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.
in washington DC whole foods is starting to feel like old fashioned colonialism: affluent white people being served by working class employees who, for the most part, are african. (I havent seen one exception yet.) so I too feel sad about shopping there now, even though l love their lettuce big time. I’ve never seen such an obvious racial divide at any other supermarket.
like you joslyn I am curious about moving on.
God bless you-you are so right. Thank you for writing
what so many of us are feeling.
Blogs like this pop up from time to time every time a store fires someone or does something less than (what the blog writer deems) perfect. The irony, of course, being that poor treatment is common at most grocery stores and goes on without a peep. Whole Foods setting the bar significantly higher just means that when they occasionally fall short (or are perceived to) they get pounced on.
First off I know nothing about the incident in question and haven’t been to this store in years having moved from the Bay Area in 2004, but I can tell you, having worked for Whole Foods previously for many years, that there is no store out there that intentionally fires workers because they want turnover; sorry but that just doesn’t happen and is not the smartest assumption once could make. It costs far more to find, hire and train an employee than it does to keep existing ones. If you want to talk about “keeping payroll costs down”, your argument simply falls apart.
2nd; you obviously got an earful from your friend who is upset about being let go and thus you don’t have the entire story. Whole Foods lets people go for multiple violations of policy or multiple instances of poor work performance. Is there some subjectivity to that? Yes. Are there occasionally instances of someone being let go when they shouldn’t? Yes (but there is a 2 tiered appeals system that your friend can pursue if they believe that). In either case, unless the issue was something major like stealing or working under the influence, they would have been warned at least 2-3 times about the issue before being let go. In other words they were given the feedback and the opportunity to improve and they chose not to.
Make no mistake. Whole Foods, like any company, is not perfect. It is made up of individuals and that sometimes means ego, greed, anger or desire for control can play into a leader’s decision making process. There are, however, ways employees can deal with that too (anonymous moral surveys and an anonymous tip line to report inappropriate behavior being 2). But that does not mean that “Whole Foods was not the virtuous company it seems to be”.
Whole Foods(as a company) do mean what they say and say what they mean, and they do conduct themselves far better than most and they treat their Team Members far better than most food service companies. Again, not perfect, but not at all the evil empire you seem to be trying to paint here over your friend’s sour grapes.
Thank you John Mackey. Nice to know your still out there defending the “WF” Brand.
I think you are right, JC, that “no store out there…intentionally fires workers because they want turnover”. But your faith in retail management is naive in the extreme.
In the present economy, it can cost far, far less to “find, hire and train an employee” – especially one who has worked in a position for a long time and earns a decent wage. Hiring someone new and paying him/her even $2.50 less per hour will save about $5000 per year. And the new employee won’t be owed as much in paid leave, personal wellness funds, etc. Do that a few times per store and you’ve saved a bunch of money and earned yourself a pretty sweet bonus.
That’s how businesses operate now.
Retail businesses don’t care about having highly skilled workers because they have no measurable way to quantify the value such employees add to the operation. Whether the guy in the wine and cheese department is an expert doesn’t matter any more at big retail chains.
Whole Foods is a multi-billion dollar corporation with hundreds of stores and thousands of employees. Its stock trades on NASDAQ. Share price matters more than anything else.
I am appalled at the amount of inter department sexual activity and drug use. As you mentioned “the hole” has lost its appeal to me. While “prepared foods” brags to ” the cheese guy” about screwing Mrs. Estelle but only while she wasn’t screwing him and Travis as well . There is a disgusting Amount of blatant theivery as well as intoxicated or drugged employees on active duty….. How sad to be mislead all this time and to come to “the hole” to surprise my soon to be child’s father … Only I was the one surprised. The health department should test the counters and the walk in’s