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So, on one of my many errands today, I was in the Food (W)hole with a cart full of provisions– not a mountain of shopping (that would come later at Costco), but a fair amount.  I was searching for an open line, I found one where the purchase was winding down, so I jumped in.  As I’m putting my stuff up on the belt, I notice behind me an older man (60s?) standing behind me holding a carton of self-serve soup and giving me a look of ‘tude.

Now, in my defense, 1) I am (almost) certain that I didn’t cut this guy off in getting to the line; 2) while I clearly had more than him, I did not have an extreme amount of stuff, and 3) I’ve got places to go to0, and hey, you shoulda hustled.  Anyway, as this goes along, the dude is still giving me the evil eye (or perhaps I was just projecting that, I’m unsure), so as I was paying, I mumbled something like “Jeez, I guess I should have let you go ahead of me.”  Which, to be completely honest, I didn’t really mean– see my previously offered defense.

So I ask you:  I wasn’t too big of a jerk here, was I?  Or maybe– just maybe– maybe it was the soup guy who was the jerk because he was trying to make me feel bad with his evil stare and sigh!  Yeah!

Whole Foods C.E.O. John Mackey had an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day where he argued for a rather conservative/anti-Obama/anti-public option take on health care reform.  Mark Maynard wrote about it, there’s a piece in the Huffington Post that goes in great detail refuting Mackey, and Mackey tries to dig himself out on his own blog.

On the one hand, I tend to agree with the critiques of Mackey’s WSJ piece, though to be somewhat fair, Mackey does have some good points on his blog. It was the Journal’s idea to characterize Mackey’s article as a critique against “Obamacare,” and they apparently cut out most of the stuff that Mackey had originally included about the importance of emphasizing good nutrition and wellness.  But it is pretty easy to read Mackey’s piece as the rantings of self-interested CEO trying to minimize his labor costs in order to maximize profits for share holders.  Which, of course, he is.

This is hardly the first kinda creepy thing I’ve noticed about the Food (W)Hole.  In January 2008, there was a local story I blogged about here about a fish guy who was fired from Whole Foods under somewhat dubious circumstances.  Whole Foods has notoriously resisted efforts at unionization.  And other stuff, as this site notes.

But on the other hand, I really like Whole Foods.  They have excellent products and service, and if you know what to shop for or what’s worth spending the extra money on, I honestly don’t even think it’s that bad of a deal.  And I have to say if I boycotted every store that had some kind of political stance that didn’t line up perfectly with mine or that was run by a douchebag CEO, I’d have to revert to a hunter-gather lifestyle.

So I’ll keep shopping there and indulging my yuppie/foodie self.  But I am once again reminded this isn’t Whole Foods Co-Op but Whole Foods, Inc.

Here’s a kind of fun map/graphic:  “Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America,” from Flowing Data.  Interestingly, I see that Iowa was a relatively early-adapter of the world’s most evil chain store.

I was in the food (w)hole the other day and I was in the dairy section for some milk.  A particular vegan “cream cheese” food product caught my eye.  Not because it was unusual to see vegan versions of things like “milk” and “cheese” and “meat” in the store– nothing could be further from the case.  Rather, what I was confused by was the lid of this vegan cream cheese substitute proudly noted it was “76% organic.”

I might be missing something, but isn’t that kind of an “either/or” sort of deal?  Isn’t that sort of like labeling peanut M&Ms as  “50% good source of protein” or fish sticks as “40% healthy fish” or something?  And in a vegan cream cheese product, what is that other 24%, anyway?

As a winter break family outing yesterday afternoon, Annette and Will and I went to the new Borders after we picked Will up from school. And yes, our family is such that going to a book store is considered a “family outing.” This new store is a “concept store,” and fairly accurately summarized in this CNNMoney.com article, “Borders Celebrates Grand Opening…” Borders, which has its headquarters in Ann Arbor and which has been hemorrhaging money for a few years now, sees the store as at least one of the futures of the business. I guess.

Anyway, the store is located in a big-box strip mall over near Ann Arbor-Saline Road in the space that used to be a CompUSA store. One of the reasons why Borders opened this store here is because the Borders suits are here, and when we were there Tuesday, there seemed to be tours of various Borders employees underway, which was a little weird. It’s a big store with snazzy lighting and furnishings and all of that, kind of arranged in a sort of wheel/spoke pattern. In the middle, there were sections of food and wine, travel, exercise and diet, and something else I’m not remembering.

My wife the Children’s Lit professor scholar noticed that a good half of the book space of the story could be included in her classes: besides a big children’s book section, there was a lot of “young adult” and whatever the book category is called for the kind of junior-aged high school kids, and a very large section on Manga, Anime, comic books, and graphic novels. So much for the “kids today” not doing any reading– or I guess the “kids today” just aren’t reading “Literature,” which was sort of shoved off into a corner of the store.

But probably more than half of the store was devoted to the miscellaneous stuff that all big box book stores sell nowadays (stationary, candy, bags, notebooks, etc.), music, and “gadgets.” Over in one corner they had a LongPen station, which was (apparently) invented by Margaret Atwood to do virtual book signings. I couldn’t find a picture on the very bad LongPen web site, but basically, it’s kind of a station sort of thing a bit bigger than an ATM with a camera and a microphone, a screen that would presumably show the author doing the signing, and a surface where you put your book and the mechanical pen thing. I dunno. The argument is that these people are saving the environment by reducing travel. It seems to me though that they’d do a lot more environmental benefit by publishing fewer books on paper and making eBooks compelling and affordable. Really, I think the main reason for the device is that Margaret Atwood (and others like her) must really hate to travel.

And then on the other side of things, somewhere between a half and a third of the store, is a very large technology stuff/gadget section. They had the Sony Reader on display, which makes sense as a book store techno-gadget (and after playing with it for about 10 minutes, my reaction to the grey and $300 price tag was who in the hell would want to buy this thing?), and they also had a display of those frames with the electronic pictures in them and some exercise gadgets, too. They were selling FlipVideo cameras and other digital cameras (I knew way more about the FlipVideo than the sales dude), and there probably were some non-iPod mp3 players in there too. They had some computer kiosks where you could download mp3s to your iPod (or whatever) right there, or you could burn them to a CD, for about a buck apiece, and they had a station where you could print out your digital pictures. And then they also had a station where you could print a customized book (I couldn’t get that thing to work) and a station where you could do family genealogy (??).

Anyway, it was an interesting idea and I’m sure it will evolve, but right now, it had the look and feel of a bunch of stuff thrown against a wall to see if it would stick. eBooks and custom printing of trade books hasn’t quite taken off yet, and it seems to me that the only people who would use an in-store/f2f service to do things like download mp3s to a disk or print digital pictures are folks who aren’t all that comfortable with technology in the first place. And genealogy? Seriously?

So we’ll see what happens over the next couple years. We did all spend some money there. I bought Blogging Heroes more or less as a risky but potential BAWS resource since I have not had any luck so far getting high profile bloggers to participate in my survey or case studies. Though after looking it up on amazon.com (which is what I link to above), which features some free chapters and a $5.38 price tag, I feel like I’ve been ripped off, which is not a good feeling to have upon reflecting on a new store.

I was in Costco today, which is a store I enjoy because they have good products, good prices (if you know what to look for, at least), and they are not Wal-Mart. I also like Costco for the samples. But today, I saw a, um “display” but not exactly a sample I was that interested in.

Dog food.

I kid you not.

This sample hawker was standing behind her table/podium thing, and on it was a single can of dog food, opened, with a plastic spoon sticking up in the middle of it.

I didn’t try any.