Ah, Whole Foods! The retailer that greets you with a bounty of flowers and fresh produce when you walk through their doors, inviting you to pile your cart high with their cornucopia of organic products, fair trade coffees, and healthful hot meals and bulk medicinal herbs. The retailer that posts their Core Values right on the wall for all to see, like “We Practice and Advance Environmental Stewardship” and “We Satisfy, Delight and Nourish Our Customers.” One could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into an ecotopia of conscious capitalism, or at least a place where the products and practices that the shopper votes for with their dollars are less guilty than other, more sullied retail grocery stores.
Ah, Whole Foods! The retailer that greets you with a bounty of flowers and fresh produce when you walk through their doors, inviting you to pile your cart high with their cornucopia of organic products, fair trade coffees, and healthful hot meals and bulk medicinal herbs. The retailer that posts their Core Values right on the wall for all to see, like “We Practice and Advance Environmental Stewardship” and “We Satisfy, Delight and Nourish Our Customers.” One could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into an ecotopia of conscious capitalism, or at least a place where the products and practices that the shopper votes for with their dollars are less guilty than other, more sullied retail grocery stores.
If only it were so easy to shop one’s way to a better world!
A week ago, the famously green grocery chain reached a settlement with the EPA regarding improper documentation and disposal of items that had been returned by customers but which had been opened or otherwise inappropriate to return to store shelves. These toxic or otherwise regulated products include items like hand sanitizer, bleach, nail polish and remover, vitamins, batteries, and cleaners. While Whole Foods issued a statement pointing out that the alleged violations of law involved their documentation processes (implying that they hadn’t been caught doing anything else wrong despite the EPA’s finding that Whole Foods had improperly handled spent lamps), the willingness of the profit-driven company (it’s right there in their core values!) to hand over a cool $3.5 million to make their trouble go away offers a telling glimpse past their thin, green veneer.
Of course, as soon as they were caught with their organic cotton yoga pants down, the company made some grand happy talk about coming up with new and stellar practices – toxic waste documentation practices – practices that you don’t even know about yet that they will devise, practices that are gonna be so good that they would soon be the industry standard (hat tip to Mr. Trump*). You know, exactly the sort of thing that the casual shopper, in for a cruelty-free pumpkin spice latte, might assume that the green-haloed grocery chain would already have implemented by choice, instead of as a guilty afterthought.
Hopefully these plans play out better than Whole Foods’ schemes to “create wealth through profits & growth” by selling asparagus water, automating employees out of jobs, overcharging customers, and externalizing more and more of the costs of doing business onto their lowest level workers or even prisoners. (Remember, “we support team member happiness and excellence” is a Whole Foods Core Value!) If it’s easy to dismiss story after story as coming merely from disgruntled current and former employees, it might be worth considering why so many of them are disgruntled. Perhaps there’s less substance behind that thin green veneer than the carefully crafted Whole Foods experience and PR department would prefer the public to perceive.
Whole Foods CEOs Apologize for Overcharging, courtesy of ABC News
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