MetaChat - I went to Whole Foods for the first time.

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16 October 2008

I went to Whole Foods for the first time. Shopping for food at Target has been a real soul-sucking experience. Today, I had the day off and decided to take the ~20 minute schlep to Whole Foods.
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For those of you that aren't aware, I live in Johnson County Kansas (JOCO). JOCO is a bland, featureless and boring mass of subdivisions and mini-malls. Everything is either a franchise or a chain, so sometimes I will drive 10-20 minutes to go to a different chain book/grocery store. Thankfully there is a series of interstates that connect these identical suburbs like a daisy chain in hell. (is that enough exposition? I hope so, I'm no good at this blogging thing)

I find the Whole Foods tucked away in a mini-mall. Fall came suddenly to JOCO and the parking lot is full of dead leaves and yuppies in sweaters. I enter through the automatic doors.

Shades of brown, that's what hits me. The theme of "Organic" is emphasized with an earth-colored floor. Earth tones and artificial a-symmetry are everywhere, trying to convince me that this place has charachter. I begin a perimeter of the place.

Whole foods seems like a Co-op that was taken over by germ-phobic yuppies. It's like a giant, prepackaged gift basket full of exotic things that look yummy but one wouldn't eat under most circumstances. There is organic goat cheese, there are frozen soy pizzas, there are coconuts. Almost everything, it seems, is packaged and marketed with the baby-boomer's long lost "Save mother earth" mantra.

I am, I begin to realize, the only 20-something shopper in Whole foods. Everyone else is either a yuppie or they're working. The employees are bearded proto-hippies, which is reassuring, since every-other 20 something in JOCO are desperately following the So Cal philosophy of bug eyed sunglasses and Ambercrombie & Fitch clothing.

Produce is, roughly, 4x more expensive than I'm used to. Oranges are 2 bucks a pound. I am making falafel, which calls for some other veggie, such as tomatoes. I find the tomatoes to be cartoonishly fresh, and they are local, which is weird to me.

Whole Foods exists in a paradox. In bringing organic stuff to the masses, they have created what appears to be a corporate organism that is just as soulless as it's sterile competitors. The only people who can afford to shop there on a regular basis are those who are well off and are probably contributing to the problems that Whole Foods is trying to offset by selling organic stuff.

In checking out, the nice girl behind the counter informs me of the sample bag they give first timers, but they are out of them. The falafel supplies, I surmise, will feed me about twice, which brings the meal cost to about $3.50.

I shall return. But first, I'm going to get my middle-east on with this falafel.

post by: hellojed at: 15:37 | 61 comments

Whole Foods, despite the fact that I might like some of what they sell, is the soul of what a lot of people don't like about the modern world. It's eco-indie-yuppie-ism commodified.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 16:26

posted by qvantamon 16 October | 16:30

LocalBusinessTakeoverFilter: Whole Foods is a perfect analogy for why everyone in boulder fucking hates texas.

posted by lonefrontranger 16 October | 16:42

The problem that I have with Whole Foods is that you have to go to an actual supermarket afterward to get the stuff that you actually need. We don't really cook so most of our shopping is for stuff like toilet paper and cat food so we end up at the Giant Eagle to buy that stuff after we hit Whole Foods.

posted by octothorpe 16 October | 16:55

i'm pretty sure this sushifood thing is from a Whole Foods affiliate.
They have a half decent cheese selection in a cheese barren landscape and a variety of meats and spices. Nothing non specific is worth buying there and going the distance unless it's worth getting in itself.

Blah. i feel like drawing dancing meat for meatchat.

posted by ethylene 16 October | 17:02

Whole Foods is from Texas? I don't think I've ever seen one here. Well shiver my timbers, I didn't know it started in Austin. Heck, hating Texas because it produced Whole Foods is like, the complete opposite from hating Texas because it produced George Bush.

On a completely unrelated note, MuddDude convinced me to buy a mess of reuseable shopping bags at H.E.B. last week.

posted by muddgirl 16 October | 17:02

Whole Foods, like Starbucks, is a real mixed bag. Among other things, they treat their employees pretty well, and they do a lot to support somewhat-more-responsible agriculture. Yeah, it's not a CSA or something, but it's not Walmart either. Instead, it's somewhere in the middle. It's kinda one of those perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good things, I think. There are a lot of those, these days.

posted by box 16 October | 17:03

I was at Whole Foods today too, though one state over from you. I must have been one of the yuppies you were sneering at even though I'm in my mid 40's (not young), live in a small town (not urban), and I'm a blue collar knuckledragger (not professional). You must have been the disheveled punk that was fondling the tomatoes in a dour mood.

