Amazon announces… changes… to Whole Foods.

Essentially: starting Monday, cheaper prices and steady integration into Amazon Prime and other services. Oh, and there’ll be a rollout of Amazon Lockers at Whole Foods. And whatever other bribes that Amazon can think of, I’m sure.

Continue reading Amazon announces… changes… to Whole Foods.

More on that Amazon/Whole Foods thing.

It is apparently freaking the shttps://moelane.com/2017/06/16/more-on-that-ama…hole-foods-thing/upermarket industry out. More accurately, it’s freaking out investors. Fox Business:

Kroger shares slumped 11 percent, United Natural Foods Inc tumbled 17 percent, Sprouts Farmers Market Inc sank 11 percent. The S&P 500 food and staples retailing index was off 5 percent… Wal-Mart dropped 6 percent and Target Corp dropped 10.6 percent… [European] Supermarket chain Tesco Plc shed 2.9 percent and Carrefour dipped 2.6 percent.

Continue reading More on that Amazon/Whole Foods thing.

Tweet of the WEEK, This Is How The Amazon/Whole Foods Thing Went Down edition.

Yes.  Yes, this is precisely what happened.  This is what always happened, if we have to rewrite the universe itself to make it true.

I am now conflicted about Whole Foods.

Half of me never, ever wants to shop there

The problem with Whole Foods is their regular customers. They are, across the board, across the country, useless, ignorant, and miserable. They’re worse than miserable, they’re angry. They are quite literally the opposite of every Whole Foods employee I’ve ever encountered. Walk through any store any time of day—but especially 530pm on a weekday or Saturday afternoon during football season—and invariably you will encounter a sneering, disdainful horde of hipster Zombies and entitled 1%ers.

Continue reading I am now conflicted about Whole Foods.

An interesting, if mildly depressing, exchange on Obamacare.

“Mildly depressing” because apparently J-School doesn’t require much reading of actual, real political theory.

Goodness gracious, but check this out. Background: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey called Obamacare first ‘socialist,’ then ‘fascist,’ then regretted calling it fascist because the Left is generally too ill-educated to understand the difference between National Socialism and economic fascism* -so they were thus all getting hung up in their own ignorance, and thus omitting to address Mackey’s point. Cue CNN Carol Costello, who gave a stunning demonstration of same.

So, once Mackey had dumbed it down again for the nice talking head, we get this exchange:

Costello then asked, “But why inject yourself into the debate over ObamaCare in the first place?”

Mackey responded that he provides health insurance for 73,000 Whole Foods employees and some provisions of Obama’s health care law will raise his company’s costs. “It’s making it more difficult to provide the insurance at affordable rates to our team members, so I’m trying to protect them as well as I can,” he said.

“I think, though, that many of your customers probably wouldn’t agree with you since, I don’t know, you kind of run a store that appeals to the more liberal in America in some ways,” Costello replied.

“I don’t understand what your question or your point is,” Mackey said.

Continue reading An interesting, if mildly depressing, exchange on Obamacare.

Scenes from the Class Struggle at Whole Foods Market*.

Here, Matt Welch cheerfully talks about an enjoyable episode of assumptions-busting with regard to his recent visit to Whole Foods:

After making my purchase with more enthusiasm than usual, I was handed another flyer from some peppy UFCW gals, including the bold-italic question du jour: “Do you really want your shopping dollars going to executives who are undermining President Obama?” One of them asked me (quoting from memory), “Are you aware that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey recently wrote an op-ed attacking national health care?”

“Yes,” I replied with a smile. “I read the whole thing.” As I walked away one of the gals said, in genuine wonder and disappointment, “Wow….”

Of course, Matt was still pumped from seeing the very things from Mackey’s proposal that he would have highlighted being reproduced and disseminated by his political opponents. For free.  Still, the reaction by the union-affiliated ‘grassroots’ protesters was tasty enough, if you’ll pardon the pun, to almost make me go to a Whole Foods and buy something. Continue reading Scenes from the Class Struggle at Whole Foods Market*.

Profiles in Blustering: the Whole Foods ‘boycott.’

(Via AoSHQ Headlines) It’s rare to see an article that sabotages its own message in the first two paragraphs, but this one on the supposed horrible coming backlash towards Whole Foods CEO John Mackey for his op-ed against health care rationing manages to do so pretty effectively.

Joshua has been taking the bus to his local Whole Foods in New York City every five days for the past two years. This week, he said he’ll go elsewhere to fulfill his fresh vegetable and organic produce needs.

“I will never shop there again,” vowed Joshua, a 45-year-old blogger, who asked that his last name not be published.

Of course he doesn’t want his last name published. If it got published, he’d risk being mocked horribly when it turns out that his ‘boycott’ lasted all of one week.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, you may safely assume by this that I am not particularly impressed by the threats of a bunch of food enthusiasts to stop shopping at the place that most easily enables their habit.  Health care rationing advocacy is one thing; giving up their most reliable source of organic buffalo cheese is something else entirely.

Although admittedly you can get Italian Buffalo Milk Cheese on Amazon. Well, you could: I am a philistine.

Crossposted to RedState.