Categories: Brown Line Construction · Damen Brown Line Stop · cta
Tagged: brown line, cta, Damen Brown Line, public transportation, trains
Whole Foods. Just say the name and it seems to be a lightening rod for many people. I know people who shop there yet are incensed at the high prices. Others shop there feeling that at least “they” take care of their employees. Others shop there because they believe that it is the socially concious thing to do. Others because they are upwardly mobile, can afford the prices and like the quality of food there, versus, say, Jewel or Costco. I shop there because I have no choice (major autoimmune and dietary issues)
At the risk of sounding like a geezer and a fossil, I can actually say that I shopped at Whole Foods when they first entered the Chicago market, and when they still had a soul. Okay, okay, maybe that’s not all THAT long ago, but for anyone who started shopping there in the past few years, their shopping experience has not had the ‘history’ that mine has had. My mom was the one who first dragged me into Whole Foods, mostly because of their large bulk area when they opened on North Avenue. My mom used to shop at Rainbow Foods, a tiny hole in the wall grocer where bulk was king. My mom also shopped at grocery coops, did Reiki and Polarity Therapy, made her own herbal tinctures and all kinds of amazing things way back in the 1980s.
When I was working on my first graduate degree, our management class team did Whole Foods as our chosen company to profile. As amazing as it sounds, our professor hadn’t even heard of them. Considering the company’s anti union stance, and the topic of our class, you would almost think they would have been loathe to meet with us. My main contact back then was the Regional Vice President, who actually had come over from the Fresh Fields merger. The company had just gone public, so the impact of that hadn’t even trickled into the organization yet. That was good. I am purposedly leaving the names of those we met with out.
Our meeting was interesting, fun and most of all shocking in that we were not used to senior management being so forthcoming, open and easy going. In addition to the Regional Vice President, we met with the then Regional President. Because I really disliked having to wear a suit to do our B School presentations, I asked them if we could borrow the WF aprons, which at that time were a kelly green. The response? ABSOLUTELY!! Followed by, “Do you want caps to go with that, too??”
Fast forward many, many years. I’m in the second part of my program, which is an MSIMC degree. I’m taking an integrated public relations class, and I chose to revisit Whole Foods from a public relations standpoint. When I say public relations, I’m talking about the professional levels that integrate a strategic marketing plan, messaging maps, etc. and not “publicity” or the irresponsible attention getting that some companies and people engage in. A part of my analysis required media monitoring. Oh what an interesting task that was.
In today’s world we monitor not only print magazines, newspapers, and books but online everything. I was also fortunate enough to speak with the public relations firm that handled one of their regional accounts (not in the Midwest). And of course, I interviewed management here in Chicago. I can tell you that going “public” and being tied into what happens to corporations when they become publically held (versus retaining private ownership) clearly has had its impact. The easy, casual, and more relaxed mannerisms of management as I knew them before were no where to be seen. When I posed the same question about aprons (and in this case it would have only been one, mine!) I was told, “Absolutely not.”
Coincidently I have a friend who worked in the store I shopped at, so I also got plenty of inside information. I would have had more but they fired some of the guys I used to like to chat with. Apparently they were a little too positive about the idea of a union. And, as if a gift from the store itself were bestowed upon me, they had a major issue that hit the news, which was almost a text book case of how a company should not handle bad press.
Growth affects organizations in many ways. Just as the types of relationships we bring into our personal lives affects us, the types of relationships that organizations bring inside also has an impact. When a company goes public, they are no longer the ‘owners’ of their company. The stockholders now own their company. This will sound kind of way out there for anyone who can’t get beyond 3rd dimensional concepts, but the energy of the stockholders also influences and impacts a company. You can see this in Whole Foods. Ironically, if you are in Austin, where they are headquartered, their redone theatrical store goes beyond that. It’s shopping as theater there, which provides entertainment and “showtime fun” for shoppers, but it’s a nightmare for anyone with energetic sensitivities. Friends I know there have simply stopped shopping there. Ironically the solution to their bad energy is also right there in Austin - there’s a person who does business clearings to help clean up majorly bad energy so companies can get back on track again. This person would be their spiritual director, but are they ready for this type of direction?
Categories: whole foods
Tagged: whole foods
Whole Foods bans plastic bags
Because I shop at Whole Foods, I knew this day was coming. While WFM is making a statement about the excess proliferation of plastic bags, I have to say that of ALL the stores ditching plastic bags, the last one I would have liked to see do this is Whole Foods.