10 years ago, Whole Foods had a lot more selection, and a lot less prepared foods. Now it's become a big fast-food joint with some groceries on the side. There are a few things I get there which I haven't found elsewhere, and I hit the bulk foods and spices when I am there. I won't go out of my way to go there, but I definitely will go out of my way for some of the ethnic markets in the area.

posted by eekacat 16 October | 17:08

Yeah, box. The age old question "How do you fight the monster without becoming the monster." I'd like to have my coffee somewhere other than Starbucks, but there's one within walking distance, so I make up for the corporate blah by not taking a car.(1)

I guess I wouldn't feel so bad if JOCO didn't look all the same. Really, I think I need to get out of the Midwest.

(1) I suspect this is offset when I have to use the crosswalk and stop four lanes of traffic, engines idling and all that

posted by hellojed 16 October | 17:13

You must have been the disheveled punk that was fondling the tomatoes in a dour mood.

Uh...was this disheveled punk wearing a brown hoodie and thick black glasses? Cause if so then that was defiantly me. (Disheveled punk? that's not the look I'm going for!)

posted by hellojed 16 October | 17:16

I won't go out of my way to go there, but I definitely will go out of my way for some of the ethnic markets in the area

Exactly. There's a lot of young kids I work with who love going to Jamba Juice. I like telling them that they could go to puerto Rican food stands three or four blocks away and get fresh juice a whole lot cheaper without additives that look like something skimmed off a swimming pool.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 17:18

Whole Paycheck.

posted by ColdChef 16 October | 17:30

Shopping for food at Target

Huh?

I am... the only 20-something shopper in Whole foods. Everyone else is either a yuppie

Huh again? The "y" in "yuppie" stands for "young."

posted by Eideteker 16 October | 17:31

Well yeah, eideteker, but usually "yuppie" implies, "was a young urban professional in the 80s", at least to me.

posted by muddgirl 16 October | 17:35

Whole Foods is not a total grocery solution for anyone I know. It can be quite expensive (though if you watch your dollars there you will find yourself buying mostly fresh, simple, healthy stuff - which is not so bad by comparison). Their ethics prevent them from carrying a lot of basics I need, so I wind up doing a combination of Costco, Trader Joes, and Whole Foods.

I use WF sparingly for fresh stuff, high-quality stuff, gourmet slow food wonderfulness I can't get at other grocery stores (let alone Target).

It's pretty easy to find fault with Whole Foods but I'd rather live in a city that had one than one that had only corner stores and a Safeway. As usual Jon is taking the piss out of the hippies but there's nothing to love about buying food from big chain stores where the produce is tasteless and everything else is made in a factory (and tastes like it).

posted by scarabic 16 October | 17:38

eide, the term "yuppie" has long since been co-opted by the millenials as the new term for "square" and is analogous to "Boomer" which it was synonomous for in the 80s if you recall.

it ceased being an acronym roughly the same time it became an epithet.

posted by lonefrontranger 16 October | 17:38

What box said. My sister-in-law and her mother worked for WF when it was quite a bit smaller, before the mushrooming explosion and concomitant values dilution it experienced about 10 years ago. Both of them were treated very well by the company, received stock shares and a more-than-living wage ($70,000 a year for a section manager in their stores), got plenty of education and easily moved up through the ranks. My SIL got her start there as a coffee educator, went on to work for a terrific importer, and all that training still serves her well in her career.

Things started to turn more corporate-ized when they expanded. The company had to standardize a lot more and had to take on large numbers of new employees at once, so of course it was difficult to retain the company atmosphere, values, and institutional wisdom that places need if they aren't to lose their souls. WF was a goldmine, and between the shareholders and the people they brought in at the tipping point, it went off in pursuit of mass profits and hasn't been quite as pure of heart as it once was.

Scale is everything.

