Whole Foods

A few months ago, Whole Foods Market bought out Wild Oats. That meant that our local Wild Oats would, in some far-away moment, become a Whole Foods.

I was very excited about this possibility. Whole Foods has always been better than Wild Oats, and in CA I almost never chose the latter over the former. For one thing, Whole Foods had substantially better prepared foods and a much better meat counter.

So imagine my disappointment last week when my mother and I dropped in to see what changes had been made.

In short: bupkus. Nada. Zilch. Oh, wait. They changed the sign above the door. And the little boxes at the salad bar.

But the prepared foods are the same. Ok, not the same foods - some Whole Foods staples are now available (chicken salad with walnuts and grapes, for example). But the ethos is the same. Take this experience as an example:

I needed a snack. So I perused the choices. Everything looked old, dry and not-especially-clean. Eventually, I picked a chicken tamale. The young woman asked me, "for here or to go?" For here, I would eat it at the little tables not five feet away. So she gave me a plate.

Fine so far. I go to pay at the little counter on the other side of the dining area, and the young lady there takes my money (after quoting the wrong price), but does *not* offer me: any option to heat up my tamale; any utensil or where to find a utensil to eat it with; salsa or any kind of sauce.

I then go to sit down, and find that the table is dirty. The table next to it is dirty, too, and the wind from the door is blowing a local newspaper across the room. What strikes me about that is that the paper belonged to an employee. He was reading it during his lunch break, then got up and went back to work, leaving his trash sitting on the table to blow onto me.

But wait - there's more! I found a fork on the salad bar, which was encrusted with drips of dressing and soup. I then ate about half of my tamale, because A) it was cold! and B) it tasted oddly like cat food smells. Not a success. Mother only ate half of her soup and cornbread, too.

The aisles were the same, the merchandising the same, the sloppy employee behavior the same (at the sushi bar, a balled-up apron left hanging half off the counter...etc.). The one thing we liked about Wild Oats was the butcher, where young Megan was so helpful. She seems to have gone, and they've moved all the chicken out of the meat cases and into plastic wrap in the fridge case. So you can no longer select exactly how much you need, and all the chicken now has an unattractively moist, grayish quality.

In other words: no good changes, and plenty of inexcusable failure. If one had no other choices...

But there's always Fresh Market.

I predict that Whole Foods will find this store a loser until it actually devotes some attention to management, cleanliness, and quality product. Because right now, Fresh Market (for all its minor flaws) is kicking their butt.