Whole Foods robbing customers who buy prepackaged foods

http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/NYC-consumer-agency-says-Whole-Foods-mislabels-6346726.php

Big "wow"!

To find a violation for every package tested is very disturbing. And not just NYC. To having settle by paying $800,000 for consumer violations in California means there must have been tons of violations.

I bought a hunk of cornbread there the other day and I did find it odd that each and every hunk, all sold by the pound, we're all exactly two dollars

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is a bad man. WF is not a progressive company. WF opportunistically chose to serve a "product" many good people like, equal parts items and pretending you are "cool" while buying them. It is not surprising WF are dishonest in essentially everything they do.

Reminding, Mackey on unions: The union is like having herpes. It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.

spontaneous said:
I bought a hunk of cornbread there the other day and I did find it odd that each and every hunk, all sold by the pound, we're all exactly two dollars

I've noticed similarly-priced prepackaged meats. Then again, I've noticed this at Pathmark, as well.

meganlibrarian said:

spontaneous said:
I bought a hunk of cornbread there the other day and I did find it odd that each and every hunk, all sold by the pound, we're all exactly two dollars

I've noticed similarly-priced prepackaged meats. Then again, I've noticed this at Pathmark, as well.

Meat at Target also seems to be priced by the package, not by weight.

Labeling by the package vs. pound is question of saving labor $s. It requires more effort to weigh and separately label each package.

krnl said:

meganlibrarian said:

spontaneous said:
I bought a hunk of cornbread there the other day and I did find it odd that each and every hunk, all sold by the pound, we're all exactly two dollars

I've noticed similarly-priced prepackaged meats. Then again, I've noticed this at Pathmark, as well.

Meat at Target also seems to be priced by the package, not by weight.

It is fine and legal to price per package. The cornbread I am referring to specifically had a per weight label on it, and each and every piece (different shaped due to them being cut from a larger loaf) happened by some miracle to all come out to exactly the SAME weight so they all ended up being $2. Had they just been marked $2 each I wouldn't have given it a second thought.

I am at Whole Foods now. The cornbread by the pound is now actually priced by the pound, each hunk has a different price on it.

spontaneous said:

Fancy that! Heh.

The difference between Target and Whole Foods is Target has no scales. That's why produce is sold by the piece. Same is true at Trader Joe's. Everything sold by weight is labelled off premises. If Target or TJ's was cheating, it would be every store seved by that facility. Someone would've noticed by now.

WF is intentionally not weighing items that vary in size, meaning if it's underweight you're getting ripped. As noted, every store in the City continued to do this after DCA warnings, and the same crime was taking place on a wide scale elsewhere.

Poor John Mackey must be bristling at the jack booted thugs who forced the facist ACA on an unwilling populace, and now wants him to actually charge customers only for what they buy. Our rights are eroding before our eyes.

For the fun of it, I thought I check myself. I had two different packs of chicken, only packed and weighted by the local store and the other in 365 packaging, which makes me think it's probably packaged at some corporate facility. Both were slightly 'light'.

Here is a pic of one, it should be 1.25lbs, not 1.30. OTOH, this is a cheap un-calibrated household scale.

They admitted their guilt. Its just a mistake even though strangely almost all "accidental" mispackaged goods were in their $$$ favor.

John Mackey and Walter Robb, co-CEOs of Whole Foods (WFM), apologized to customers in a video filmed in the sliced fruit section of one of their grocery stores. The casually dressed execs admitted that some customers had been accidentally overcharged for sliced fruit, fresh squeezed juices and sandwiches by workers who made errors.

The city said it found only a few instances customers where benefited from underpriced food.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/02/news/companies/whole-foods-overcharge-apology/

I'm not excusing them one bit, but it is human nature to make mistakes in one's own favor. I hold them fully responsible for it, though, because not trying hard enough to do it right is just as bad as making an effort to cheat people.

