For plebs or persons comfortable ingesting large quantities of cancer giving chemicals, Thanksgiving ingredients rose 7.6% to $94.63, year over year. But for organic-assholes like me, prices have fucking skyrocketed by 26% to $134.95. For those of you pondering where inflation is being buried, it’s in the aisles of organic grocers — like Wholefoods. I have a hard theory on why this is happening — all stemming from the dichotomy in the economy, between the haves and have nots. Inflation for the rich is in the double digits. And those assholes, like me, eat organic food.
Bear in mind, I’m not religious about eating organic food. Being a fatalist, I’m not scared of death, or even a harrowing one via inorganic foods. Nonetheless, my grocery bills for a family of 5 are beyond absurd — at $3,000-$3,500 per month, not including fine dining out with my dickhead friends.
The vast majority of my produce comes from local farms in the Princeton area. But I do plenty of shopping at Wholefoods as well and I feel like a victim every time I insert my debit card into their god forsaken money collecting machines.
For a shopper looking to serve a fully organic meal, Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods was the only retailer in the study where the 20 items were available. The price of the organic basket was $134.95, up almost 26 percent year-over-year. Whole Foods made its name as a supplier of items that shoppers couldn’t find elsewhere, but with organic food moving to the mainstream, there are now supply constraints. That’s made it tricky for company to keep prices down, Bartashus said.
“There are only so many organic turkeys out there,” she said. “Supply isn’t expanding as quickly as demand with some of the specialty items — it makes it harder for them to bring down prices.”
Last year, Wholefoods came under fire for blatantly ripping their customers off.
Last week, New York’s Department of Consumer Affairs said it was expanding its investigation after finding that Whole Foods stores in the city regularly ripped customers off, including overcharging $14.84 for a package of coconut shrimp and $4.85 for eight chicken tenders. The department tested 80 types of prepackaged items and found all of them had mislabeled weights. The investigation focused on eight stores in the city.
In a statement, Commissioner Julie Menin said that the Department of Consumer Affairs was “gratified” that Whole Foods admitted to issues with its prepackaged food labels.
In the YouTube video, Mackey said there was a “very small percentage” of weighing errors with items made in stores, including sandwiches, fresh juices and cut fruits.
“We know they are unintentional because the mistakes are both in the customer’s favor and sometimes not in the customer’s favor,” Robb said.
Even while ripping off their well to do customers, profits haven’t exactly been robust. After years of uninterrupted earnings growth, the chickens have finally come home to roost — as the pangs of this healthcare burdened economy finally hit the bottom line of the biggest asshole grocers in the country.
Year to date, WFM is down 5.2%, KR is off by 18.6%, SVU is down 30%, SFM is down 18% and TFM is the only outlier, higher by 21%.
Conversely, the distributors of food are making bank. With demand kicking up, the volume of organic goods is buoying the profits of the fuckers who deliver the stuff. Shares of SPTN are up 72% for the year, in addition to SYY (+38%) and UNFI (+21%).
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