For one, I shop there, and I take public transportation. This means that on the days it is raining, I opt for plastic. Usually I bring my own bags, but there are times were I go there after an appointment, upon deciding to move my schedule around, and I am bagless. Believe me, if it is raining, I want plastic. Whole Foods has always used a higher quality plastic bag. What does this mean? It means it is easy to reuse, to fold up and to stuff in your messenger bag, briefcase, or purse, and because it was of a higher quality, I never had to worry about the bottoms opening up and having my groceries spatted all over between one of two bus stops (now that my Brown Line Station is closed). Do I reuse Jewel plastic bags??? Hardly. I try, but they are cheesy and small, don’t hold much and often when I carry very heavy items, they need doubling, which hardly saves usage.
Where I can walk to a store, I usually use a Zucca bag (reusable tote on wheels in a steel frame that doubles as a seat in a moment of fatigue). When I don’t have the bag, or my own reusable plastic bags, I do need a bag and one with handles. When I use the self check out, I see a lot of people who also bring bags, knapsacks, etc. Those who are aware of over consumption often are careful not to perpetrate it. Then there are those who are unconscious about it…
It is this group, those who are unconcious about their over consumption that need to be reached. It is this group and those who have a general disregard for the world we live in who often toss their plastic bags out onto the street, so that they can either become post-its on the bottom of people’s cars, tree ornaments or artificial urban tumbleweed. It is this group that uses as many plastic bags as possible because they have no awareness, or they don’t care to think about the long range implications. After all, if you do think about it, you might have to think about what the other things one does and eats is doing, to themselves, their loved ones and our home here on this planet
Categories: banned · consumption · plastic bags · whole foods
Tagged: banned, earth day, overconsumption, plastic bags, whole foods
I just received an email forwarding an article from yesterday’s New York Times, Sticker Shock in the Organic Aisles. My hip, socially aware and spiritually concious cool cousin from LA sent me this, with the comment, “Nooooooooooooooo. or hellooooooooooo. Are they just waking up to this NOW??” Apparently many have still been sleeping.
Due to medical issues, I have no choice but to shop organic. In the early 80’s I shopped at Coops and at the many independent natural foods stores that used to be in Chicago. As Fresh Fields developed stores here, my then favorite store, the independently owned Foodworks, began to have problems competing. A large part of that was due to so many people being curious about Fresh Fields. We shopped at both places, which meant that our food dollars were now being split between two stores and less on mail order items. Then Whole Foods entered the market, and our beloved Foodworks store on Diversey and Sheffield could not compete against two giants. Barb and her husband closed the store.
By now I developed a rare autoimmune condition (genetic) that requires me to be fastidious about doing organic foods. Add to that yet another autoimmune condition and many allergies, and now I’m not an organic shopper only by choice but by necessity. During this time Whole Foods basically gobbled up Fresh Fields, leaving a giant of stores to compete against what was left of the independent natural and health food stores in Chicago. Slowly, or quickly depending on your perspective, they withered and closed up, leaving Chicago with only one choice. Even the previous competitor Wild Oats was no where to be seen in the city.
A competitor seemed to arrive years ago, called Sunflower. Their choice of locations and bad timing made it impossible for me to get there and shop there. By the time I heard about it, the CTA had begun announcing station closures on the Brown Line. I can assure you that if you haul your groceries on public transportation in the summer, you really don’t want to wait in the blazing heat for 30-45 minutes while your produce cooks and your other perishables perish, so the train is the way to go. Last year Sunflower closed.
So here we are in Chicago, with Whole Foods really being the only game in town for those of us who have extremely special dietary needs. The store does a good job of serving those needs, and for those of us who get deathly ill from conventional food “food preservatives,” Whole Foods is the place to shop. Fortunately, Jewel Foods also has expanded their product mix to include more natural and organic foods, but the product mix and choice is really a function of what store you shop at. For example, the Jewel on north Clark street in Andersonville is where my uncle shops. When I was there yesterday, I was amazed at what a small selection of organics they had. I commented to the friend of mine whom I was with that the Lincoln Avenue store had four times the dry goods and more than three times the selection of produce.
All that being said, what about prices??? HIGH, UNFREAKINGBELIEVABLY HIGH. In fact, at times Jewel is higher than Whole Foods (the volume a store does obviously has an effect on the prices they can get from distributors). How long has this been going on??? For years, yes, YEARS!! Two years ago I saw my organic and naturally raised food bill double. Since a full year ago, I’ve seen this bill double again. So please, NY Times, don’t tell us our food bill has gone sky high. This is majorly old news for us.
