I find it strange that in this land of union busting one singles out a relatively small and mildly green retail chain that is not particularly union-friendly but neither does it distinguish itself as being exceptionally anti-union as the target of "anticapitalist" attacks. It reminds me of the ostensibly anti-capitalism diatribes targeting mainly Jewish landlords or bankers. Or ostensibly anti-crime rhetoric targeting mainly Black drug dealers, welfare moms, and crack cocaine users. Scratch that, and you will find plain racism and bigotry beneath.
Lefty attacks on the retail outlets serving mainly urban, slightly "bohemian" markets, such as Starbucks or Whole Foods, belong to the same genre. Scratch the lefty veneer, and you find the old fashioned petit bourgeois, anti-urban, small town populism. I visited scores of "alternative" or "healthy food" stores from Berkeley and Santa Cruz to the People's Republic of Cambridge and what I found is that the main commodity most of them peddle is the homey, mom-and-pop, small town image. Few if any of them are unionized, the stuff they sell is either overpriced new age snake oil or bulk flour, rice, grain etc. - but the merchandise as well as the ostentatiously primitive décor unmistakably project the image "just like in the home town in the good old days."
Starbucks or Whole Foods operate in the same market niche, but they are devoid of this homey image. Instead, the image they sell is that of urbane cosmopolitanism - something that the petit bourgeois Boobus Americanus loves to hate. It is this aspect of these business establishments that, in my opinion, provokes the wrath in a substantial chunk of the US left.
US society is thoroughly petit bourgeois - and that pertains to virtually every political orientation, including, or perhaps especially, the Left, which freely mixes anti-capitalism with anti-urbanism, fear of large complex organizations, and warm feelings for homey small town instituions. I'd go as far as saying that the entire notion of direct democracy is small town populism in disguise. Direct democracy and town-hall-meeting decision making may have a slight chance of working in small communities, but they have not even a remote chance of working in complex social organisms.
It thus makes sense that petit-bourgeois-at -heart US left feels threatened by a Starbucks outlet competing with their small town homey coffee shop, perhaps even more so than by a rabidly anti-union, anti-abortion, pro-Christian-values Wal mart opening in a suburban wasteland. (In the same vein, they are more threatened by a lefty splinter group than by capitalism in general.) However, open expression of homey petit bourgeois sentiments is un-cool, hence the façade of anti-unionbusting rthetoric.
Wojtek