Whole Foods To Launch Discount Chain

Whole Foods yesterday announced that it will launch a discount subsidiary that will market to millennials.

"The store will be "unlike anything that currently exists in the marketplace," Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods, said in a release. But based off his description, it sounds pretty similar to Trader Joe's, which sells a curated selection of private-label foods at cheap prices. In describing the new store concept, Robb said, "Offering our industry-leading standards at value prices, this new format will feature a modern, streamlined design, innovative technology and a curated selection. It will deliver a convenient, transparent, and values-oriented experience geared toward millennial shoppers, while appealing to anyone looking for high-quality fresh food at great prices." The company said it is building a team solely to develop the stores and negotiate leases. It plans to launch them next year and expects a "rapid expansion" thereafter.

Whole Foods' stock value dropped 11% this week after the company reported lower than expected earnings.

Rabbit Season

Animal rights activists are furious with Whole Foods over the plan to begin selling rabbit meat.

On Sunday, rabbit-lovers organized a national day of action to draw attention to the production and sale of rabbit meat at the grocery chain, warning that dogs and cats could be slaughtered for meat next and accusing Whole Foods of being “bunny butchers.” Proving that virtually everything has an advocacy organization, the House Rabbit Society helped design leaflets adorned with adorable bunny pictures for protesters. And one petition asking Whole Foods to stop selling rabbit meat already has more than 13,000 supporters. For its part, Whole Foods has said its pilot program was launched after a four-year process to design a system of rabbit-slaughtering that maintains high standards of animal welfare. 

A spokesman for Whole Foods says that they are sensitive to the "companion animal issue" and are only responding to requests from customers.

Seen On Sale At Whole Foods

(Via - Copyranter)

BALTIMORE: Whole Foods Solicits Donations For Anti-Gay Charity

Today JMG reader John convinced the manager of a Baltimore-area Whole Foods to temporarily remove a placard which solicits donations for a local charity which trumpets the below mission statement on its website.

We believe that God has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. We believe that any form of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, bestiality, incest, fornication, adultery, and pornography are sinful perversions of God’s gift of sex. We believe that God disapproves of and forbids any attempt to alter one’s gender by surgery or appearance.

According to John, the manager mentioned having received other complaints about the charity. For now, their slot (on the left) on the Whole Foods donation station remains blank. Contact the manager to keep it that way: Dan.Reilly@WholeFoods.com.

UPDATE: Please note that the House of Ruth, which is pictured above, is not the charity in question. The Baltimore Rescue Mission is the charity whose placard has been removed from the above donation box.

More Crazy From The Whole Foods CEO

We already know that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey thinks that global warming is a hoax and that Americans have no inherent right to health care. The latest bit of crazy from crazy Mackey's crazy mind is a new employee discount policy. If you have lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, and a lower BMI (Body Mass Index), you get a bigger discount. Aside from the fact that those three factors, while important, are not necessarily predictive of good health, there's Mackey's "fatties shouldn't work here" message. The planned in-house screenings should be a riot. Participation is voluntary, just in case you don't want corporate all up in your business. But then you don't get the steeper discount on that $2 banana.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey: Global Warming Is A Hoax

Months after he infuriated loyal customers by saying that no American has an inherent right to health care, Whole Food CEO John Mackey is back in the news, this time for claiming that global warming is a hoax. The New Yorker profiled Mackey and asked him for some of his favorite books.

One of the books on the list was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming—the Missing Science,” a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he put it, “no scientific consensus exists” regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow “hysteria about global warming” to cause us “to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.” One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, “Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.”

You may recall a years-ago scandal when Mackey was exposed as trolling an industry web forum where he used a pseudonym to attack a rival and say flattering things about himself.

Unions Join Whole Foods Boycott

Two employee unions representing six million workers have joined in the call to boycott Whole Foods.

Change To Win Investment Group and United Food And Commercial Workers Union -- both a part of the Change To Win federation of unions representing six million workers -- have put out statements criticizing Mackey and encouraging a boycott of the store. CtW called for Mackey's removal as chairman of the board and CEO. "Mr. Mackey attempted to capitalize on the brand reputation of Whole Foods to champion his personal political views, but has instead deeply offended a key segment of Whole Foods consumer base," the group's executive director Bill Patterson said in a statement. UFCW has begun handing out pamphlets to Whole Food shoppers. The group said Mackey's op-ed was an "attempt to undermine Obama's health-care reform." (Whole Foods is not unionized.)

Whole Foods has remained relatively quiet on the boycott movement, only saying that their CEO's opinions on health care reform are his own.

