As someone with a relative high up the ladder at Whole Foods, I feel for him and for the enterprise (as much as you can feel for a business, anyway). Whole Foods tries to bring to market the best products an area’s surrounding farms and suppliers have to offer, in a socially conscious way with high-touch customer service at the point of sale. Yet in doing so, they’ve brought out the worst in the people who are attracted to that idea. Or perhaps more accurately, their idea attracts the worst kind of people. I don’t know. It is a frustrating irony for which they should not be held responsible. There isn’t much to do, after all, when your core demographic happens to be a living, breathing hashtag. #firstworldproblems
16 thoughts on “Does Whole Foods Attract Awful People?”
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Apt. 11d 
I really never notice many awful people when I’m at the Whole Foods. Which might be because I’m not very self-aware or something.
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I have never noticed awful people at Whole Foods either. And, in the story, the person who packed up another person’s groceries was about as awful as the person who left the line to grab something. As well as the author, noting with glee that his target is apparently single (and, presumably, unloved).
I am, however, sympathetic to the idea that wealthy people are generally more selfish and self-centered than the non-wealthy, and cite as evidence the recent study that showed that drivers in more expensive cars are less likely to stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk (Piff et al, PNAS, 2012).
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The connection between “wealthy” and “drives expensive car” is not very strong, which is a pretty fatal flaw to that particular study. There are way more people who drive nice cars than can afford nice cars. It would be far more sensible to draw the conclusion that people who are careless with their money are careless with pedestrians’ lives, which sounds pretty intuitive to me.
Our only car is probably only worth about $1500 right now and our next car is probably going to be a Kia (which we will almost certainly pay cash for), but it would be very unwise to assume that that means that we are broke. It works very much the other way around.
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The paper actually has 7 studies, of which the car example is only one. They also address the question of whether their stand-ins for wealth are correlated with social class, and with what degree of accuracy (the studies are about social class and not just income).
The average income of luxury car buyers is definitely higher than the income of the buyer of the average car, so it is not a bad correlate for wealth, though not perfect
Median incomes of owners/purchasers
Audi: $183,601
Mercedes-Benz; $174,558
BMW: $169,289
Lexus: $141,745
Cadillac: $129,656
Lincoln: $113,782
(FYI, for comparison, it looks like the median income is $51,000)
I like the study, though I hope more studies are done, not the least because bigger samples are always better.
In addition, they test theories of why higher income people produce their various forms of behavior (which includes cutting off both pedestrians & other cars at intersections) and conclude that higher income people are more likely to exhibit non-communitarian/asocial behavior.
Other studies of wealth & behavior show that higher income individuals are more likely to make “utilitarian” choices (i.e. the footbridge dilemma — an individual pushes a large person off a bridge to stop a train and save the lives of five people, pushing is considered the utilitarian choice) (Cote et al, 2013, higher social class subjects were more likely to push the stranger than lower social class subjects).
I would not have presumed a relationship between people being “careless with lives” along with being “careless with money”, but I wonder how one would test that hypothesis. Maybe one could look at behavior as a function of how much more the person spends than the average person at their income level on different expenditures? as a function of behavior? Merely associating expensive cars with careless spending is inappropriate, since plenty of people who buy expensive cars can afford them, too.
I’m hoping for a science fair project on the car hypothesis, though I need to think through the ethical implications of photographing cars and observing behavior.
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Were the cars in the study under lease, or owned? Were they driven by the owners, or by friends or family members? What was the driver’s net worth? (Don’t think you could determine that from the street corner.)
Did they test the possibility that the make of car influenced the drivers’ behavior? They could test this. Record subjects’ driving in a Mercedes, Lexus, Ford, and Kia. Do they drive differently in different brands? If the brand influences the behavior, then it’s not necessarily the income.
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Unfortunately, the brand data isn’t in the paper (and, also, car status includes more than just brand), and, I can imagine that brand might influence behavior, too. They do correct for gender & age in the analysis, since one might imagine those to influence behavior as well. Part of the reason why I really want to do the study myself, but I’m not sure I have quick ways of identifying gender and age.
The existence of potential confounds doesn’t make the study interpretation less valid (i.e. the correlation between car driven and social class) unless the potential confounds significantly impact the correlation. For example, it’s possible that in their study, all of the drivers of high status cars were leasers and that leasers are, on average, poorer than owners. But, absent some evidence that that (or some other confound was actually present), it’s reasonable to assume that the general correlation between wealth and car driven is valid in their study.
But, again, a larger n would certainly help, say so that you could be reasonably confident that the sample of cars was large enough that potential confounds were less likely to explain the results.
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To Cranberry- Do they drive differently in different brands?
You certainly have a much harder time trying to cut someone off in a Kia than in a BMW
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I haven’t noticed awful people at Whole Foods either. As another story by the same writer on that site is titled, “Your Kid is a Little Asshole And Guess What: It’s All Your Fault,” I suspect this writer finds angry people wherever he goes.
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I do let my kid push the cart through Whole Foods. I do this both because it amuses him and because it pisses off the right kind of people.
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Heck, it gets better. The author works on projects with Tucker Max.
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Whole Foods is a grocery store, not a way for people to assert their personal identities (or their opposition to other people’s identities). I don’t shop there often because it is more expensive than other grocery stores in my area that have similar quality food but when I do shop there it’s because I need food which, contrary to this guy’s assessment of the situation, is probably why most people are there.
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That was me.
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I also go there to get free samples and free samples alone and no one there gives me a hard time about it so on that point alone: yay Whole Foods!
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Our HEB has been giving away free sushi samples. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I find myself buying a very small $10 box of sushi for the big kids to share. Yay?
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Yes, I find those free samples extremely seductive and they are a great marketing tool for me. It would be interesting to hear the market research on the success of free samples.
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In Nebraska, they sometimes have free (very small) samples of whiskey.
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