There’s a pretty good New Yorker profile of the nut who runs Whole Foods, John Mackey (via Steve Benen). He’s a vegan who doesn’t believe in global warming, opposes health care reform, and loves Ayn Rand. The article describes him as a “right-wing hippie”, which seems fairly accurate to me. I liked this part:
The health-care op-ed’s headline, “THE WHOLE FOODS ALTERNATIVE TO OBAMACARE,” was the Journal’s, Mackey says, but the sentiments were his. Mackey’s prescriptions ranged from the obvious (people need to eat better) to the market-minded (promote interstate competition among insurers) to the dreamy (the corporations will take care of us). The gist was that, together, they’d obviate the need for a federal plan, and that the course being pursued by the White House and the Democrats would have disastrous consequences. He led with an epigram attributed to Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Before submitting the op-ed, he showed it to Lanny Davis, the former Clinton White House special counsel, who represented Whole Foods in its antitrust battle. Davis told me that he “prodded John a little to think like a liberal,” and he reckons that the Thatcher quote was ill-advised. Still, he blames “left-wing McCarthyism” for the outrage that greeted the piece.
I don’t shop at Whole Foods, because we have Wegmans in western New York. There’s all kinds of stories about the Wegman family’s political leanings (they’re pro-life and anti-union), too, but I don’t particularly care, because the stores are excellent and, by all accounts, the employees are treated very well. And, by the same token, I don’t boycott Whole Foods just because the CEO is a weirdo and an asshole, though I probably wouldn’t shop there even if I didn’t have Wegmans near by because Whole Foods seems like a rip-off to me whenever I go in.
But I think we’d all be better off if the “There Will Be Blood” vision of business titans prevailed over the “Atlas Shrugged” one in the public consciousness. It’s simplistic to say this, but a real world Galt’s Gulch would likely be an insane asylum or a prison.
mcc
So what I’ve discovered lately is that Trader Joes has these things that are sort of like carrot cake muffins? And they’re amazing. They’re filling and do a good job of convincing you you’re eating something sort of healthy, yet they’re basically just carrot cake. It seems so obvious in retrospect (did the cream cheese really add anything anyway?) but I’ve never seen these anywhere else.
DougJ
They’re filling and do a good job of convincing you you’re eating something sort of healthy, yet they’re basically just carrot cake.
But, in fairness, Trader Joe’s just pretends stuff is a good deal, not that it’s good for you.
General Winfield Stuck
Hell yes, DougJ. All the Banksta’s end up killing their wingnut preacher bidness pardners with private bowling pins.
tgidieday
Or Galt’s Gulch could be at the bottom of the ocean, populated by hideous, yet smug, mutants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioshock
Comrade Luke
As expected Jon Stewart is taking apart the whole Nutsack Bomber thing.
He must have been salivating over this for the last week.
Fraud Guy
I just skip Whole Foods because they’re way overpriced.
Trader Joe’s can have good deals, but local markets have the best values, and the quality can be good.
adolphus
I moved to Florida from the Mid-Atlantic a couple of years ago. No Trader Joes, no Wegmans, and no Whole Foods.
Publix sucks.
(I’m not allowed to say that here, or I get arrested. For some reason Floridians love Publix.)
I really miss Wegmans.
BR
I’m just happy that I moved last year and now live 3 miles from Vermont, where I can get some of the best local produce and eggs and cheese I’ve ever had.
If you haven’t signed up for a local CSA, you’re missing out.
hovercraft
you can always resort to stu lenards since you’re in ny
Comrade Mary
There’s a Whole Foods in Toronto, but I manage to live without it. I get most groceries from whoever has a sale this week; produce, grains, nuts, tofu and fish from Kensington Market; and ground beef from the local organic butcher. Milk products have no hormones or antibiotics in them up here, so there’s no need to go organic on that.
Getting a Trader Joe’s would be great, though. Oh, and we could definitely use Target.
bago
Yaaaaay! Someone got themselves hit by the subway. Now I have to spend all night re routing.
jcricket
Please – Galt’s Gulch would be a strip-joint without the strippers, basically. Either that or a usenet rec.sci.* forum IRL.