Categories: Organic Foods · whole foods
Tagged: food prices, natural foods, nyt, organic, whole foods
The Damen Brown Line Hooray, more progress is being made on the station that I used to use to go just about anywhere!! During January and February, it seemed like such a waste to have closed the station while it appeared that not much was going on. While I can appreciate that there may have been construction being done that was not easily ascertainable from the street, for those of us who depend on the Brown Line and were using this station, not seeing progress wasn’t exactly making us happy campers while we slipped and slid our way to either the Western Ave. or Montrose Brown Line Stops instead. With Spring seems to have come more steel girders and more construction… and knowing that we’ll only have to put up with walking to another stop for 9 more months.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: brown line, construction, cta, damen stop
From the New York Times: March 31, 2008
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation. When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Mr. Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of recreating Cambodia as an agricultural nation.
To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant. Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.
In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones. The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine…
When I first heard about the Killing Fields, it was from reading a book that appeared in 1985, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” There was a film made based on this book, the Killing Fields. While horrifying because it is based on the genocide that Dith Pran lived through, it is both historical and inspiring to have read about one who has suffered so much, lost so much, and had the fortitude to not only start over but help change the world by surviving. Without Mr. Dith and Mr. Schanberg, and without Mr. Dith’s survival, the story of Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge may never have been so eloquently communicated and the world educated about what happened there.
In the 60’s, in a different country, the Cultural Revolution also suppressed, tortured and imprisoned many of China’s educated citizens. For anyone who thinks the Cultural Revlolution in China was only about wearing Chairman Mao jackets, they are seriously unaware. Nien Cheng was a survivor of those years, and her experiences are recounted in Life and Death in Shanghai. While graduate school business students are not required to read books regarding cultural and national history and issues, I often think they should. When I was in business school, our international business ethics course provided rich materials and cases that only began to open the door to the complexities of cultural nationalism that every nation, including the United States, “owns.”
When I took International Marketing, we were all assigned several different countries to develop a general marketing plan for a specific, assigned product. Fortunately one of my team members was just as interested in understanding the culture and social moires of our “country” as I was, and we did well in our analysis and product presentation, despite that fact that it was not a European nation. One of the things that struck me was that in general, if the country was not a western European nation, remnants of EuroCentric focus that most US citizens have clearly showed. What was appalling was when one group, which was assigned China, came out with “Chairman Mao Beer” and came up with a ‘celebratory campaign’ honoring the Cultural Revolution. How clearly off the mark they were. I hope they either learned more about that period of time and what it did to segments of the educated Chinese population, or stayed away the field of International Marketing.
Categories: Cambodia · educational system · genocide · history
Tagged: Cambodia, china, dith pran, international marketing, killing fields
I was at a luncheon with my friend Peter, and somehow we started talking about relationships and adultery. Peter is this amazing guy I met in a class I’m taking. He had a bad case of Lyme’s disease and became disabled from it, and you can see that it had ravaged him leaving neurological and muscular damage. His mind and sense of humor, however, are fine and because of that, he’s a blast to be around.
While we were discussing relationships, the question of being ‘true’ and ‘in truth’ to oneself came up. That’s when I commented about something that happened to a friend of mine. About 8 years ago a friend of mine was quite upset because his sister called his mother to say she was getting a divorce and moving in with her boss, who was also getting a divorce. On the face of it, it seemed to throw every value he was raised with in his parent’s face, yet a year ago we revisited this topic and he admitted that for years before his sister left her marriage, the ’signs’ were there - no one wanted to see them though. It turns out that both parties were living in a dead marriage with no hope for revitalization. Both his sister and her husband, and her boss and his wife existed together but had grown apart in almost every conceivable way. By the time his sister decided she couldn’t live a lie any longer, her husband was relieved, as living as room mates and buddies was not his idea of marriage. Adultery, as the term is used, does not happen in a void. If two people are truly in love, committed to each other and honest about their relationship, adultery will not have room to exist. This is because if the marriage is going to end, it will end and not “live on” propped up by artificial “life” saving techniques where one partner has created a belief, often a very committed belief extending to friends and family, that everything is fine while the other partner is wresting with dealing with a disconnect in truth.
Are these situations preventable? Most of change over time, some of us grow spiritually, some of us reject spirituality, some of us need to be right about everything and some of us are willing to try to understand another person’s point of view, some of us are somewhere in the middle, and on and on. When two people end up at diametrically polar opposite positions, and would NEVER get together if they were single but they are still bound due to marriage, it is their personal responsibility to be in truth with what is going on. This truth needs to be not just with themselves but with the other person. If one person is willing to live a lie then the relationship will, inevitably suffer in some manner. A relationship needs to be based in honesty and truth for it to survive and be fulfilling and not empty.
Categories: adultery · marriage · truth
Tagged: adultery, divorce, marriage, truth
So what exactly makes a ‘good marriage?’ In the Chicago area, the news has been covering the search (and discovery) of Anu Solanki. According to the Chicago Sun Times, “Solanki, 24, who moved to the Chicago area after her marriage in May, was reported missing Monday by her husband, Dignesh, when she disappeared soon after leaving work at a gift shop in the Westin Chicago North Shore Hotel in Wheeling. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said early Friday that Solanki appeared to have traveled with Karan C. Jani, 23, who graduated this year from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles… “We believe Anu is, in fact, alive,” Dart said earlier Friday. “She had another relationship with someone.”