CNN On Whole Foods Boycott

The boycott of Whole Foods doesn't seem to be going away. I noticed quite an angry crowd outside of the Union Square store a few days ago.

RELATED: A massive new two-story Whole Foods opens on the Upper West Side this week, right in the belly of the progressive beast, as it were. The UWS location will feature the largest kosher selection of any of their stores.

Whole Foods Boycott Gains Steam

More than a dozen groups have called for a boycott of Whole Foods over the last 48 hours, and of course, there is a Facebook group.

Whole Foods is NOT a company that cares for communities and they have built their brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. No more. My $ will no longer go to support Whole Foods' anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities. John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on 8/12/2009 quoting Margaret Thatcher and suggesting that healthcare is a commodity that only the rich, like him, deserve. Whole Foods has the right to cheat and lie and be as hateful and selfish as they wanna be. We also have the right to starve them of our $.

Whole Foods had almost $2B in sales in the last quarter. The next quarter's tally will be interesting.

Whole Foods CEO: People Have No Intrinsic Right To Health Care

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has raised the ire of many of his most loyal customers by penning an anti-health care reform editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in which he lovingly quotes Margaret Thatcher and says that there is no "intrinsic right to health care."

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Customers are going apeshit on the Whole Foods website. One example:

John Mackey's comments in the Wall Street Journal re: "Obamacare" (as he puts it) run completely contrary to Whole Foods' purported "values" of caring about the community, nutrition, etc. It is an absolute slap in the face to the millions of progressive-minded consumers that HAVE MADE W.F. what it is today. You should know who butters your hearth-baked bread, John. Last time I checked it wasn't the insurance industry or conservatives who made you a millionare a hundred times over. Suffice it to say we will be selling our Whole Foods stock asap and will only be shopping at our neighborhood W.F. for emergency items from now on, even though it is by far the most convenient store for us.

Single Payer Action has already launched a boycott of Whole Foods:

John Mackey is a right wing libertarian. He’s a union buster. He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes. He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system. And he’s the CEO of Whole Foods. Primo hangout of liberal Democratic yuppies. [snip] Single Payer Action is calling on all American citizens to boycott Whole Foods.

UPDATE: Whole Foods has deleted the entire above-linked customer forum, where many pages of complaints had been posted. JMG reader John reports that customers are now "going renegade" and posting their complaints in other areas of the site such as "new product requests."

The Case Of The Tuna Sandwich

Supermarkets around the nation throw out tons of edible food every day to comply with expiration rules. An entire "freegan" movement has sprung up in which people dumpster-dive behind these stores to rescue the most usable items. Here in NYC, an interesting discussion has arisen because Whole Foods fired an employee for theft after he set aside a garbage-destined tuna sandwich in order to eat it at the end of his shift. The case has made it to the state's unemployment court.

Initially, New York State ruled that the tuna sandwich episode was misconduct, based on Whole Foods’ statement about the trash. In New York, as in other states, employers’ unemployment insurance rates are based on the amount of the benefits their former workers collect, giving them an incentive to limit the number of employees who receive unemployment. Mr. Reese challenged the ruling in January. “I knew what they said was wrong,” said Mr. Reese, who earned $11.50 an hour. His version of the story: He was throwing out 30 sandwiches at the end of the shift, and he put the tuna sandwich aside on the counter in plain view. When the supervisor confronted him about it, he said it was going to be thrown out and he was going to eat it. The supervisor then threw the sandwich out. Two days later, Mr. Reese was fired.

Was it really theft if the sandwich was meant for the garbage? Was it theft if the employee didn't actually get to eat it? I understand that some employees would definitely abuse any system in which they were allowed to have expired items. But at least there has got to be a lawsuit-safe way for Whole Foods to get that expired-but-edible food to the homeless. Don't some stores do this already?

Organic, Free Range, With Added Scam

It looks like John Mackey, the CEO of the Mecca of urban angertwinks nationwide, Whole Foods, is about to lose his job after having been exposed for posting anonymously on Yahoo! Finance forums for the last seven years under the alias "Rahodeb", an anagram of his wife Deborah's name. In over 1000 forum postings as Rahodeb, Mackey blasted the operation and stock value of rival Wild Oats as Whole Foods negotiated to acquire the smaller chain, which they agreed to do earlier this year.

As Rahodeb, Mackey wrote, "OATS has lost their way and no longer has a sense of mission or even a well-thought-out theory of the business. They lack a viable business model that they can replicate." The feds are moving to block the merger under antitrust laws and Mackey's web shenanigans will likely bolster their case.