Ah, Whole Foods
posted in The Popular Culture |A couple years ago, in the San Francisco branch of Whole Foods Market, off of steep and divisionary slope of Van Ness Blvd, I picked up a flat package containing a fistful of cold, cooked white rice, and a few pieces of bloody tuna thrown this way and that. I brought it to the help desk, and asked, “What is this?”
They looked at me with more than puzzlement. “Sushi.”
“Yeah,” I said. “No. This.” I pointed to the price - $13.99, for a palm-sized, inch-high designer-plastic shingle of cold, syphilitic leftover tidal scraping (alright, it wasn’t syphilitic, it was just cold and intensely unappetizing to yours truly), but a volume of food that wouldn’t have stopped a starving man from throwing himself into the lion’s den in the Roman Colosseum, in hopes of maybe getting a real bite of cat flesh, while being ripped to pieces…
“I’m saving money to go to Whole Foods Market!”
I asked them if they thought a working-class family could feed itself on what was offered at their store. “We have many budget-priced selections,” I was told by one of the quintuply-tattooed and pierced anorexic heroin-addict working there. (Alright, maybe he wasn’t anorexic).
“Yes,” I said. “I’m familiar with everything in your store that doesn’t cost $22.00 a pound.” And I walked away, because Whole Foods used to be a market for people who cared a little (and not a lot), about their health, and the health of their local and national environment.
But no more.
For years, I shopped at Whole Foods Market, buying a few staples from their bulk section, and from their ‘budget’ “365″ label. But my buying ability has been chipped away, year by year, by a ceaseless tidal flood of price increases, that knows neither shame nor pity…
- “Budget? I don’t see no stinking Budget!”
Even while WFM ventured and won a (pointless) hostile takeover of their single competitor, Wild Oats. Even while they’ve expanded and expanded. Even while their stock rose and rose (and now falls and falls)…
…until I found that the only thing I could afford at WFM were three items in the bulk aisle: Oats, Rice and Split Peas.
But the tide has not turned, and the prices go up and up, like a cruel mistress with a desperate sugar daddy.
And I defended ex-Ceo John Mackey’s fanoodling with the boards at Yahoo finance over the Wild Oats buyout. “He’s a brazen capitalist,” I said. “He’s a streetfighter in his realm, I am in mine, so much the better.”
Wrong. So much the worse, so much the less competitive, so much the more ruthlessly over-priced, over-milled, and over-produced; shelves full of nothing but torpid garbage for the (remaining) nouveaux-riche, and their taste for the useless, inedible, overpriced bulemia-gourmande that used to be reserved for specialty stores in Chestnut Hill to La Jolla that reeked of duck bladder and ancient cheese whose putreificence would blind you from thirty paces.
Now I can afford, on a regular basis, exactly one thing at WFM: Tofu - $1.19 a package, (which is up from $0.99, last year), and my business goes to the local Stop and Shop. Organics be damned.
And when Alfred E. Newman has your number, you know your number’s up…
So, I’m starting a list, to be updated, of recent price increases in my area. You are invited to add your own…
- Bulk Rolled Oats - overnight from $0.79 to $1.39.
Ten years ago, oats were $0.39 a pound in bulk, and remained at 0.49 for about 8 years.
They’re still $0.59 a pound at my local market. Eft Ewe, Whole Foods.
-Eft-Ewe (or, “Eff-You”, colloquially)
- Corn tortillas - $1.49 for 10, up from $0.79.
- Soy yogurt (large container): $2.69 up from $1.99, overnight.
- (small containers) - $0.99 and $1.09 for four to six ounces, up from $0.79.
- Hot Soup, pints and quarts, up from $2.00 and $4.00, to $4.00 and $7.00 dollars.
- Salad Bar - $7.99 per pound, up from $4.99, $5.99 and $6.99 in the last 4 years.
- Soy/Rice Milk - $1.49 per quart, up from $1.19, overnight.
And I’m just getting started. I’ll keep this list growing, updated and corrected.
So, What’s gone up in your Whole Paycheck Market?