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. Continue reading →