Natural Food, Unnatural Prices

Roaming the parking lot of a San Antonio shopping center last month, my wife Priti and I came upon a Whole Foods Market. I couldn't resist hitting the brakes. For years, from our home in Kansas, we'd been reading and hearing about this king-of-the-hill among natural food retailers, and we wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

I found a parking spot between an Outback and a Prius. In moments, we had left the land of steel and asphalt behind and stepped into a world of biological wonders. The robust-looking bread, in all the right shades of toasty brown, was clearly far more than an inert sandwich-support medium; even the few lonely white-bread specimens looked good. The fruits and vegetables actually looked and smelled like fruits and vegetables. The bulk bins formed a solid base for the best of food pyramids. In the deli and packaged-food sections, it was an invigorating experience simply to read the labels.

The work day was just starting, and the employees, most of them anyway, were genuinely friendly and seemingly delighted with their lot in life -- to be young, healthy and working at Whole Foods. These "team members," as they're known in company lingo, have signed on with a major-league powerhouse. With 180 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, annual sales of $4.6 billion and profits of $160 million, Whole Foods recently moved into the Fortune 500.

But then we started looking around for something to buy. As we stared bug-eyed at the lofty price tags, I wondered aloud what sort of income it would take to become a regular Whole Foods shopper. Priti had an idea: Why not give Whole Foods the Wal-Mart test?

Return of the cashier-shopper

Priti was referring to a June 2003 AlterNet article in which I asked this seemingly simple question: In view of Wal-Mart's vast range of merchandise and "Always Low Prices," could a family whose breadwinner worked at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Salina, Kan., afford to supply its minimum needs by shopping there?

I'd relied on published studies that computed the cost of an "adequate but austere" life for a family with one adult and two children in Salina. The budget included only the basics: shelter, transportation, food, routine toiletries and medicines, and not much more. Housing and transportation can't be bought at Wal-Mart (yet), but almost all other necessities can be.

The bottom line: Our Wal-Mart cashier could not satisfy such a bare-survival budget even if she worked 40 hours per week, more hours than a typical Wal-Mart workweek. And as you might expect, in trying to keep the family within such a budget, I condemned them to an array of foods that were boring, unappealing, and not very nutritious -- and produced in ways that most customers would prefer not to know about.

But is that inevitable? Or is the nation's corporate food system capable of supplying people at all income levels with products of the quality we saw at Whole Foods?

Salina to San Antonio

I took Priti up on her suggestion, moving the hypothetical family from Salina to San Antonio, and having my cashier work and buy groceries at Whole Foods. I used the same list of foods -- a minimal, USDA-recommended "low-cost food plan" -- that I'd used at the Salina Wal-Mart.

Back at Whole Foods, we followed the same simulated-shopping rules, selecting the cheapest food in each food category and the cheapest brand of that type. Using those prices, I computed the monthly cost of feeding an adult female, a 12-year-old boy and a 4-year-old child.

At Salina's Wal-Mart, the bill had been $232, plus sales tax. At Whole Foods, the same basket of food cost $564. Texas has no sales tax on food, and Whole Foods employees get a 20 percent discount, bringing the cost for the San Antonio cashier all the way down to $451. That monthly price tag includes only the cheapest foods in each category, and none of the store's popular luxury items.