WHOLE FOODS Just Opened Near Me! My Yuppie Status Is Certified!

Foodies,

A monumental occasion occurred in my life today as that hallmark of gentrification, the gleaming indicator that a neighborhood has truly left its melting pot immigrant roots behind in the dust and become the yuppie condoville with increased property values every real estate agent and home seller dreams of, finally opened up in my neighborhood.

Yes, fellow board members, a Whole Foods finally opened near me. My yuppie status has been officially certified, as I can afford to live in a neighborhood with a Whole Foods and not a skanky Wal-Mart as its central grocery hub.

That’s right, no elderly, black, Latino, student, recently unemployed or recent immigrant customers to be found here, this supermarket is for upwardly mobile foodies on brands they never heard of but know deep down inside must be good because the word “organic” is plastered on the package right next to that suspiciously high price that is double or more what the equivalent non-organic product would be. Stick to the No Frills and Great Value supermarkets further north up Yonge Street, bargain shoppers, this place is for those of us with money to burn.

So how is the place exactly? Pretty nice, actually. It looks like a condensed St. Lawerence Market with a gourmet meat shop, produce shop, bakery, cheese shop, cafeteria, takeout restaurant and bulk food store all rolled up into one. Just take a look at these pics. Have you ever seen a supermarket so bright and gleaming?

Not exactly how you’ve envisioned it to be.

I’m sorry to burst anything, but yours is definitely not the same as ours here in Manhattan.

They don’t call it “Whole Paycheck” for nothing.

But hey, the place isn’t nicknamed Whole Paycheck and Whole Salary for nothing, right? The prices must be outrageously expensive, right? Surprisingly… not really. They were actually pretty equivalent to what I’d find in the local Loblaws (the biggest Canadian supermarket chain in Ontario and Quebec) for the exact same or similar products. Some items were certainly pricier but sale prices tended to even them out.

Okay, the meat is pretty darn expensive but to be fair the quality is also way, way up there. In that respect, it isn’t any different than the prices at the local gourmet food store Pusateri’s which is local here in Ontario. So nothing inherently unfair in this. You know what you’re paying for.

Amazingly, organic produce and milk products were EQUAL TO OR LOWER than the equivalent non-organic items at other supermarkets! Shock! For example, organic 2% milk was just $2.99 for a quart whereas it would be $3.27 for a non-organic quart at Loblaws.

So how the heck does this place get its nickname? Because of its insidiously large selection of ready to go prepared and cooked foods. I mean there is a ridiculously large amount of prepared ready to cook and already cooked foods ready to go in the aisles. And if that’s not enough, there’s two cafeteria hot tray tables full of more mains and sides. And if that’s still not enough, there’s a full take-out restaurant inside the store offering daily meal specials to either eat inside the store or take home with you.

This, I realized, is how insidious this place truly is. Well at least up here in Canada. By opening up specifically in upwardly mobile neighborhoods, they target people who either have no time to cook, no ability to cook, or are simply too tired to cook, they suck you in to just drop by after work and grab as many premade items as you can. Not too surprisingly, the only other Whole Foods to open up in metro Toronto is at Avenue and Bloor, right in the heart of the first established condo yuppieville neighborhood in Toronto within walking distance of all of them. Same with the one near me.

And if you were to take all the premade items ready to go from every possible venues – the butchery, the bakery, the ready to heat up aisle, the hot trays and the restaurants – you would absolutely never run out of possible combinations to make a quick hot meal for you and your family at home. And let’s not kid ourselves, even fanatically devoted foodies like the people who populate this board are going to have nights where the temptation to just pick something up quickly right after work simply cannot be passed up. And once you go down that path, you’ll keep walking it again and again. Insidious, I tell you.

My theory was very much borne when I visited today right after work to find the place packed with yuppies and curious browsers. As the store just opened, they very smartly put quite a number of items on sale to attract customers into buying what would otherwise be higher-priced packaged items. For example, selling organic macaroni and cheese that normally goes for $3.59 CDN at 2 for $4 CDN. Even then, the busiest aisles by far were the bakery, takeout restaurant, butcher shop and premade food aisles.

So I will definitely be back on a regular basis for the surprisingly competitive organic staples, bakery, cheeses and produce, bulk food, sale items and premade food when I’m really tired and don’t want to cook. Meat I will avoid like the plague for the most part along with most of the pre-packaged stuff. I’m afraid this place is going to earn its rightful nickname in the long run based on the large crowd I saw tonight and its future effects on me.

Truthfully, man, I would love to come down there and see that if only to erase the image in my mind I have of the singularly mostly Caucasian and Asian crowd I saw in the store near me tonight. I am of course well aware that simply by being there I myself help to perpetuate the stereotype the store appears to be catering to successfully at least here in Toronto.

youre saying milk is on average 3 dollars a quart there?

I can tell you here whole paycheck is in a generic neighborhood that no one would call upscale and the people I see shopping there and spending 100 on a hand bag of groceries are not by any means yuppies.

I love great food, I love wholesome things and still only shop there for very specific items.