At any rate – Mackey is an ass, but this whole “Obamacare” thing is going to be a fucking debacle for the right and for Libertarians. People only want what they are selling b/c they believe the government is incapable of providing solutions. Certainly under Republicans that’s true, but it isn’t always the case under Democrats.
If “Obamacare” is at all successful (insures 30 million people, eliminates pre-existing condition clauses and most rescission, cuts medical bankruptcies, closes Medicare donut hole) and it’s got his name on it – Republicans are going to see what a real “Reagan” looks like (i.e. someone whose name people want on all sorts of monuments and what-not).
This will have the side effect of further enraging RedState, Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and all the other fucking nuts that are the Republican base. See how far that rage takes them electorally outside the deep south (and even in the deep south long term).
Bubblegum Tate
@hovercraft:
Stew Leonard’s is the coolest grocery store ever. My mom sent me a bunch of Stew’s chocolate croissants for breakfast–talk about recapturing a delicious part of my childhood!
As for Whole Foods…meh. I live on Oakland–if I’m going to do the upscale grocery thing, I much prefer Andronico’s.
freelancer (itouch)
@bago:
That sounds horribly inconvenient for you, bago.
The high here on thursday is -1. The high. Today’s was 3. I bought ski goggles, superawesome gloves, a balaclava, and 3 burkas. I’m thinking of a mid February trip to Hoth to thaw out.
wmd
they call it “whole paycheck”, not whole foods around here.
Yutsano
We have a local store in this area called Yoke’s. Fantastic produce and a great variety. They offer also the best customer service I’ve had at any store anywhere. Don’t tell the wingnuts who live in my area that they’re a collective however. All full-time employees get a share of the company. Could be why they a) don’t require a union b) are highly responsive to customer requests/concerns and c) offer better benefits than even the union shops in town do.
Loneoak
Mackey’s clearly a dickwad, but man were the pro-boycott people around here insufferable. There’s plenty of reasons not to shop at Whole Foods, but the personal views of the CEO is hardly one of them. If we are all morally culpable for the beliefs of everybody we are in commerce with then we might as well starve to death.
Morbo
Hmm, if only I had imagined all the inmates as CEOs on my play through Arkham Asylum…
JBerardi
John Mackey… drinks… your… Raw Organic Kombucha!
(Which is a real bummer because it costs like four dollars for a 16 oz bottle.)
Spiny Norman
No “likely” about it. It’s a Postcommunist Russian prison infested with XDR TB.
Sly
@JBerardi:
I eagerly away the techno remix.
jl
Does Mackey smoke? Ayn Rand said you had to smoke in order to be an Objectivist, because it proved, I don’t know, something about wholehearted assertion of the self, or some such nonsense.
Do any vegans smoke? Mackey better smoke or he is a skinny glibertarian fraud, IMHO.
JBerardi
American Spirits, maybe. Also, pot. Definitely pot.
jl
@JBerardi: Never thought of pot. Would pot count for Ayn?
Martin
Mackey is off his talking points. Eliminating state insurance regulation would piss off the red states like nothing else because they’d lose the ability to dick around with abortion coverage and services.
And doing so would almost certainly bring the public option back into play.
But yeah, he’s a serious douchebag.
parksideq
@bago: Holy crap, what line? (I’m assuming you mean NYC Transit, if not, I have no idea)
Back on topic somewhat: one of my favorite parts of going to school in Ithaca was Wegmans. It’s the supermarket chain that Trader Joe’s wishes it was. And apparently people really like working there, so that’s a plus.
I’d gladly knock down the Whole Foods in Union Square if it got replaced by Wegmans.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
I’ve heard it referred to as such for many years, in nearly every city I’ve lived in or visited. It’s a well-deserved label. I very rarely shopped there before and now I’ll avoid it altogether, no need to help the asshole become richer. Not to mention that I can find everything sold at whole paycheck at local markets, my co-op, the strip district (great old downtown wholesaler/ethnic shopping area), farmer’s markets and trader joe’s. All for a lot less $ and and all local.
