Why Do Whole Foods Misinterpreted?

Whole Foods has been struggling for quite sometime now, this is because of several things. Whole Foods was caught overpricing its customers and has been trying to reshape its image for two years now. For example their vegetable platters were on average overpriced by $2.50 and their chicken tenders were overpriced by an average of $4.13. This led to a lawsuit of $800,000 and extremely bad press, where people began nicknaming it as “Whole Paycheck”. Around the same time the company’s stock fell by over 40 percent. Whole Foods was also accused of not actually monitoring the methods of their meat suppliers, turns out that the farms where Wholes Foods’ meat was coming from barely met industry standards. This caused customers to lose trust in Whole

They believe that the solution to their problems is by laying off its employees, without taking into account that they are at a fault as a whole. This relates to the assumption “Production of data is not affected by organizational politics” from “Give the Kid a Number”. It is clear that the Whole Foods management is laying off their employees in order to make up for their mistakes. Indeed they haven’t stated this, which is basically showing that when people are in the position to be able to influence data whatever way they like in order to suite their own purposes (Garham, 1982). Through further research I found that Whole Foods is opening up 365 new stores, this is inconsistent with their conclusion to layoff employees. If they are going to be increasing the amount of stores wouldn’t they need more employees? This leads me to relate back to the first assumption given in “Give the Kid a Number” which says, “data reflects a constant reality” (Garham, 1982). Whole Foods did not take into account the fact that they are opening up several new stores, which will in return cause increase in expenditure. The expenditure could include stuff like building cost, employee wages, production costs, etc. Therefore their assumption in thinking that laying off 1,500 employees will enable them to decrease prices and increase technology is