For myself, after a disabling accident in 1991, what was a ‘tolerable’ marriage became intolerable. While we did a lot of things together, we stayed together because of cultural and societal pressures we felt, and neither of us were honest with each other in admitting that the love was gone, as were gone any sparks and emotional connections. We had become two friends, not even good friends, who were living together. After my accident “honesty” was in our face and after a couple more years I was forced to put truth on the table and we split. It was the worst time someone in my situation could have done this, but it the living with a stranger with no support made life even more intolerable than living on my own again. Because of our personalities, we never overtly shouted or fought, we often usually appeared together at business and family functions and we didn’t put acrimony first in all the years of being not so happily married.
I’d say for most of our years, we weren’t miserable until the end, but we were ‘tolerating’ each other and at times at peace with ‘being stuck’ with each other until after my accident. From the outside, people thought we had a GREAT marriage, so when we announced we were getting a divorce, except for my closest friends, most everyone was shocked and could not believe it. Common comments from people, including relatives, were of the ilk of, “you both always seemed to love each other… you both seemed so happy together, etc.” After reading comments about Anu Solanki, it brought me back to some difficult years for me in the past, and how we stayed in our marriage because we felt trapped… and how it took a disabling accident to push us to our truth that while on the outside, things looked fine, on the inside life was miserable and we wanted out. In our case, my accident exacerbated our relationship problems (or lack of relationship) and we divorced before either of us had an affair.
The experience of staying when ‘feeling trapped’ is something that only those who have experienced it can truly understand why spouses often do the things they do before they decide to separate. Personally I believe it is one of the reasons so many people step out on their spouses. Ultimately it isn’t about the other person, ultimately it is about a person being honest with whether staying in a marriage or relationship is for their highest good or if they are just living in a created fantasy of “don’t force me to change my life.”
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: good marriage, solanki, truth
I finally saw “Bobby” last night thanks to my Netflix subscription. I can understand the criticisms that having a cast of stars could be distracting. What I found distracting was the lack of demographics. Estevez’s film had a good number of Latinos and Mexicans featured in the kitchen, a smaller smattering of African Americans and absolutely no Asian Americans. Come on, this was in Los Angeles, one of the few places in the USA which already had a large Asian Amercian population!!
Shame on you Emilio for ignoring this group, one that built the railroads in this nation, a group that sacrificed for their country and which found their civil liberties taken away just 24 years prior to Bobby Kennedy’s murder. Then again, for me, the star studded cast is a reminder that this is Hollywood, not real life. Mexican kitchen help has some dialogue toward conveying their situtation and a little of US history about US acquistion of Mexican lands, and uses the term “Latino” once but that is all. For the most part, the handing of ethnic subcultures is superficial. I suppose if Estevez wasn’t Mexican in heritage, it might have been even more wanting. Still, Asian Americans and Native Americans have been living in California (it was Indian land before, remember??) minimally at the turn of the 1900’s. Yet Bobby, with its historical background, would have a view believe Asian Americans and First Nation people did not exist in Los Angeles, that African Americans had largely “made it” and all Mexicans worked kitchens. Bobby left me disappointed at this mix, with the sad irony that Kennedy’s speeches had so much more substance than the film’s depiction of those of whom he spoke of and for.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Asian Americans, Film, Los Angeles
I’m happy to report that my favorite Whole Foods store (the one I shop at regularly) has undergone a good metamorphisis. Missing is the dour faced girl that I used to find so unpleasant at the Customer Service counter. There are a few other old faces missing, some of which were good employees, so I can’t say that all the changes seem good, but the mood in the store is definitely much, much better. The robotized personal interactions I had noticed the past year seem replaced by nicer, gentler, real customer interactions - hooray. That’s the good news, and that’s the Lake View store. The bad news still is at the Huron Street store. Stopping by there on the way back from my (uh) dentist’s office to buy a cookie and a few other items, I was amazed that things haven’t changed for the better. There was no hello, no eye contact, not even a thank you - it was the most silent of transactions that leaves a person feeling like they don’t count as a consumer. It left me with a very unpleasant memory, that being that at least the last time I was there, there was at least some acknowledgement, albeit minor, that as a customer I was more than a thing that held out my money to be taken.
One other comment: the Whole Foods in Lake View has a much, much better cookie selection in their bakery!!
Categories: Customer Service · whole foods
Tagged: Customer Service, whole foods
