I was devastated when I received an email titled "Avoid Whole Foods." After years of shopping at the woebegone ACME, pronounced in the native Philly "Ack-Ah-Me," I had discovered the wonderful world of organic, expensive food at Whole Foods only a few years ago. Now I was being informed that the Founder-CEO-Crazy Sonovabitch of Whole Foods is a right wing, libertarian nut case. After a bit of research, so it is. I should have known better. All along, I knew the company was headquartered in Dallas, home of the Screwball. I should have known.
John Mackey, an original Screwball, leads the charge against Universal Healthcare, arguing in several op-eds in the Wall Street Journal (where else?) that rationing health care is the American Way. He also has been fighting against unions for umpteen years. So, anyway, do your own research. I am left with nowhere to shop for food, for God's sake.
Oh, you Southerners go ahead and smirk with your Publicks and Piggly-Wigglys, but we have winter and fallow times to deal with up North here. It's not like we can buy our produce year-round at the farm stand, or grow it out back you know?
A Wegman's has opened recently in Cherry Hill and we have a small Trader Joe's uptown, but now I have to investigate their socio-political lineage and all, and, shit, I need eggs!
Once upon a time, I thought all I needed to know was to avoid Walmart.
Life gets complicated.
Mackey is a self-obsessed clown with a penchant for shooting off his mouth...this is the only explanation for why he embarked on the WSJ OpEd odyssey when he should have learned his lesson from the trouble he got in with those anonymous comments on Yahoo (slandering Wild Oats to drive down its stock price so Whole Foods could snap it up more cheaply):
ReplyDeletehttp://consumerist.com/277818/whole-foods-ceo-caught-bashing-wild-oats-stock-on-yahoo-forums
He is not a 'Screwball', but a greedy, self-promoting bast*d with a flexible moral compass. His core customers do not exactly fall into the teabagger/evangelical/O'Reilly-Limbaugh demographic, and they are PISSED (I will not shop there again). Go add your comments (WTF, WF?) to their damage-control website:
http://www2.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jmackey/2009/08/14/health-care-reform-full-article/
No need for Wal*Mart: there are CSAs, farmer's markets, Essene, the Italian Market and a bunch of coops (Germantown et al).