Shopping at Whole Foods can be a remarkable experience, especially at the flagship store near downtown Austin. For years after it opened in 2005, and possibly continuing to today, the store was a destination in an of itself. People go there not just to by groceries, but to look around and, you know, like, experience stuff. This also makes going to Whole Foods one of the most infuriating experiences of modern-day upper-middle-class American life—when you think about it, that ought to make us all pretty hopeful, but it’s still an irritating experience in the moment. It definitely gets a #firstworldproblems hashtag.

An article at Medium by Nils Parker deems Whole Foods “America’s Angriest Store,” and there is much truth to that assessment.

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.

They stand in the middle of the aisles, blocking passage of any other cart, staring intently at the selection asking themselves that critical question: which one of these olive oils makes me seem coolest and most socially conscious, while also making the raw vegetable salad I’m preparing for the monthly condo board meeting seem most rustic and artisanal?

I do not, as a general rule, like shopping. The ability to order stuff from my iPhone and have it delivered to me is, perhaps for me, the greatest technological achievement of my lifetime in terms of minimizing annoyance. When I do go to the grocery store, or wherever else, I prefer to get in, grab what I need, and get the hell out. I’m reasonably good at getting the lay of the land once I’m in a store so I know exactly where to go.

Whole Foods makes this almost impossible, because of the people I described earlier, whom I shall call “tourists.” I don’t think it is as bad at the flagship store as it was during the first few years, when people seemed to wander the store aimlessly, pushing shopping carts that they never actually filled with groceries, marveling at the fact that there are multiple different kinds of canned organic coconut milk.

The checkout line experience is equally difficult to manage, either graciously or gracefully. With regard to Austin’s downtown store, the act of parking is a whole separate ordeal, as cars are force to proceed single-file into a subterranean parking maze while the bike-riding crowd seems to sneer. Anyway, I’m sure I could go on and on about the experience. I haven’t even touched on the CEO’s , ahem, nutty positions on various issues that occasionally give me second thoughts about shopping at Whole Foods at all, until I start missing the kalamata olive bread. The Whole Foods experience is nothing new, though.

When I lived in Houston in the late ’90s, I often shopped at the Whole Foods at Shepherd & Alabama (I think it’s at Kirby & Alabama now, for those who know the area). I worked at the Bookstop that used to be in the same shopping center for a little while, and got a pretty good sense of the neighborhood. It existed at a cultural crossroads. To the west lived the opulently wealthy denizens of River Oaks, where houses have their own security staffs. To the east lived the proto-hipsters and hippie-Bohemians of the Museum District. To the northeast lived the proto-hipsters and cool gay people of the Montrose District. They all shopped at that Whole Foods, which was tiny compared to the Whole Foods stores of today. Some of them shopped there because it seemed less corporate than Kroger or Randall’s. Some shopped there because of vegan macrobiotic whole-grain free-range cruelty-free all-natural buzzwords. Some people shopped there because it was more expensive than the other stores in the area.

You have not lived until you have seen a 20-something blonde woman with dreadlocks down to her knees arguing furiously with a middle-aged woman, who is wearing the younger woman’s annual salary’s worth of jewelry, over who saw the last few organic beets first. It’s a magical experience.

Photo credits: That Other Paper [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Flickr; Counse [CC-BY 2.0], via Flickr.