BG9 said:
They admitted their guilt. Its just a mistake even though strangely almost all "accidental" mispackaged goods were in their $$$ favor.
John Mackey and Walter Robb, co-CEOs of Whole Foods (WFM), apologized to customers in a video filmed in the sliced fruit section of one of their grocery stores. The casually dressed execs admitted that some customers had been accidentally overcharged for sliced fruit, fresh squeezed juices and sandwiches by workers who made errors.
The city said it found only a few instances customers where benefited from underpriced food.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/02/news/companies/whole-foods-overcharge-apology/

Are those the real people? Or did they bring in wax stand-ins from Madame Tussaud's?

kthnry said:

BG9 said:
They admitted their guilt. Its just a mistake even though strangely almost all "accidental" mispackaged goods were in their $$$ favor.
John Mackey and Walter Robb, co-CEOs of Whole Foods (WFM), apologized to customers in a video filmed in the sliced fruit section of one of their grocery stores. The casually dressed execs admitted that some customers had been accidentally overcharged for sliced fruit, fresh squeezed juices and sandwiches by workers who made errors.
The city said it found only a few instances customers where benefited from underpriced food.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/02/news/companies/whole-foods-overcharge-apology/

Are those the real people? Or did they bring in wax stand-ins from Madame Tussaud's?

They look they've been dipped in and preserved by some preservative.

If their looks are the result of a Whole Food diet, maybe then its best to ....

So Mackey thought lying might make people willing to forgive WF? The violations in the City were overwhelmingly in WF's favor, were "the worst case of mislabeling the(e inspectors) have seen in their careers" according to the DCA commissioner, continued after DCA told WF to fix the problem, and cheating of customers in California included short weighting and charging for containers. So his suggestion that there wasn't a pattern favoring WF is false. And pardon me if I assume he knew this was going on, otherwise he's as incompetent as Christie would have us believe if he didn't know about Bridgegate.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26024561/whole-foods-hit-hefty-penalty-overcharging-customers-california

I ran across a very interesting piece in Bloomberg on the history of honest weights in American business. In the days before packaged food, almost every item required weighing. Short weights were the rule, and the problem was solved in the Progressive Era with Federal action leading to honest local enforcement. Those reforms have largely held, and led to WF getting caught using the time honored "thumb on the scale" trick.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-02/whole-foods-and-the-old-thumb-on-the-scale

A major part of these reforms was making it illegal to charge for packaging. I know this is the law in NJ, and can't imagine it's not the law everywhere.

This leads me to earlster's weighing. The weight you see should be over 1.3 oz, unless you have your scale set for the packaging weight (tare). If the needle on your scale is set to zero, the tare should add at least another oz if not more. That means you should see roughly 1lb 6oz. Odds are the law's been broken.

ALWAYS blame it on "staff errors." No pattern there, of course! And no liability. Reminds me of a certain workplace I used to inhabit. Give ambiguous or no guidelines and watch how the chips fall. Lovely.

I once paid ten bucks for a pint of ice cream in whole foods. Was it good? Sure, I suppose so

Don't shop there. I find it funny how most people here want a higher minimum wage. But, here's a store that pays higher than just about any other grocery store. They get fair trade goods, environmentally soundly grown, pay top wages in their sector, the whole thing. Pretty responsible. But, people here can't wait to tear them down because its expensive.

TylerDurden said:
Don't shop there. I find it funny how most people here want a higher minimum wage. But, here's a store that pays higher than just about any other grocery store. They get fair trade goods, environmentally soundly grown, pay top wages in their sector, the whole thing. Pretty responsible. But, people here can't wait to tear them down because its expensive.

It is one thing being legitimately expensive. It is quite another if it is expensive because they are overcharging customers.

This kind of thing happens pretty often. Companies are fined for all kinds of things. There are incredible amounts of regulations retailers must comply with. A lot of effort & $$ is spent to ensure compliance. Yet, mistakes happen all the time. And these companies are then fined. I seriously doubt there is any top-down plan to rip off their customers. It would make zero sense for them to pursue that as a policy.

The Whole Foods CEO says he considers the company to be the "victim":

"A Whole Foods executive now says the company was the victim in the overcharging scandal at some of its stores despite admitting and apologizing for the mistakes, reports say.