Also, I think it’s silly that just because Mackey’s vegan and into organic foods that is all it takes to label him a “hippie.” I’ve encountered a few vegans whose attraction to the lifestyle seemed entirely rooted in their inflated ego and self-worship; they don’t want to put anything into their bodies that isn’t pure and it has nothing to do with liberal political ideology, compassion for animals or the environment. (I think most vegans are motivated by the very opposite– it’s about outward issues, compassion, etc.) Therefore I find it bizarre that anyone would call Mackey a “hippie” outside of trying to be cute.
Mark
I am genuinely conflicted about where to buy my groceries. Safeway and Whole Foods are equidistant from my house.
Safeway is unionized, but man, are they a bunch of pricks at that location (and all of the other nearby locations) – and lazy and slow. Safeway also seems to have a very old workforce (Whole Foods is much younger) and I wonder if the union has voted to make the entry-level jobs pay poorly.
Whole Foods is competitive price-wise on a lot of items and the employees are generally good, but a number of them are total flakes. I asked one of them why their vegetarian sandwiches were the same price as their meat sandwiches and she told me: “They’re just that delicious!”
Like I said, I’m conflicted. There’s an independent grocery store nearby that charges more than either WF or Safeway, so that’s not a better choice.
Batocchio
Lanny Davis, demonstrating those awesome powers of perception and persuasion yet again.
Yutsano
BTW part of my job is talking to customer service staffs all over the US. I can tell just from talking to them where I would want to shop and where I wouldn’t. The few times I’ve talked to a Wegman’s I’ve been impressed with how knowledgeable and friendly they are, not to mention how cooperative they are. Kroger and Wal-Mart can DIAF as far as I’m concerned. Of course I thought that about Wal-Mart even before I got my current job.
freelancer (itouch)
@Batocchio:
Fuck Lanny Davis with no less than 2 of AsiangrrlMN’s rusty pitchforks.
Ripley
Moved from central PA to southern NM for the weather, among other things, and I miss Wegman’s too. Down here, it’s either Albertson’s (drab, cramped, overpriced) or Satan’s Five-and-Dime itself, Walmart. Ugh. The local attempts at upscale/natural are like European food mausoleums.
In a college town for fuck sake. I can haz a Trader Joez?
silentbeep
I hate my Ralph’s i don’t like the selection and the customer service is crap. I love my Whole Foods, the customer service is excellent and I enjoy the selection, ditto for Trader Joe’s.
Ruckus
@Mark:
It sounds like we live in the same neighborhood. And I agree that some things a WF are cheaper or the same price and better quality than Safeway. And the staff actually seem to know their stuff at WF. Plus I don’t get what feels like corporate customer service BS at WF like at Safeway. The clerk has to call out your name from the receipt and ask if you need help to your car. They have to ask everyone and it seems condescending to ask a grown adult who buys one small bag if they need help getting to their car.
So what if the Mackey is a dick. I can’t imagine the CEO at Safeway being much different, maybe in detail but not overall. Hell I can’t imagine many CEO’s of big companies being less than dicks these days and a boy hasta eat.
Glocksman
@Yutsano:
I don’t have your job and God knows as a good union man I shouldn’t deal with Wally World any more than I have to, but our local Wal-Mart passed my customer service test when the girl at the counter immediately paged the store manager when I asked her to help me with a problem she couldn’t solve.
Of course the store manager couldn’t do much either*, but she at least pretended to care and spent a half hour dealing with me.
The above notwithstanding, the main reason I buy at Wal-Mart at all is because they’re open at 3AM when I get off of work.
The local and regional grocery stores used to be open during those hours, but started closing at midnight once the Bush Recession hit.
*I returned a shit TomTom GPS for a refund and packed the auto DC adapter from my old Sony in the box instead of the correct one.
The manager was more concerned about whether or not the TomTom adapter would work with the Sony than if the the Sony adapter would work (it will not) with the TomTom.
Of course the unit I returned had already been shipped off to a DC for processing but I had the distinct feeling if I’d complained enough I would have received an equivalent GPS free of charge.
I didn’t do so as I’d already bought a Garmin to replace said Sony and the Sony will charge from its adapter.
