In Costoesque fashion, Whole Foods aggressively pursues exclusivity & volume, obscuring not only the existence of Big Organic, yet Big “Naturals” in pursuit of market dominance. I like to say that one of the hidden fallacies of Whole Foods is that they in fact both drive & obscure New Monoculture.
Worse, perhaps, or in my opinion, they do this under the guise of some destructive version of the term ethics. They ruthlessly cling to “organic” beyond reason for pure branding. The means have long outpaced the meaning, much less the method, not only with obscurantist Big Organics driven by WF. Organic is, vapid & foundational to WF, like the token inclusion of the Big Mac no matter the revamp of the menu over with McDo.
They blind consumers to this silly & indeed ultimately harmful word game.
They (willingly) blind otherwise smart people (with money) to real food, to food issues.
In the same way, they subsume other fashionable word games (local, ethical, GMO-free, etc.) driving their true purveyors (smaller producers) to death, dressing everything up in kindergarden colour codes, bathed in pre-determined profit margins.
They may offer tattoos
There is no other poignant reminder of how the concepts of “edgy” or “responsible” are utterly dead than in the colour-coded ethical labelling and in-house tattooing tactics of Whole Foods.
If the latter are already doomed concepts, the market tactics of the corporations that subsume them make their death all the more gruesome. Neither markets nor tactics, however, can be usefully blamed…the one is a set of functions, the other a way to operate within those.
Feel good companies are the worst kind of predators, investing more into obscuring their market & worse, when successful doing so, chomping up the last shreds of meaning for fellow humans.
À table 