But it always was expensive - it's a specialty store, make no mistake, a boutique shopping experience, with prices to match. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Shop there when/if you can and want to. If you can't/don't, skip it. I personally prefer going to a lot of little stores for different things, but WF has some neat and really tasty product lines that aren't available anywhere else, and when you're traveling, it's a great place to stop for a healthy and relatively inexpensive to-go meal.

posted by Miko 16 October | 17:39

80s yuppies were late 20s/30s aged then.
i'm in my late 30s and stranded in the Midwest with a huge lack of ethnic markets. If i could find them, it wouldn't be worth going because i could order the stuff for the same price of effort, or find something close enough at the WholeFoodette if i really cared. Not being around a good bulk co-op type of place really ruined my whole food ethic and quality. Once i cared, now i bother occasionally.

posted by ethylene 16 October | 17:41

Yeah, ok. Yuppie for me is someone who is currently a yuppie (like most of MetaFilter, I'd imagine). I guess you might call them hipsters with jobs.

posted by Eideteker 16 October | 17:48

muddgirl, the WF=texas analogy: basically WF came in and bought out our local boulder-based startup organic (wild oats) and then spread their mass-marketness all over it. same as how there've been a lot of import texans (specifically developers) who've created a lot of munge and sprawl and yuppiedrome mass market mediocrity all over this particular region of the front range over the past decade. so it's not a hate-on for whole foods in particular so much as a hate-on for everything corporate that's sucked a lot of the character out of the area.

me, ima midwest import myself so I probably shouldn't talk much.

posted by lonefrontranger 16 October | 17:49

The original Whole Foods was on 12th and Lamar in Austin. (On my most recent visit back there, it was the location of Cheapo Disks. That's probably changed too, though.)

Here's something that may endear you to the place. Or maybe not. I got my elder cat at the original Whole Foods, before it was a chain. Yep, the evil one came from Whole Foods. I was on my way to work. Went in to Whole Foods for a sandwich, came out with a sandwich and a kitten. There were a couple little girls sitting outside the store with a box of them. On a total whim -- I lived in an apartment that didn't allow pets -- I picked the cute orange runt.

Continued on to my job at the photo lab in the mall. With kitten. It just happened to be the day that the district manager was visiting. I walked into the store and saw him, promptly had an Oh Shit moment. We had this little photo booth in the corner of the store. It wasn't one of the coin-op kind -- it took 12 color exposures. It was mostly used by wannabe gang girls from South Austin. They went in there with their huge hairdos and made gang signs and kissy faces at the camera. I assume they gave those pictures to wannabe thugs, but who knows. Anyhow, when I saw the DM in the store, I stuck the kitten in the photo booth. A group of gangsta girls came in and paid for the photo booth. I escorted them over there and told them, in no uncertain terms, "Don't fuck with the kitten."

For all I know, my cat was in all their photos, and could have been instrumental in winning over some little thug's heart.

It sucks that he turned out to be such a little shit. In fact, fourteen years later, he answers to "you little shit."

I also used to regularly run into Ann Richards in the more recent WF flagship store on 6th and Lamar in Austin, but that's another story. (She was an awesome politician, but wasn't very nice in grocery stores.)

My point is this:

There is only one way to shop at Whole Foods. Go there on a weekend, during the day. It will be crowded, yes, but they have TONS of free samples. Eat your way through the store. Then leave and shop at a regular place.

Also, don't get kittens there. They spoil.

posted by mudpuppie 16 October | 17:50

As usual Jon is taking the piss out of the hippies

Actually, I'm taking the piss out of yuppies. Hippies will gladly go to 7-11 if they're high enough.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 17:52

and scarabic, forgive my cynicism, but I've worked at laboring level for a few warm-and-fuzzy corporations and I've learned that the nicer they act for the public, the more full of shit they actually are. So forgive me my unwillingness to believe. The two-bite brownies are tasty though.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 17:55

nah Eide, hipsters-with-jobs are generally viewed as cool folk, i.e. mathowie or Steve Jobs. yuppies = britney spears, the cast of SATC and basically anyone who drives a lexus.

yuppie is almost universally a derogatory term in today's youth culture and it's got zero association with age.

[NOT LEXUS-IST] [OR BRITNEY-IST]

posted by lonefrontranger 16 October | 17:56

I suppose I'm being a little whiny. I mean, at least I can buy food, right? I'm living in a very prosperous part of the world where food is readily available at reasonable prices. Why do I care if my tomatoes are organic and locally grown if it really dosen't matter to me on a personal level? I should just be able to go to the SuperTarget and pick up some food and just be grateful, you know?

