So, I went to the new whole foods today after work. To be honest, I wasn’t planning on buying much, I just wanted to check out the “new digs.”

Holy balls, this place is huge. It’s absolutely insane. Adam said it was the 3rd biggest in the country. I do believe him. It’s located on Kingsbury just south of North ave, more or less “across the street” from the old Whole Foods, near Blick.

They have a small surface level parking lot but I didn’t even bother, because I knew the small lot would be full. I went straight up into the depths into a gigantic parking garage rivaling that of The Grove in LA. Keep in mind, that’s for an entire outdoor mall, not just one store.

I was surprised to find the 2nd floor lot almost entirely full, although I don’t know how many levels the garage is. I did find a spot on the 2nd one, though. Upon descending the escalator into the store (it took me a second to find where I had to enter the store itself) you get a pretty wide overview of the entire place. It has a very open floor layout and it was bustling with shoppers. And it was overwhelming. They had little mobile kiosk-esque stands instead of the standard fish counter, the produce section was right when you entered and was quite extensive, and this was just the view i could see. I blindly stumbled around and put some kale and bananas in my annoying “euro-style” basket-cart thing (seriously they suck) and plunged into the depths.

Of course being new at the store (who WASN’T new, it just opened yesterday) I wanted to look cool like I knew what I was doing. but god damn I didn’t. I think it seriously affected my judgement, due to all the aisles being perfectly blocked. They’re certainly wide enough for two carts now, whereas the last whole foods was barely wide enough for one. I ended up buying a $12.50 6oz steak of fish and a $20 mini keg of beer for a BBQ on sunday. I didn’t want to get too much because there’s no way I’d find it and I hate having to put your cart in one of those conveyer belts to go upstairs to the parking garage. Seriously, that may be detrimental to my shopping experience, unless I can score a surface level spot.

The place has a legitimate food court, like you’d find at a mall, but with fancy food like sushi and, well, pizza’s not that fancy but it probably was there, and other stuff. That was the most crowded part of the store, too. They had like 4 different checkout areas not in traditional spaces, either. I did check out after wandering around for a bit and was in and out in 20 minutes - impressive considering the crowd and the sheer size of the place.

Ive got mixed feelings about the new Whole Foods…It’s so spit polished and just goes to show you how the company really is just another big box retailer, but they specialize in gourmet goods. It’s nice to know you can get imported vegetables from south america (what’s the carbon footprint on those, hmm?) or whatever, or knowing that people are interested in this enough that they can build a multimillion dollar monstrosity in this economy, but it’s all a bit sickening. Now, i’m on the verge of sounding pretentious here (when has that ever happened) but all of “my” usual whole foods have been a bit run down or home-y feeling in a lot of ways than this one….like in Boston, we shopped at the old Bread & Circus that Whole Foods bought out. Or in West Hollywood, we shopped at the somewhat ghetto on on Santa Monica and Fairfax, not the “nicer” one on Fairfax and 3rd. So this one that’s spit polished and gigantic kind of goes against the idea of “whole foods” to begin with…after all, how much energy does it take to power the lights, air conditioning, cash registers, freezers, and coolers at such a place? How much was spent on this building? How socially responsible and environmentally friendly can whole foods really be…what does it matter when you’re eating a carrot that has the carbon footprint of a mack truck?

All in all, I’d say my experience of shopping at whole foods has been brought down a notch or two. It’s not easy to get your cart up a flight of stairs even if there is an escalator thing. It’s certainly not cool to have a giant store full of exotics from the far reaches from the globe posing as some quasi-earth friendly co-op. Sad thing is, I’ll continue shopping there. Makes you think about places like the Fare Share market or Berkshire Co-Op.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Superior Judgment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.