The New York City foodstores were slammed in June by city officials with more than $58,000 in fines for mislabeling the weight of its pre-packaged products in the "worst case of overcharges that they've ever seen," Commissioner Julie Menin told the Daily News.

Whole Foods quickly responded with an apology admitting that its stores made mistakes and said any errors were unintentional.

But Wednesday during an earnings call, a top executive said he felt like Whole Foods was being singled-out by officials and the "media went wild with" it, Business Insider reports."

"We do feel like we're victims," co-CEO of Whole Foods John Mackey said on the call."

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/07/whole_foods_was_the_victim_after_overcharging_customers_says_whole_foods.html

dk50b said:
I ran across a very interesting piece in Bloomberg on the history of honest weights in American business. In the days before packaged food, almost every item required weighing. Short weights were the rule, and the problem was solved in the Progressive Era with Federal action leading to honest local enforcement. Those reforms have largely held, and led to WF getting caught using the time honored "thumb on the scale" trick.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-02/whole-foods-and-the-old-thumb-on-the-scale

The libertarian keep government small and out of my and yours business view would most likely be "How dare government regulate the weight of transacted goods between private parties. Where does it say in the constitution they can do that?".

TylerDurden said:
This kind of thing happens pretty often. Companies are fined for all kinds of things. There are incredible amounts of regulations retailers must comply with. A lot of effort & $$ is spent to ensure compliance. Yet, mistakes happen all the time. And these companies are then fined. I seriously doubt there is any top-down plan to rip off their customers. It would make zero sense for them to pursue that as a policy.

I somehow missed Tyler's assurance this was a mistake that happens all the time and corporations must spend an inordinate amount to comply with burdensome regulations that ensure consumers don't get poisoned or ripped off. At least that's my takeaway.

As said before, inckuding in my 7/3 post, these weren't mistakes. These laws have been in place for 100 years, and compliance isn't ambiguous, but demands trained employees. Turns out that it's possible WF didn't want to pay what such employees cost, canned them (under the "365 Everyday Value" label), and had untrained part-timers supervise this critical responsibility after being fined $800,000 in CA, and that NYCDCA was investigating.

http://kitchenette.jezebel.com/whole-foods-execs-desperately-flailing-in-wake-of-overc-1715447763

http://gothamist.com/2015/06/24/whole_foods_ripoff.php

BG9, that does sum up the Libertarian view. But thanks to the purchase if the Republican Party by the Koch Brother's Tea Party, their intention to roll back every regulation and entitlement program adopted since Teddy Roosevelt is now Republican policy.

It turns out that the invisible hand of pissed off consumers and investors works, as sales and stock value have been hit by the weighing scandal.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/whole-foods-results-add-to-growth-concerns-1438202546

The easy solution to being overcharged is not more regulation. Every consumer should carry a scale to challenge the marked pricing on per-pound groceries and produce. Of course, then there is the small matter of calibrating 100 million scales...

TylerDurden said:
This kind of thing happens pretty often. Companies are fined for all kinds of things. There are incredible amounts of regulations retailers must comply with. A lot of effort & $$ is spent to ensure compliance. Yet, mistakes happen all the time. And these companies are then fined. I seriously doubt there is any top-down plan to rip off their customers. It would make zero sense for them to pursue that as a policy.

People are penny-wise and pound-foolish all of the time.

TylerDurden said:
This kind of thing happens pretty often. Companies are fined for all kinds of things. There are incredible amounts of regulations retailers must comply with. A lot of effort & $$ is spent to ensure compliance. Yet, mistakes happen all the time. And these companies are then fined. I seriously doubt there is any top-down plan to rip off their customers. It would make zero sense for them to pursue that as a policy.

Companies rarely make it a policy, but it is just as high a crime not to make a sufficient effort to prevent its occurrence. Look how many errors Verizon makes it its favor. They are the worst company at it, as far as I know. Most people don't usually make errors in the other person's favor. It's just human nature. What to do about it is the question.

New Jersey Law also prohibits having MORE product in the package, bag or can than is listed. This law seems to be enforced more as a revenue raiser or as harassment of a particular store.