Also, I must get off my bum and wash the dishes I sullied from making my last batch of falafels.

posted by hellojed 16 October | 17:57

yuppie to me means Young Urban Professional. The type of person who shops at Whole Foods and who expends brain cells worrying about the things that they base they're whole existence on. The rest of the world has their own problems.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 18:02

Huh, Yuppie still meant Young Urban (or Upwardly-mobile) Professional to me. I didn't know that it had morphed into a new meaning.

posted by octothorpe 16 October | 18:03

Yeah, ok. Yuppie for me is someone who is currently a yuppie (like most of MetaFilter, I'd imagine). I guess you might call them hipsters with jobs.

Wait, now Mefi is filled with hipsters? Employed hipsters?
Really?
?

posted by ethylene 16 October | 18:04

ethylene: this is news to you?

posted by jonmc 16 October | 18:05

OMG, is mathowie your idea of a hipster or merely employed?

posted by ethylene 16 October | 18:06

He's a nice guy, but he's a geek who made good with hipster tendencies. I never said it was a simple equation.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 18:08

Wait, wait, wait.
What the hell do you people call a hipster?
Next we define blue.

posted by ethylene 16 October | 18:08

What the hell do you people call a hipster?

Someone who lets trends among a certain demograpic (educated, urban, upper-middle-class) define how they view themselves.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 18:10

Definition appropriation has run amok.
You say teal, i say cyan. i show you charts, you switch to azure.
Must to adjust levels.

posted by ethylene 16 October | 18:15

it ceased being an acronym roughly the same time it became an epithet.
posted by lonefrontranger

What year did it become an epithet?

And seriously, Wild Oats wasn't that great of a store, nor was the chain they bought whose name escapes me. Not much different from Whole Foods to be honest.

hellojed, my point was about making sweeping generalizations about people. If you actually talk to them, you might find their story a little different from your assumptions.

posted by eekacat 16 October | 18:15

Next we define blue.

Check your crayon box.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 18:16

All that means i am taking a pee break and finishing something. Carry on.

posted by ethylene 16 October | 18:17

If you actually talk to them, you might find their story a little different from your assumptions.

That goes both ways, eekacat. And places like Whole Foods owe a big chunk of their success by marketing theselves to people who like to consider themselves 'different' from people who shop at Stop & Shop.

posted by jonmc 16 October | 18:21

When I was in college in the early eighties, there was a great punk band called The Hipsters whose lead singer was a devout Mennonite. At the time the word Hipster hadn't been in current usage since the early sixties.

posted by octothorpe 16 October | 18:22

hellojed, my point was about making sweeping generalizations about people. If you actually talk to them, you might find their story a little different from your assumptions.

true. I was actually thinking about this as I was writing the post. I'm not sure why I didn't address it. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess.

Whole Foods was actually a pretty nice place, I guess the blandness of JOCO has made me jaded. (Or I'm just really thick, elitist m-f'er)

posted by hellojed 16 October | 18:25

Yeah, it sounds to me like your problem is not WF, but the soul-sucking environs you describe in your hometown.

posted by Miko 16 October | 18:47

Hipster, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz, in particular modern jazz, which became popular in the early '40s. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: manner of dress, slang terminology, use of cannabis and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual codes.
OR
The first i've ever known of "hipsters" were "characters who like hot jazz."
Sadly, this is no longer the case.

Wow, i just deleted a lot of text. Thank me.
≡ Click to see image ≡
This is not mathowie.
≡ Click to see image ≡
This is not even mathowie.
≡ Click to see image ≡
This is mathowie.

Mathowie is not a hipster.

That you would think
≡ Click to see image ≡
mathowie, jess, and cortex were hipster is just patently odd.
Looking like Jesus hasn't been au courant for ages, no matter how big your doughnut, but besides that, i realize that i need to put that whole mathowie is not a hipster bit to music and a beat, definitely some hot jazz.
≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by ethylene 16 October | 19:08

Hipster, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz, in particular modern jazz, which became popular in the early '40s. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: manner of dress, slang terminology, use of cannabis and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual codes.