Glocksman
@Yutsano:
Also I wasn’t surprised to learn of this since I think the woman is a tacky whore, but my biological father’s second wife literally used a set of bedclothes she bought from Wal-Mart for 6 months and then had the gall to return them for a refund after redecorating the bedroom by claiming they were a gift.
Sheer gall and tackiness aside, my first instinct as a store manager would have been to call ‘bullshit’ as Wal-Mart’s inventory system is the literal envy of the retail world and it would have been trivial for the manager to point out that the set in question had been sold 6-8 months ago, was obviously used, and was beyond the return date.
Instead they gave the bitch a complete refund.
geg6
Our regional market, Giant Eagle, is awesome. They have locally grown produce, a large organic section, and as many high quality, gourmet type products as whole foods, not to mention good low priced store labels and excellent prepared foods. Plus I get fuel points to use at their gas stations. I wouldn’t give up Giant Eagle for Whole Foods for anything. And Mackey is a huge asshole with an ego to match based on the online interview I read on him a few weeks ago. What a jerk.
Glocksman
@Ripley:
‘Satan’s five and dime’.
That’s worthy of being included in the BJ lexicon, especially if you’re a regular reader of the Sinfest webcomic.
My only shame is that I didn’t think of it first.
Moesha
Wegmans rocks….I live in Manhattan now so I shop the independents. I go to separate stores for everything…greengrocers, fish market, butcher. Tres Euro.
J. Michael Neal
My only experience with Whole Foods was making markets in their options for 18 months. It’s a fucking grocery store. No grocery store should trade at a P/E of 28, I don’t care how trendy their food is.
I think, in the end, I pretty much broke even on it*, but that motherfucking grocery store caused me more heartburn than all the organic antacid in the world could cure.
*Maytag was what really killed me, though half of it was entirely my fault.
bob h
There is also in the New Yorker article the faint suggestion of sexual preoccupation/kinkiness that would definitely identify the Whole Foods leader as a Republican.
media browski
Re Galt’s Gulch, ever heard of the game Bioshock? It presents an excellent take for what a bunch of Randians would actually behave like if left to their own devices. (They devolve into fascist factions and anarchy)
Violet
@Glocksman:
A manager at Bed Bath and Beyond told me that I could return torn sheets for a refund if they were purchased at BB&B. I was buying a new set after another set of sheets tore after only a short time of use (clearly some kind of flaw in the fabric). I was mentioning this and he told me I could have returned them had they been purchased at BB&B. I said, “I can return used sheets?” – clearly I was shocked. And he confirmed I could.
That just seems wrong.
gbear
@Mark:
More likely that, on what they earn at the grocery store, they’ll have to work until they die. They simply can’t afford to retire.
Incertus
(I’m not allowed to say that here, or I get arrested. For some reason Floridians love Publix.)
Because, at least in my part of Florida, the only other options are Winn Dixie, Wal-Mart, or Whole Foods. You’re gonna tell me Publix sucks harder than any of them? And they make great sandwiches, besides.
JMC in the ATL
In my parents’ part of Florida, the choice is Winn Dixie or Publix. Publix wins hands-down.
Where I am in Atlanta (actually North Decatur / North Druid Hills), the options appear to be Publix, Kroger, Whole Foods, and the limited options at Target. Again, Publix wins.
Plus Publix is one of Florida’s true business success stories. It is employee-owned, and was started and is headquartered in Florida, with stores across the state. In a state with such diversity in its population and between cities (what do Miami, Orlando, Daytona Beach, and Tallahassee have in common?), its a common focal point.
It is kind of like Beall’s, I think. My parents and their friends shop there first, because its a Florida chain.
Also, they do make really great sandwiches. And potato salad. And fried chicken.
Walker
I love Wegmans, but they have a serious problem with their meat selection. They only carry prime cuts of meat. Any time I need something for a southern recipe, like ox tail or ham hock or even a decent sausage that is not made of turkey, I am out of luck. Getting pork shoulder for BBQ is hit and miss. Same with catfish.
