Dear Whole Foods

Vanderleun knocks another one out of the park with this rant:

Dear Whole Foods: We're through. It's not me. It's you.
You know how it is, Whole. You know. And I know you know. We just can't pretend it is what it was any longer.

Bad things have been happening between us whenever I've tried to get into your sack for quite some time. It's time to face the fact that we just don't have that old natural spark between us any longer. We've faded from organic to conventional. It's time to move on to fresh fruits and vegetables new -- elsewhere. Ditto your firm, moist and alluring meats of many flavors. None of what you're doing to me is doing it for me any more.

I ignored a lot of your irritating habits, Whole -- like keeping that entire wing of the dairy case jammed with your revoltingly raw vegan pastes and six flavors of tofu, those sloppy seconds of soy. I rationalized you were just trying to keep your green ass from getting so fat you couldn't get into that tacky green apron you insist on wearing all the time, because "they go with my Earth shoes".

I put up with your petulant insistence on "helping me" find things I wasn't looking for whenever I paused in an aisle to ask myself "Johnson Grass and Brayla Suet Sausage? What the hell is that and what life form eats it?"

I put up with your plucking money from my wallet while I slept, so you could blow it on wind power and floats in the Green Pride Parades. I figured that every Whole needs a hobby.

Yes, I put up with your junkies' greed as you whined for more and more.... especially in the cheese department where you had no shame in marking up English and French and "local, sustainable" cheeses first to $20 a pound (Or as you coyly say, "$19.99!").... and then up to $25 a pound... and then -- since somebody was evidently paying you to screw them this hard -- when you went whole hog and started into the $35 a pound range with no end to your cheese needs in sight.

Yes, I just looked the other way, Whole. I figured I could always just skulk around the deli counter cadging slices of salami and smidgens of cheese off your perky crew until they grew tired or I was full. But the feeling of being used by you -- especially with the Euro cheeses which went up and up regardless of how heavily the Dollar was sitting on the face of the Euro -- kept on pinching me in the pocket.

It's a matter of balance. We sell boutique milk (Twin Brook) and organic and "natural" products at the store but we don't gouge our customers for that privilege. We shop in our local food co-op and at Trader Joe's whenever we are in Bellingham as well. There was a Whole Foods store that opened about two miles from where I used to live in Seattle and I went in there maybe once or twice. Talk about running a business into the ground by being too passionate about one's ideologies: (Click on the above link to see a full-size interactive chart.)