Okay, so the only thing that's keeping me from being a hipster is that I'm not as well-dressed as a jazz musician.

posted by box 16 October | 19:35

You have perfectly described the shopping experience at the Whole Foods in Boca Raton near my school. Boca is rich-ass fancified suburbia for people who couldn't quite make Palm Beach but don't want to associate with the rubes down in Broward, and the entire design of this particular Whole Foods is just "join us in our trendy, artisan-friendly, globally enlightened ecologically *~*aware*~* megacorporate indie-ness, and you don't have to associate with smelly broke hippies to do it!"

I realised all this the day I went in to get a snack (spinach-feta croissant, I'm not a yuppie I swear) and noticed the brown (because that's the color of organicness!) paper baggies were now stamped with fancy swirly metallic copper logos. Whole Foods did for the organic-artisan aesthetic what Starbucks did for the indie-coffeehouse look - it's all slick homogeneous corporate pseudoquirky now.

Half of this particular store is taken up by prepared foods (in addition to buffet tables and the bakery: sandwich stand, noodle bar, sushi bar, "wood-fired" brick-oven pizza stand, regular deli, coffee stand, smoothie bar, barbecue stand), and the cheese section is pretty huge, and the wine section is simply insane. I walk by bottles of nearly the biggest labels in wine (freaking La Tour Haut-Brion) if I go in for coffee before class (amazingly, they're still cheaper than the campus Starbucks - this is Boca, and it's that sort of campus.)

In one of my grad courses, I worked on a team presentation about innovative business practices. We pointed out that Whole Foods stores are always arranged so the fancy produce and cheeses and prepared foods are on the outside, so that Boca-type clientele can get their trendy eco-aware food without having to come into contact with the granola types poking around the health supplements and weird oils in the middle aisles.

posted by casarkos 16 October | 19:45

Your Whole Foods are wholly different. Around here they are pretty much like grocery stores with an island of encasements in the middle-ish, with some people trapped inside.

≡ Click to see image ≡
This is not a picture of a hipster.
This man is a geek and successful at being one. Not being socially crippled does not automatically turn a geek into a hipster.
Hipsters, by necessity, must look the part and be noticeable from a distance.

posted by ethylene 16 October | 19:55

By some Manhattan standards, I'm a yuppie because I live in a new, gentrifying building in Harlem, I work in real estate, I am constantly thinking of how to get millionaires to spend their millions on condos, I only wear jeans to work on Fridays, and that's only with a nice sweater.

By other standards, I'm poor because I make only $35K a year, I shop at Pathmark or Fine Fare not Fairway, and if I didn't have this damn high blood pressure problem, I'd be buying and eating macaroni and cheese dinners every single damn night because it's cheaper and faster than buying damn frozen healthy frozen dinners.

And the weird part is that my roommate claims that with my skills and the fact that I have a degree, I could be making no less than $50K a year somewhere else (but not in this economy).

So... what does that make me?

posted by TrishaLynn 16 October | 20:05

...well, regular for Whole Foods, which still means things like whole crown roast and London broil carved to order and crab-stuffed salmon fillet. It all looks delicious, but I can never bring myself to spend that kind of cash.

The Whole Foods down by where I live in Broward is a much smaller affair (for starters, no barbecue, pizza, or sushi) and likes to be active in the community. Every month or so they host things like kids' cooking nights and local music showcases. I think it might be an individual management thing.

posted by casarkos 16 October | 20:33

In one of my grad courses, I worked on a team presentation about innovative business practices. We pointed out that Whole Foods stores are always arranged so the fancy produce and cheeses and prepared foods are on the outside, so that Boca-type clientele can get their trendy eco-aware food without having to come into contact with the granola types poking around the health supplements and weird oils in the middle aisles.