Well, they deserved to be gypped if they’re still referred to as “yuppies” up there, in this day and age.

Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying. It’s usually $2.99 - $3.29 for a 1 liter container i.e. approximately 4 cups i.e. 1 quart. Personally I think we are paying too much for our milk up here in Ontario, Canada but there are only 2 or three really large diary producers here that can meet the demand so we’re stuck with whatever price they set. Best price I have ever managed to get is $2.22.

I’ll probably end up shopping there for a just a few very specific items as well. You’re the second poster after Ramon to mention that Whole Foods is taking quite a different approach than up here in Canada. Curious as to why the blatantly different approaches.

I think the better stereotype, at least in Los Angeles, is that all the women shop in yoga pants as if they just worked out or are in their work clothes as if they came from work. There is no middle ground. But one thing we can all agree is the same at every whole foods. The cashier workers must have tattoos or a piercing not located on their ear lobe.

My neighborhood supermarket dynamic is quite weird tho. There is a trader Joe, Ralphs, Albertsons, whole foods and sprouts in a 1-2 mile radius. All the clientele tends to intersect EXCEPT for the Albertsons. The Albertsons is filled with seniors and lower income families. Why? I have no idea. The area the Albertsons is in is surrounded by nice upper middle class homes, more so than the other markets, but it’s so markedly different than the other four places. Rather confusing to me and haven’t really figured it out.

I would love to live in that type of neighborhood. Where I am with the Whole Foods now open, there is a Whole Foods, two Loblaws, a Metro all one subway ride away and further north a No Frills if you are willing to take a bus ride as well as a two stop subway ride.

I go to the No Frills strictly for fish, meat, poultry and dairy, they have the absolute best prices. There, I do see lots of seniors, immigrants and bargain shoppers. At the Loblaws, I see more upwardly mobile families and customers. I usually never go to the Metro as I find they are not very price competitive. And of course I’ve already mentioned the stereotype at the Whole Foods.

I am off work today and will in fact visit again during the day time to see what things are like. Maybe I’ll take a few more pics as well.

Given that you’re totally head-over-heels, Tran, I hesitate to link to this. But it’s always better to know the truth…

@Peter: Okay, okay, I confess that deep down I was hoping for it to be the pretentious overpriced nirvana it is always reputed to be because I wanted to claim the panache and prestige that I can afford to go there on a regular basis unlike most other commoners.

Truthfully, the only thing that honestly made me raise my eyebrows were the many different allegedly organic eggs (how the heck do you make an inorganic egg anyways, it comes right of a living organism which kinda makes it organic right from the womb) on sale from $7.99 to a whopping $18.99 per HALF DOZEN.

This said, I couldn’t help but notice that many if not all of the different egg cartons Listed their TERROIRS and some even listed INDIVIDUALLY NAMED FARM FIELDS ON THE PACKAGE!

Now to be fair, even I had to draw the line here. Seriously, can you imagine that? Buying and ingesting a pricy consumable on a regular or even daily basis that sells itself on not only the land region from whence it came but even the individual field? And it’s not like I eat eggs every day, imagine if I had to DRINK something like that… er, um, what board am I posting on here again? Oh. Right.

So how do they handle wine in Canada? Not at all, I presume. I feel your joy; I live within walking distance of WFoods, Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, and Albertson’s.

You must have heard that Nordstrom is coming to Canada (I think the Calgary store is open) too.

I dont do a lot of grocery shopping and when I do, I dont really look at prices, but man do they seem high. I have two different sources here of local farmers that sell a dozen eggs for two bucks…want to say a gallon of milk is less than 4 bucks…yours is 12…thats crazy.

I pay $4-$5 for 4 litres (1 gallon) of milk in Ontario.

Chris is correct, the price of milk seems to go down when you buy a 4 L set of 3 milk pitcher bags to about $5.99. If he is paying $4-5 a set then he should continue buying it at that price because he’s getting a good deal by our standards up here. Behold the price of a litre of quality organic milk. Seems a touch pricy for a quart (1 L) but I do like the old-school glass bottles.

Sorry, no wine as Ontario laws are very strict and only government LCBO stores, licensed restaurants and licensed wineries are allowed to sell wine. On the plus side, look: ORGANIC COSMETICS! Because I want to both look beautiful on the outside and feel beautiful on the inside as well for helping save the planet.

And just in case anyone was thinking I was kidding about terroir and specific land fields being listed on the eggs:

Milk is a subsidized religion in this country. If they took the subsidies away it would be at least that.

FWIW, WF milks their suppliers too. We know a young couple who produces a very fine product (I won’t mention what it is because it doesn’t matter and might cause them trouble). They work really hard, and were interested in marketing through WF. For the privilege of doing that, and advertising that they were a WF supplier, $5,000/yr. Not small change for them! They tried negotiating, and got WF down to $1200. But then they couldn’t say they were a supplier! In the end they passed…

3.99 doesn’t seem like much for 1L , basically 3.59 US, a normal .5gal carton is about $5 in the US for organic milk, so you’re basically paying $1.50 more?