Another thing to factor in: Whole Foods ain't union, and has actually fought union drives with twisted progressive or 'alternative' rhetoric.
However, leaving them and big-box stores like wal mart and target aside, other than that retail food supermarkets are a bastion of organized labor in the service industry. I'm writing an article about this for a magazine called clamor, and have been sort of surprised to learn that union density in many regions in supermarkets is like 80%! !! !! I was a ufcw member when I worked at a superfresh thru high school.
[WS:] Not according to BLS http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t03.htm, whose data show that union membership in retail industry is 5.7% - BELOW, the private sector average of 7.9%.
I think that singling out retailers like Whole Foods has more to do with blue collar anti-intellectualism (your use of vernacular seems symptomatic) and silly resentment and kulturkampf against "yuppies" than any serious effort to advance the cause of labor in this country.
Wojtek
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