I went to my Whole Foods for the last time the other day.
In a small town like mine, Whole Foods is the social hub. People go to Whole Foods not just to shop, but to hang out, meet up with friends, to see and be seen. Whole Foods is such a thing in Mill Valley that we actually have two Whole Foods within a mile of each other. When you tell someone to meet you at Whole Foods, or “the Hole,” as we call it, you have to specify “the old one” or “the new one.” Most of my friends shop at the Old Hole, for sentimental reasons and also because we love the people that work there.
I am on a casual first-name basis with half the people who work at the Hole, and they me. In fact, I got to know one of my very closest friends after wearing him down with countless questions about wine and cheese, the department he worked in. I say “worked” because, as of the other day, he no longer works at the Hole. He, like me, is moving on. Although in his case, it was less of a choice and more of a forced departure for oblique and somewhat sketchy reasons.
While I don’t feel comfortable telling his story for him, and while I of course only heard his side of the story and not his manager’s, I will say that he is the second person I know to leave his department, under duress, in the weeks before Christmas, when the Old Hole is full of dutifully enforced holiday cheer, including the endless turkey-and-mashed-potatoes hot bar reruns and the overpriced hemp stocking stuffers and a decadent, bourgeois live classical music trio atop the frozen food case.
Indeed, in the front of the store, things are shiny and happy and organic as fuck, while behind the scenes, corporate controls our every bourgie hippie desire like puppets.
Whole Foods may seem, from the wide-eyed consumer standpoint, like a utopian vision of healthy, local, organic food, but look a little closer. Whole Foods is not what we think it is. It is not a community of like-minded people driven by a love of good food and local values. It’s not a company motivated to support organic small farms and non-CAFO meat suppliers out of a sense of virtue and decency. Whole Foods is a business, and like any business, money is the exclusive driving factor behind every decision.
(Incidentally, I am not an investigative journalist, but Field Maloney, a Slate writer who just happened to grow up in my neck of the woods in Western Mass—where small family farms are a dying breed in a place once saturated with farming—did a nice piece a while back on why Whole Foods is a nefarious company. Read it here.)
A lot of businesses start out with the best intentions, born from noble ideas: better products, better business practices, better employee standards. But the raw truth is that, as a company grows, only one thing remains important, and that’s the bottom line. This is capitalism. This is the American dream.
I’m not naïve about how capitalism works.
I have long suspected that Whole Foods was not the virtuous company it seems to be, but I have chosen to turn a blind eye. Because what, am I going to shop at Safeway? No thanks. Fluorescent lights bruise my soul.
However, this last week got me thinking about how I vote with my dollars. Because I have multiple friends behind the scenes at Whole Foods, I am privy to how the management of our regional chain of Holes operates, and sadly, it’s not about supporting noble causes. It’s about money. It’s about competing with Trader Joe’s. It’s about brilliant marketing that makes us buyers think we’re eating healthier just because we’re eating at the Hole. It’s about keeping payroll costs down while jacking product prices up. It’s about shuffling some of our favorite faces out the door so they can bring in new, fresh young blood who will toe the line and, I’m guessing, get paid less for their inexperience.
In other words, the Hole is an illusion, a brand, a compelling deception of organic, healthy Eden. One that I have knowingly bought into for many years.
Witnessing my friend—and several other tenured members of his department—get pushed out the door over the last few weeks and months has caused me to take a good hard look at how I am voting with my dollars. When I sit with it, I realize that I can definitely live without Whole Foods in my life. I am lucky to live in the Bay Area, where a year-round cornucopia of local produce and non-factory-farmed meat is abundant. There are countless farmers markets in an easy radius, where I can buy truly local, truly organic food right from the growers. There are large groceries—like Good Earth in Fairfax and Rainbow in San Francisco—that haven’t yet become giant behemoth chain retailers and still cleave to honest-to-goodness business practices (as far as I know). Those are businesses I want to support.
It’s been a good run for me at the Hole, but I feel good about moving on. In fact, the Old Hole, in their ruthless pursuit of turnover, has taught me a valuable lesson about not clinging to the status quo. So, onward and upward. It’s been nice knowing you, Whole Foods.