Fortunately, Tops does carry these things. Hell, I can get chitterlings at Tops.
drew42
And Wegman’s isn’t? Whenever I shop there, the total cost ends up about 50% higher than if I bought the same groceries at Tops or P&C. I get the feeling I’m just paying for the ambiance — they do have nice lighting.
smith
I was in a Whole Foods once and the prices were utterly outrageous (IMHO). I wouldn’t shop there even if I had the budget. Also now that I know about Mackey I would avoid Whole Foods like the plague anyway.
Wegman’s owners are right-wing but they don’t write op-eds about their political beliefs and shove them in your face. I LOVE Wegman’s and they do cover birth control so they aren’t right-wing to the point they’re denying people access to medication(s). They also have a very sizable organic and healthy choice section (at least the Wegmans by me does).
Wegmans is known for treating their workers very well, offers college scholarships, and often recruits inner-city kids to work at Wegmans. Everyone I know who has worked or works at Wegmans loved/loves it there.
twiffer
farmer’s markets are only open for a few months at CT, so in the winter, whole foods for better produce. also, the only place nearby to get a decent selection of cheeses (alas they’ve stopped carrying caerphilly and finding shropshire blue is hit or miss). trader joes is around, but really only good for frozen & packaged stuff. stop & shop for the basics.
gelfling545
I am a big fan of Wegman’s and I hear they are starting to spread out of WNY. Whatever their personal politics, they don’t seem to be trying to force it on the public and I hear from the young set that Wegman’s jobs are sought after but hard to get as they don’t get much employee turnover. One thing that I have noticed lately that they are doing well for the community is employing persons with disabilities in non-“token” jobs.
I used to cook summers for the cafe in a local “health food” store and Wegman’s became more and more competitive as a source of organics, vegan foods, etc. I just hope they will not be taken over by some overseas corporation as happened to our other local supermarket chain, which is now an expensive mess.
Paul in KY
Adolphus, when I lived in Florida I shopped at Publix & liked it.
There are different levels of Publix stores, though. Some are the nicest stores I’ve ever been in (these are usually around hoity-toity areas) and some that are like a badly run Food Lion.
Brendan
Allow me to join the “I miss Wegmans” parade!
I worked for them for 12 years, and then moved to NC from Rochester. I still stop by Wegmans in PA when I travel to see my parents in Maine.
Around here, the closest thing to Wegmans is Harris Teeter. We’ve also got BiLo (ok), and Food Lion (skip it!!)
Maxwell James
Mackey may be a strange man and wrong about some things, but if every CEO were like him this would be a much better country.
EIGRP
@Brendan: When I was in Atlanta in 1996, I went to Harris Teeter multiple times. It was worse than Tops up here. I also hear that HT (and others) visit Wegmans to be more like them.
I am close to the Pittsford Super-Wegmans. I’m looking forward to trying their new restaurant “Next Door” which is across the street (Tastings is turning into a banquet center IIRC). Sadly, Wegmans is also getting rid of the Tea Bar in Pittsford – a really nice little area.
Wegmans might be more expensive, but you’re paying for wide aisles (ever try to get one cart by another when you have kids in tow at Tops?) and their customer service. You can return just about any product at any time for any reason. We have been extremely pleased with them.
-Eric
Evinfuilt
There is ONE thing I love about living in Texas. We have HEB, and their specialty foodie store, Central Market. In Houston CM is right near Whole Foods, but unless you’ve got cash to burn there’s no reason to go to Whole Foods.
I did have a problem with CM two thanksgivings ago (where they ran out of the specific turkey I had pre-ordered a month prior.) Now I lived 30+ miles from there, but the manager went out and tracked down a similar turkey (well to him it was similar, it was nothing of the sort, and they found it at Whole Foods) and then had a driver deliver said turkey all the way down where I live along with a $100 gift card.
Everyone I know who’s worked at any HEB loves it, they treat employees well, keep excellent stock of local food and just about anything else you could want.
Still wouldn’t complain if a Trader Joe’s opened down here.
chopper
@Incertus:
publix is pretty bad, but man winn-dixie is a turd.
Mike P
@JBerardi: This.
