Problem for the CEO of Whole Foods is that what he is selling the the whole liberal-left social experience. Whole Food is to a left-winger what an ammunition store is to a gun nut.
Have you ever been in a Whole Foods and looked over the shoppers along with the clerks? Read the bumper stickers out in the parking lot?
As much as anything in the world is real as opposed to some kind of social construct, to borrow some reasoning from the kind of people who might teach at an academic department with “Studies” in the title and may also shop at Whole Foods, the “real” version of Whole Foods is something like the Willys Street Coop in Madison, Wisconsin. Whole Foods is a kind of synthesis of the East Madison 1960′s hippie food coop with a kind of boutique seller of upscale, luxury foods. Whole Foods is “not real” in the sense that it is not a kind of hippie quasi-socialist coop, it is a for-profit corporate entity, and as such, it carefully crafts its corporate brand. Just as McDonalds has kitch brand-ID like Ronald McDonald and the Hamburgler, Whole Foods has its left-wing stupid “Declaration of Interdependence” plastered on the wall by the cash registers.
In a way I blame more Mackey and side with Goofy Left-wing Lady on this. I mean what is Goofy Left-wing Lady purchasing at Whole Foods? Food? No, that can be purchased for half the money down the street at a chain supermarket. What one is purchasing at Whole Foods is the Whole Liberal-Left-Wing social experience, mingling with people who share your world view. By going iconoclast on Health Care Reform, Mackey has damaged (who knows if it is that serious) the brand.
If one is truly a “man or woman of the people”, one shops at Aldi, an international chain of German ownership specializing in bare bones product selection and rock bottom prices. Among the social cross section one encounters there are a number of inter-racial couples. To be inter-racially married, even all of these years after Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier, one has to be genuinely liberal in terms of social outlook, and one has to seriously not care about what other people think about you. Such people shop at Aldi and mingle freely with the people who have to shop there on account of the low prices. I do not see inter-racial couples shopping at Whole Foods. I do not see anyone fitting the profile of a Whole Foods shopper at Aldi. People who shop at Whole Foods care a great deal what people think about them.
Another interesting matter relating to Whole Foods is a book titled “Class” by Paul Fussell. It is this short work outlining what social class you belong to based on your tastes in entertainment and housing and house decorating. One of the interesting categories in “high prole” (prole as in proletarian after Orwell’s 1984 and the mass of people who spoke thick Cockney and were not Party members). The observation is that one can be wealthy enough to be considered “rich” by any reasonable definition, but one can remain working class in one’s sense of taste and be, well, high prole.
The other interesting thing about the book, which on one hand seemed critical of the lower classes for having cheesy tastes, but on the other hand seemed critical of the middle classes for being affected in their tastes out of insecurity about their social standing, offered “The X Way Out” as a final chapter, describing a kind of middle class bohemianism as a way out of social striving and class insecurity.
Fussell’s description of “The X Way Out” describes the Whole Foods clientel to a T, and to me, it is even phonier than the kind of middle class, say, as lampooned in the movie “The Graduate.” Again, I think the only people who are not phony about social class are the professional-class inter-racial couples shopping at Aldi, because to be inter-racially married and to shop at Aldi (or especially Wal-Mart), you have to really not worry about what anyone thinks about you.
