The brick-facade Tativille that is the US Patent Office’s new Alexadnria headquarters got a new tenant this month — a sparkling new Whole Foods. Jennifer and I have explored the place and bought a few things, but its customers are the two-lawyer/two-bureaucrat families that make up much of the DC area. Since I don’t bill by the hour, and Jennifer doesn’t work at all, we’re going to stick with Trader Joe’s for most of our groceries. Neither of us knows what to do with most of the two-dozen different kinds of fresh mushrooms Whole Foods stocks anyway.
At alternet.org today (a site with little love in its heart for Wal-Mart), someone takes Whole Foods to task as well. Stan Cox, who earlier wrote that typical Wal-Mart cashier could not pay rent or buy groceries (at Wal-Mart) on a Wal-Mart salary also discovers that a typical Whole Foods cashier is not paid much more and certainly could afford to shop at their own store, even with a discount:
At Salina’s Wal-Mart, the bill [for a USDA recommended list of “low-cost” foods] had been $232, plus sales tax. At Whole Foods, the same basket of food cost $564. Texas has no sales tax on food, and Whole Foods employees get a 20 percent discount, bringing the cost for the San Antonio cashier all the way down to $451. That monthly price tag includes only the cheapest foods in each category, and none of the store’s popular luxury items.
Whole Foods is almost as anti-union as Wal-Mart is (only one store has successfully uninionized), and the hippy-dippy feel of the place tends to wear off after six months of working there.
Cox says the company’s CEO is unapologetic about making a nice, tidy profit nor does he apologize about the wages. “Customers who frequent Whole Foods are unlikely to be Wal-Mart cashiers or other low-income earners … Half of the zip codes with Whole Foods stores lie above $72,000 in average income. A fourth of them exceed $100,000,” Cox writes. Well, what’s to apologize for? There’s nothing wrong with selling expensive stuff to people willing and able to pay for it. There’s nothing wrong with aesthetic choices, or several dozen different kind of frresh mushrooms, or $120 bottles of wine. Raise your hands, all you reading this who make a living out of selling something other than the cheapest product at the lowest price? Not everyone is price sensitive, or price sensitive on all things. Or else Orbea would never sell a $3,000 bicycle.
Cox goes on to argue for living wages and “alternatives” (whatever that means) to “traditional” ways of retailing food. (I love the notion of alternatives — you can buy and sell, or ration. Ain’t no other way for people get goods. Well, theft maybe…) I like co-ops, and there’s one in the Sunset District of San Francisco my wife and I miss very much. But what Cox describes later in his piece with People’s Grocery in Oakland, California, sounds a lot like Trader Joe’s. I like farmers markets, too, but they aren’t always a guarantee that stuff will be cheap — Old Town’s farmers market is pretty expensive (the retailers have pretty well figured out the two-lawyer household) when you compare that produce with what you can buy at Trader Joe’s.
The answer, of course, if the retailer in question offends you easthetically, morally, or commercially is — don’t shop there. And don’t complain if others do.
1:55 pm on January 25, 2006