Kylroy
Jumping on the Bioshock tangent here. I don’t know if Rapture (a 50’s-SciFi underwater city) qualifies as “real world”, but the setting’s still a great example of how Galt’s Gulch could never work. Specifically, it shows that such a society would be completely incapable of allocating scarce resources (the central task of *any* economy). When everyone believes they are completely entitled to whatever they can grab, they start grabbing with both hands…and both barrels.
The game itself has a rare sea slug that enables people to perform genetic manipulation as the catalyst of Rapture’s downfall, but I can’t see how the pure libertarian approach would handle oil or steel or, hell, *FOOD* any better in the long run.
Bill Arnold
Did they really mean “average”? Really selfish distributions could satisfy this constraint, e.g. a company where the top 6 percent get paid really well, and the bottom 94 percent get paid nothing at all.
mak
Where is the love for Genuardi’s? Han Ah Reum (H-Mart)? Hong Kong Market?
Bueller? Anyone?
Dr. Loveless
There’s a Whole Foods just a couple of blocks from my house, but I’ve only been there maybe three times. Meh. It’s cramped, the customers are snooty as hell, and it has nothing you can’t get for less $$ at Trader Joe’s, Henry’s, the farmer’s market, or the food co-op in Ocean Beach (a bit of a drive, but well-run, and not a weird Stalinist nightmare like the one in Brooklyn we were discussing a few months back). Plus, the guys who work at my Trader Joe’s are about a million times hotter.
JenJen
Weird, because just last night I curled up with a bad cold and a warm blanket and watched “There Will Be Blood” for the first time.
It blew my freaking mind, and catapulted immediately to its rightful place on my personal “Best Films of the Decade” list. In fact, it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen, and Daniel Day-Lewis… good gawd, what an astounding actor.
Can’t believe it took me so long to finally see this incredible film. I also can’t believe that so many reviewers (cough Ebert cough) hated the ending; I thought it kicked ass. “I’m Finished!”
sparky
hey Floridians: join a CSA, or go to a farmer’s market. owner aside, WF seems to be making an effort at least in South Florida and NJ to stock locally-grown produce. if WF were actively pursuing a rightist line that might be different as to my willingness to shop there. incidentally, for many items they are the same or cheaper than other supermarket chains.
i find publix is quite hit or miss.
oldfatherwilliam
Long-time Safeway employee here. Supermarkets everywhere are low margin and hotly competitive. Management of these savage environments are by nature Social Darwinists if not outright Randians, and since like has every incentive to promote like, they are uniformly assholes. Shop for groceries where you will, be assured you are trading with assholes. That being a given, try to treat the clerks well, folks. They hang on to their jobs so long and get so old because unionised jobs usually provide an almost-living wage and yes, HEALTHCARE.
tootiredoftheright
You guys should go try out ALDI. They drove Walmart out of Germany and are expanding throughout the US. Food is much quality stuff then walmart and often cheaper.
trevalyan
@Kylroy:
Well, the fact ADAM makes its users both incredibly powerful and clinically insane would probably be a more critical factor than its scarcity. Given that seemingly every damn bad guy is getting ADAM, I wouldn’t think it was all that rare. The problem is, there is never enough. In general, resources were allocated to some satisfaction even when central governments were weak, such as in post-Revolution America, but our current system came into being after huge numbers of people stopped supporting the old systems in the 20th century.
The point to Bioshock isn’t that Objectivists or libertarians are inherently bad people- even though listening to the audio diaries generally made me want to kill their writers- but that individuality breaks down fast when factions form in society and people only respect force as a value. Fontaine manages to spin Bible-smuggling and Fontaine’s Home for the Poor into full-blown civil war, and Andrew Ryan takes bad measures in dealing with it. I think it would have played out the same without ADAM. And possibly even with a real government.
It wouldn’t surprise me terribly if a Fontaine-like figure ended up exploiting the teabaggers, for instance.
tootiredoftheright
@Violet:
Lots of people return stuff at walmart that quite clearly shouldn’t be returned because it is either obviously stolen or the manager doesn’t open up the box to see if the item is in fact in the box. Yes people have gotten money on empty boxes for claiming the vcr or dvd player they bought didn’t work and the manager who cleared the return didn’t check the item out of the box to see if it worked or was in fact bought from the store. So for a cardboard box they got thirty or fifty or whatever amount of money.
