Nope, just a former WFM cheesemonger. There are several other Whole Foodies past and present besides me who posted on the Fast Company article.

And as for John Mackey, I'm clearly not him or I would have worked some libertarianism or anti-union sentiment into my comments. ;)

Anyway, there are ways to shop at WFM and not bust the budget - the 365 private label stuff is an especially good deal. When I was working there, we were cheaper on basic milk and other benchmark goods that customers often know the prices of than our mainstream competition. That was very much on purpose. However, many of the products sold at WFM come from smaller companies, which don't have the economies of scale of the stuff you buy at a conventional supermarket. Often they're made with more expensive ingredients. Things like expeller-pressed oil as compared to hexane-extracted oil, or organic vs. conventional ingredients add up in raw material costs and make the finished product more expensive.

Yes, you can spend a lot of money there if you try, but you can get out of there pretty cheaply if what you mostly buy is whole food ingredients to cook at home. These days, I live in a small town where there is no WFM, and we spend about $100 on groceries a week. When I was shopping at WFM exclusively, we spent about $120 a week. The difference mostly went into organic produce.

Furthermore:

Flowers are often at the front of the traffic pattern because they're largely an impulse item. The aim is to get them in your cart before you start adding up your total in your head. But WFM is certainly not alone in that among grocery stores.

Bananas are not ripened on the plant. In fact, bananas, unlike most fruits, ripen poorly on the plant. They're picked when green and ripened in controlled atmosphere rooms with ethylene gas (which is naturally produced by ripening fruits) under ideal conditions to deliver the right color at the right time. The color that is more likely to sell is the color that indicates to the consumer that the bananas are slightly *less* ripe and that there will be more days to use the fruit. You can find this scandalous color guide here.

Likewise, the revelation intended to produce disgust that we're all eating year-old apples evidences a lack of understanding of how the produce world works. Apples produce a crop once a year in the late summer or autumn, depending on the variety, and are held in controlled atmosphere to allow them to be sold over time. Our ancestors did this by putting them in a root cellar. It's also likely that you aren't buying a year-old apple, even in mid-summer - global trade has brought us southern hemisphere apples that ripen in the northern hemisphere's late winter and early spring. That's why you might see New Zealand on that little sticker on your apple.

The author clearly knows nothing about the food business. On the other hand, I clearly should have taken my food marketing degree and dozen years in the business and written a book about the IT industry or rocket science.

The chalkboard signs have not been mass-produced in a factory; WFM stores have store artists, sometimes several per store, to make the chalkboard, paper, and other hand-lettered signs. It's very time-consuming.

This article is also wrong about the stacked boxes that are claimed to be made in a factory in China to look stacked. WFM uses custom-printed corrugated cardboard boxes for those stacks, because the boxes the produce arrives in aren't as attractive.

And the ice everywhere? That's so items that need cold temperatures can be displayed in areas other than where refrigerators are located. It gives move display flexibility and allows for "cross-merchandising," which is placing an item with others with which it is often used.

I should know; I spent five years at WFM as a cheesemonger, and every day I set up and iced down a display of containers of fresh mozzarella next to the tomatoes.

This article is crap.

If you read the reddit thread, it's the words PARKING CHARGE that has been photoshopped.

By the time I back up enough to see Marilyn, everything's so out of focus that I can only recognize the pattern as vaguely face-like.

This isn't a new idea...this sort of thing is sometimes called a wearable vase or posy pin.

The comments on the original video say it was taken in Kerala. There's also an earlier vid that seems to be taken at the same stall. What they're making, according to the comments on the original videow, is roti.

Note that the catcher is tossing the rolled-out breads onto the grill that guy #3 is working, with the fire below it. That earlier video features tossing directly to the guy working the grill.

An early (and lame) version of the Spirograph toy.

Pointless stories are my thing, black, men's large.

My husband, a philosophy professor, uses the band Napalm Death (yes, he's both a professor and a metalhead) as an example of this when he teaches the Ship of Theseus paradox. Here's his diagram.

I have a permanent case of "prune hands." It's caused by a neuro-immune disorder. Immune activation produces elastase and MMP-9, the former of which breaks down elastin (which is what gives skin its elastic quality) and the latter of which breaks down collagen. It actually makes it quite uncomfortable to use a trackpad! My fingerprints are also noticeably smoother than they used to be - my fingerprint scanner on my laptop no longer picks them up, and it did when I bought it in 2007.