>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."
except guess what? i'm not at all an advocate of small town, homey stores as an advantage over large corporations. i've worked for small businesses and big ass corporations. the exploitation you experience at a small joint is generally worse.
if you'd pay attention, i was complaining about your defense of anti-unionism.
as for the shopping experience at mom and pops, whole foods has just marketed that at a higher level than the little guys, too.
finally, the complaint--at least as shane initially advanced it--was the sad, but altogether mundane and ordinary, failure of people whose ideology enables them to see the "wholeness" and "connection" between dolphins, spotted owls, coffee bean farmers, the rainforest and their consumption habits and be willing to PAY MORE to ensure that they're treating the earth and themselves well and not, in turn, be able to see the connection between the people who mix up their soy-milk and raw cane sugar frappes and bag their organic tofu and themselves and, therefore, be willing to PAY MORE to ensure that workers get a living wage--the same kind of living wage that enables many of the people who shop at places like WF to shop there in the first fucking place.
this is, as i said, to be expected from the owners of WF. Their self-interest is in keeping costs down and that means fighting unions tooth and nail--unless and until they start trying to exist in a climate where it would be difficult for them to continue their union-busting tactics. (see the history of the rise of labor unions and why big biz accomodated them)
unfortunately, it's also to be expected among a significant portion of the green types who shop in places like WF actually live in a social milieu where the ideas we're discussing are readily available to them. except they're probably like a woman i know who once told me that she paid her housekeeper a damn good wage. And I said, "Do you pay him the same wage as you earn?"
No, she can't possibly pay her housekeeper the same wage she earns because it wouldn't be particularly efficient for her to do so. And, not only that, she believes that, as a lawyer, she deserves more than her housekeeper.
Ditto _some_ of the people who shop at WF and certainly ditto the people who own it.
And there you have one of structural contradictions inherent in class society.
Kelley