There was a blog operated by a walmart worker who documented a lot of fraudlent returns by people who either stole the item from the store itself sometimes just walking up to the counter from the department it had been taken from or didn’t qualify as a return because the item had been used for years. Managers overrode it and accepted the fraudlent returns.
Mind you I have had a return item issue due to a stupid rule that bestbuy.com purchases cannot be refunded at a retail bestbuy store. It was a gift of two dvds I didn’t want and they weren’t open and the gift shipment receipt was in the shipping box which I brought.
tootiredoftheright
@trevalyan:
Also that in the Ayn Rand society people still have to clean the toilets and do the manual labor which points out the lies of the society.
As for ADAM it doesn’t make people insane what they did with the ADAM did. Something like that if people had sense would have been incredibly restricted instead of doled out willy nilly.
Besides one should play the System Shock games they are much better then Bioshock.
ChrisS
@Walker:
I don’t know which Wegman’s you’re shopping at, but at mine they have everything from bone-in USDA Prime rib roasts at $350 to smoked ham-hocks at $4 (I grabbed a few for my split pea soup). And they have ox-tails, too. I almost picked them up for an Afrikaner’s poike.
I’m typically very impressed with everything Wegman’s butcher shop has to offer. Although now I have connections with local farms to get my beef and lamb wholesale.
One of my favorite little touches is that the cheese shop has a little basket with trial-size chunks of expensive stinky cheeses for sale so I don’t have to pay $18 just to try an imported sheep’s milk bleu and find out that I don’t like it.
Remember November
Sadly, the quality of WF isn’t all that. They are also way overpriced.
Give Mackey a taste of his own, and shop at Trader Joes, WIld By Nature or other natural food stores.
JenJen
Anybody happen to see Mackey on John Stossel’s shitty new Fox Business Channel show? If you’re not quite yet certain of what a d-bag Mackey is, watching him and Stossel exchange wet sloppy Randian kisses would have removed all doubt, I promise.
Bituminous
@DougJ
As someone in one of the B-J threads here pointed out a while ago, a libertarian is a republican who wants to smoke dope.
I’d say ‘right-wing hippie’ is also an accurate description of the same.
Maxwell James
Bill Arnold:
That’s certainly true. But it’s also clearly not the case at Whole Foods, whose frontline worker wages are well-known to be highly competitive. I worked at a friendly neighborhood health food co-op for five years, making $8-11/hr. During that time, I had plenty of colleagues who jumped ship to the local WFM, where they all made at least 50% more.
‘Whole Paycheck’ carries a somewhat different connotation for people who work in the grocery industry, by the way.
Kobie
DougJ — where in Western NY, if you don’t mind me asking?
Kobie
Also, Wegmans is the greatest grocery store on the planet. Hands down.
Kobie
@gelfling545: They’ve already spread out of WNY. There’s Wegmans in New Jersey, PA, and Virginia, at least.
Julius Ray Hoffman
Why is he a “nut” or an “asshole” or a “dickwad”? These labels are not justified. He built a solid business that provides a good service and employs a lot of people. His comments about health care weren’t malevolent or even political– they were clearly written with the intention of putting forth a workable solution to the problem. I understand if you disagree with him, but there’s no reason for all the hate.
Or is it that he should be demonized because he doesn’t agree with your solution, or your politics?
Really, you ought to be more generous and not so hateful.
Ken
“a real world Galt’s Gulch would likely be an insane asylum or a prison.”
I vote asylum. After all, the inmates believe perpetual-motion machines are possible.
BruceJ
I’ve been Going Galt on Whole Paycheck for a long time now…mainly because the Whole Paycheck around here is criminally overpriced, insufferably arrogant and frequented by the worst stereotyped noveau riche WooWoo fake hippy vegan food nazis this side of, well, John Mackey.
I’m VASTLY more satisfied with shopping at Sunflower Markets which is a great place: good food, good prices and it shows: everyone from hippies to 100-year-old grandmas shop here…a lot.
Kate
If we all had Wegman’s, that would be dreamy. Us Albany folks miss out on that AND Trader Joe’s.