Like a porn star's endowment, everything about these stores is so pretty, so lush, so big, so overdone, yet irrationally attractive.
The sad reality is that instead of being a Green improvement over standard grocery stores, they are the opposite.
The Cupertino store employs no less than 30 of those incredibly wasteful overhead infrared headlamp devices (the kind usefully seen on the patios of popular restaurants). However, this is balmy Cupertino, where it rarely gets below 50. On the day of my visit, it was a dreary and cool-ish February. All the heatlamps were pumping out thousands of BTUs of heat into the atmosphere, to keep exactly zero patrons warm. So much for Global Warming, they're doing it directly (why bother going through the tiresome intermediary of Carbon Dioxide when you can heat the planet directly, for no other purpose).
Both stores have signage beautifully made with exotic (probably tropical) plywoods, where you can see the pretty laminations in alternating light (pine?) and dark (mahogany?) woods. I'm sure these are sustainably harvested woods, from fair wage laborers, etc etc. But each little sign (every shelf in the store has a few of these) represents probably $100 of actual added value (in US dollars) for what point? To encourage shoppers to feel better about themselves, feel cozier and more luxuriated, and thus buy more stuff they don't really need?
The Brand Message of Whole Foods is all about 'natural', 'green', and 'wholesome'. But that is not the reality of their impact on society and the earth.
What these Whole Foods Mega Stores (and their ilk throughout the US Retail economy) really represent are:
- Materialism
- Consumerism
- Excess
- Marketing, Branding, and Shop-fitting as Manipulators of Emotion and Behavior
- Self-Indulgence, of the Gastronomic Kind (i.e.: Foodies)
- Disproportionate Utilization of Resources, especially Energy
- Exploitation of Arbitrary Labor and Natural Resource Market Inequalities
- Waste (of Consumer Dollars)
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