I remember reading in a Paco Underhill book that most successful grocery stores make sure you had to walk through the whole store to buy milk and bread--staples and essentials. And, in a completely different context, I also remember reading a healthy-eating book that encouraged people to be sure to buy everything from the outer parts of the grocery--e.g., produce, dairy and (no pun intended) whole foods.

posted by box 16 October | 20:34

Also, is that gaspode in the background of that mathowie photo?

posted by box 16 October | 20:39

That goes both ways, eekacat. And places like Whole Foods owe a big chunk of their success by marketing theselves to people who like to consider themselves 'different' from people who shop at Stop & Shop.
posted by jonmc 16 October | 18:21

That might be true, jonmc. I'm not sure what you're getting at, but my point remains at either store. Which is: you can go into Stop & Shop, make assumptions and sweeping generalizations about the people there, but if you talk to them, you might find something different. It just so happens that hellojed was doing that with Whole Foods in this case. Or, are you saying that the sweeping generalizations are true?

posted by eekacat 16 October | 20:40

Yeah, that's true. And every grocery store puts produce, meat, cheese, dairy, and freezer sections all around the outside perimeter, to draw you all over the store and expose you to more specials. Boring things like tampax, cat litter, and vitamins are always on the inside, as are all manner of processed crap. So it is a great healthy-eating strategy to "shop the outside of the store." Apart from forays into the center for paper goods, coffee, canned beans, pasta, baking needs, wine, and pet food, it works pretty well for me.

posted by Miko 16 October | 20:47

Also, is that gaspode in the background of that mathowie photo?

Huh. So it is. The photo must be from the London meetup last year.

I like Whole Foods. Good cheese. Never go there though because I order my groceries online.

posted by gaspode 16 October | 20:54

Aw. Are all the pictures disappearing now?
i wanted to draw on that one, box, and point things out with arrows. i find that picture priceless. Never has there been a better point and mug.

posted by ethylene 16 October | 20:55

Also, don't get kittens there. They spoil.

I am very much liking this, the story with a moral, right now.

posted by Zack_Replica 16 October | 21:20

Also liking the pic I'd never seen before of cortex breaking the rule and eating something bigger than his head. That would've left me bound up for days.

posted by Zack_Replica 16 October | 21:24

I find Whole Fords has no ingredients from Asia, the Middle East, Africa or the Caribbean so it don't work for me.

posted by arse_hat 16 October | 22:13

My only experience of Whole Foods has been in New York. I was expecting a supermarket, but found a very upmarket and fairly expensive deli. If I want takeout deli food in NY, I'll go to Zabar's, thanks.

There's a couple of Whole Foods opened in London, but if I'm in Central London, I wouldn't be buying raw food, as it'd be minging by the time I got it home on the Tube, so I've not been in there.

I do like Trader Joe's though, except it is always packed, and Fairway Market at Red Hook is the most awesome supermarket I've ever been in. Just breathtaking. I think on my next trip to NY I'll take a trip to Red Hook just to browse Fairway Market while Jason is at work. I'll go on the free Ikea ferry :-)

In Columbus, while I was waiting for a friend at her doctor's appointment, she left me at a little strip mall where there was a really fantastic supermarket, The Fresh Market. It was absolutely beautiful, everything top quality, perfectly presented and, being Ohio, prices were much lower than NY, although probably very high for the Midwest. I bought some donut peaches there at $1.99 a pound that were $5.99 in Chelsea Market in NYC.

I love browsing American supermarkets, looking at all the different products and comparing the price of things to home. I love this one, in Ohio. I could spend hours there. Seriously.

posted by essexjan 17 October | 04:44

no ingredients from Asia, the Middle East, Africa or the Caribbean

Mine does. It's not the best local source for any of those things, but they're there.

There are better places to get most things, but it's on my way home and it's open late, so I pop in every couple of weeks. I find the moralizing about it pretty tiresome.

posted by tangerine 17 October | 18:07

Fresh Market is Whole Foods as far as i know, like how Hellman's was Best Foods. The idea of whole foods doesn't fly well in the Midwest, much like how "Jews" could be discovered to be imaginary, as far as they could know or care. Donut peaches and organic greens and produce are becoming more easily available in other regional chains so they can't wildly inflate prices for "specialty" items, and where you could find a Fresh Market, you could also find other big chain affiliated store that has wine and spices, etc. that don't fly at the local chains.
It's all very sad what i have to go through just to get a jar of Patak's or Mideast spices these days.

posted by ethylene 17 October | 18:37

Remember how Patak's used to be Mr. Patak's? I once knew a guy whose dad was friends with Mr. Patak.

posted by tangerine 17 October | 19:08

The uncooked pizza shells at Whole Foods are cheaper than the supermarket. The pesto is the same price, but better. I'm such a housewife, I love shopping for food.

posted by StickyCarpet 18 October | 12:56

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