. . . Whole Foods’ clientele are all about mindfulness and compassion… until they get to the parking lot. Then it’s war. As I pull up this morning, I see a pregnant lady on the crosswalk holding a baby and groceries. This driver swerves around her and honks. As he speeds off I catch his bumper sticker, which says ‘NAMASTE’. Poor lady didn’t even hear him approaching because he was driving a Prius. He crept up on her like a panther. Kelly MacLean on The Huffington Post
You know it’s true. I’ve asked many Whole Foods workers about the rude entitlement of so many of their customers and they roll their eyes and nod. Now there are efforts to organize these workers, against major C-Suite opposition, and it won’t be pretty.
It’s all starting to piss me off. Between the company, its image and its customers, it’s easy to get angry. I’m a Sixties product with all the baggage that that implies, including the right to organize, and basic kindness and respect from one person to another, but at my most granola I didn’t question the responsibility of public health, of immunization, first for me and later for my kids, and wasn’t predictable enough to produce this:
I talked to a public health official and asked him what’s the best way to anticipate where there might be higher than normal rates of vaccine noncompliance, and he said take a map and put a pin wherever there’s a Whole Foods. I sort of laughed, and he said, “No, really, I’m not joking.” It’s those communities with the Prius driving, composting, organic food-eating people. Science journalist and MIT professor Seth Mnookin in a 2011 interview
So here I am, cranky and irritated after an emergency trip to one of the many Whole Foods in the Bay Area, astonished at the alleged vaccine/Whole Foods connection and up to my ears in fair trade, cruelty free, organic, shade-grown, beautifully displayed, hugely costly foods, vegetable prices determined partly by the cost of workers piling and re-piling them in perfect order (not that it’s not pretty, it just seems so….)
These are cruel and dangerous times. We have substantial issues to confront. We should be healthy and well-fed when we face down these crises but how did we get to a place where it is also a virtue to be smug and self-satisfied about being able to do that?
I will be a proud Progressive with my last breath, but please try to get those rude, cart-pushy, deli-line crashing, parking place stealing people to behave a little more socially conscious about the people in their immediate environment (um, your store), oh Whole Foods, so the harmony you sell (see image at the top of this post) in your ads can emerge inside your stores, too.
