of it being given out, it wouldn't be caught and the employees would not get in trouble.
I was given several unregistered club cards when I didn't have mine (or wanted another one from another division). I don't think I ever filled out the application, but I never used the cards again either. If this was against policy, it was poorly enforced. Sometimes I would just enter a famous phone number like 867-5309 which would almost always work.
Side note: Amazon has destroyed Whole Foods at all levels. The Prime discount is a joke.
As much as I'd love to give Amazon credit for this, Whole Foods was in hot water with their investors for their high SG&A (payroll) and wound up getting a nasty activist investor group pushing for changes. It was at that time that they had to start centralizing operations, eliminating fun positions such as store artists and sign makers, removing store purchasing abilities, and standardizing offerings of labor intensive in store perimeters. They didn't even have a consistent company wide automatic replenishment system, planograms, or POS system - some stores had their own registers that were old dinosaurs (Monterey, CA for example used a proprietary system with stickers on the register from a small town local retail company).
Some flagship stores had as many as a dozen prepared food operations such as barbecue, Brazilian churrasco, tacos, sushi, Indian, pasta, juice bars, "produce butchers", coffee roasters, chocolate fountains and truffle bars, and all sorts of other categories of food. Unfortunately their attempts at multiple in store restaurants and such had poor results as much of this food sat too long and became visually unappealing after the prime lunch hour. The shrink and labor costs had to be unreal. There were already issues of angry employees as the company was under pressure to improve profitability; there were pictures online showing entire dumpsters shoved full of produce and other perishables with the claim that these were filled to the top daily due to overzealous ordering by department managers who wanted to have abundant mountains of meats, fruits and vegetables on display. Angry frontline employees would take these pictures upset at the waste their supervisors caused, while their supervisors were upset they were losing the right to waste all of that product. All that manual ordering had to go and be replaced with computerized ordering.
The problem is that they switched to completely standardized recipes and formulas for all prepared food areas, making the stores identical and losing their character. Many of these new standard recipes had mixes put together by a new corporate commissary, or sauces prepared in cryovac bags etc. eliminating the real cooking. They had real chefs working in the stores who were both stripped of their creative abilities overnight and targeted for their high wages (as a lower paid cook who can follow a recipe book could now replace them). I doubt any WFM still employs their own store Head Chef. I will say though that the new corporate food is very bland, but some stores had Head Chefs that made some God awful food as well. There are a few stores where the corporate formulary might be better than what they were serving! (Barbecue Pork Pizza with Cream Bechemel sauce, globs of ground garlic from a jar on top, strong and pungent Roquefort blue cheese, corn, and some sort of invented in house barbecue pesto type sauce - the stink of this pizza could be smelled 50 feet away).
The flagship stores like Tustin, CA are where the cutbacks are the most evident. They remodeled the store to remove the vast majority of the perimeter departments (that store had four entirely separated counters for meat, seafood, ready to cook marinated meats, and barbecue with a seating area for example - with Brazilian barbecue on the opposite side of the store). The entire store was pushed back about 40 feet from the front wall, and a giant "lobby" of tables and chairs was installed to fill the empty space, ironically after most of the options for in store dining were removed or outsourced (they rented the front prime space to Mendocino Farms deli). The store feels hollowed out with widened aisles as the obvious SKU reductions and installation of corporate planograms meant many aisles needed to be removed.
I have zero doubt that if Whole Foods wasn't acquired by Amazon it would look almost the same today. Customers were complaining on the WFM Facebook and Yelp accounts that there weren't 342 different varieties of tomatoes anymore days after the buyout was announced and clearly Amazon has destroyed the store. Amazon was very clear in stating that they didn't start to even get their hands on the business for a couple of years because they were already so deep in their internal restructuring. I do question if Amazon had bought it earlier if they would have made less changes than WFM made themselves... The fact is they could have taught appropriate business acumen (if you only sell 50 large ribeyes a day and keep cutting 250 a day you're losing so much money you would have been better off putting a "closed" sign on the meat case), installed appropriate standardized practices of planograms and auto replenishment, and so on. And tell the employees WHY they're making the decisions, which obviously didn't happen.
It was ridiculous reading the news stories of angry WFM employees bitching to reporters that they're angry they can't buy and set an endcap of $14.98/lb fine imported Italian tagliatelle from some unheard of company like Pasta Obscura Expensiva because "evil" corporate has a POG for 365 pasta which by the way is on the ad cover and customers might be looking for it. The handling of the restructuring left a mass of toxic, pissed off employees who did more to damage the brand than any other change. Something went very wrong as these employees somehow felt that they were actually destroying and harming the company because of planograms, and no longer being permitted to literally hoard food overstocks in the stockroom despite throwing out dumpster loads of spoils daily.
These angry employees put the brand and customer health in danger. I am sure that many decided to start to "half-ass" cleaning procedures intentionally because they didn't care - not just because of labor reduction. Restrooms went from cleanest in food retail to foul smelling cesspools in multiple stores. I purchased a beautiful prime steak from the service counter and took it home in a cooler bag with ice packs (I always carry a few of these in my trunk when going to grocery shop). That evening took the steak out to put on the grill and it had multiple green spots on both sides - obviously they were not sanitizing the meat cutting equipment properly anymore. I took a picture and threw it out, the store refunded my money next visit but I never bought meat there again.
At current wages I am sure that if no changes were made and WFM continued to operate "as is" it would have bankrupted and liquidated some time ago. The question is why did it have to change so much that it completely lost its soul, its reputation, and feels like one of those bad private equity retail acquisitions?
