Learning from the Parking Lot

2.25.05

You can learn a lot about a grocery store by hanging out in its parking lot. Ranking among the most dangerous lots I've been in would be those in places like Tampa, Florida and Scottsdale, Arizona, where drivers present a slow, lurking danger to the pedestrian. At the upscale supermarkets in these cities, traffic always seems to move at a courteously slow pace... and that's just where a visiting pedestrian might run into trouble, innocently assuming that people who drive at such a nice speed would be ready to stop and grant you your pedestrian right-of-way. Patronized largely by elderly retirees who seem to operate on the premise that maintaining a consistent, slow speed will prevent them from hitting anyone, places like Scottsdale, AZ have parking lots where one should REALLY remember not to assume the driver sees you.

As dangerous as Retirementville USA is, it doesn't have anything on the experience of walking through gourmet supermarket parking lots in Cambridge, MA. Today as I stood outside Whole Foods waiting for my job interview, I had ample opportunity to survey what must be among the most treacherous lots in the US. I had taken my Whole Foods personality test almost a week before the interview, and it was filled with questions designed to gauge the degree of the applicant's hostility towards their fellow human. Questions ask whether you agree or disagree with statements like "I overlook my coworker's small mistakes" and "People are generally trustworthy." So after thinking back on the benevolent attitude towards humanity that my response to those questions conveyed, I tried to watch the parking lot scene go down with an attitude of detached kindness.

If ever there were a proving ground where one could see that people who are crunchy, peace-loving, and liberal in the abstract can be downright cruel when they meet their fellow humans face-to-face, Whole Foods' parking lot would be it. For people who spend most hours of their day doing good deeds and writing letters for Amnesty International, the parking lot of Whole Foods reveals a darker side. In Scottsdale people run you down because they cannot see you, but in Cambridge, it seems to be out of a deep, abiding malice.

In fifteen minutes of observation, I saw numerous acts of hostility perpetrated by otherwise gentle Prius drivers. One impatiently waited for a car to pull out of a spot located close to the stores entrance. When the departing car took too long to leave, the Prius driver laid into her horn and slammed on the pedal in a fit of righteous road rage, zooming away towards another section of the lot. This pattern; the brief moment of indulgent patience followed by a burst of pedal-pushing fury seemed to be the norm in the lot. People tapped on their wheels impatiently as exiting shoppers slowly drifted across the road, munching on their purchases. Waiting motorists seemed determined to take the skin off their heels, speeding forward the moment that the person had passed.

To put this lot experience in perspective, my interview was scheduled to take place at 2pm. 1:45 is not even rush hour yet at Whole Foods Cambridge, so one might wonder, then, from whence come this lot full of passive aggressive drivers?
I think I can provide an answer to this mystery; they are on drugs. I know because I've been there myself. Whole Foods market is a place of release.As the reader can probably guess from this website, I am something of an environmentalist ideologue. I take my politics fairly seriously; I've donated to the Sierra Club, I'm insistent about not owning a car, I bring my own grocery bags to the store, etc..
For a long time I worked quite close to the Whole Foods I now describe, doing a job that was very much in accord with my idealistic principles. Though it matched my interests, the work itself tended either to be very stressful, or mind-numbingly dull. To make matters worse, the office was situated in an office-park, which in turn was situated in an area which functions as a service-utility zone for the City of Cambridge. It's here that the dirty little secrets are kept; frigid, high-rise public housing, near bankrupt mattress discount warehouses, the pumping station, the power lines. In the midst of this postindustrial wasteland was my job, and also, like a mirage in the desert, a gigantic Whole Foods Market.

Stuck in a job stuck in the middle of this wasteland, Whole Foods was the single pleasure of my world. Here you could soothe yourself with dried fruit, or sample Guacamole that looked like it had been tele-ported in from California. For the senseation-deprived office worker, Whole Foods was alike a vacation to Bali. As the office's errand girl I would speed over in a variety of borrowed cars, making a break from the office and plunging into the parking lot on a quest for release from its monotony. I knew that somewhere behind the pristine glass were amber colored apricots, or some crispy apples that would magically make me feel alive again after my light and air deprivation. I formed brief obsessions with all sorts of strange Whole-Foods items; from Muenster cheese slices to turkey baloney to fresh ground peanut butter. I knew there was always some little desirable which I could take away, which was just overpriced enough that its quality was palpable. The market was an alternate reality, a land impervious to surrounding development; accidents on the rotary, the malfunctioning computers, the pesticide smell which hung around the office park shrubs, all of which were clipped into defiant little balls.

One bite, and you might be brought back to your senses. And it sustained in you the belief that you would one day retire to a land a birds and sunshine, where the citrus grows on trees. When I think back on this, I remember how desperate I was. The way I would frantically bounce into the lot behind the wheel of a borrowed black SUV, the buyer/dealer on the way to procure a fix for myself and a roomful of bored people like myself.

As I watched the women hurrying in and out of Whole Foods today, I realized that they and I were the same... and that Whole Foods works on us for the same reasons. They look well educated. Their bumper stickers declare them to be Kerry supporters, vegetarians, and visualizers of whirled peas. And people like us buy organic, right?
When I look at the parking lot, and the honking, and the driving, and the misery of all that surrounds the market, though, I can't help but to wonder if the cure is worse than the disease. In my interview I was trying to explain why my Harvard Educated self was interested in working at a supermarket, and i decided I would profess my interest in working for a company that was making Environmentalism work in its economic interest. My exact words were more like "I"m interested in the way Whole foods has managed to successfully profit off of the Environmental Movement." After saying this, I tried to backpedal, realizing that "profit off of" didn't cast the situation in the most positive light...

But in fact, that is exactly what I AM interested in. Where does that ideology start to be pure lip service and profiteering? Whole Foods succeeds by taking the American food service model and doing it one better. It also succeeds because it ties ideology, and the notion of being a "responsible consumer" into that package. In Cambridge, where what you eat verges on religion, Whole foods is a temple.
Inevitably, then, arrives the question about commerce and ideology. Good 'ol J.C. turned over vendor stands in the temple, and I think that a latter-day earth guru Jesus would have been similarly disgusted with the lip service being paid by upscale organic markets. Moving organic produce at tremendous speeds across states and continents so that the product can arrive pristine and be displayed in winter locked Cambridge to sensation-deprived academics and ideologues hardly seems to be an act of responsible consumerism. But the package says organic. And never has the purchase of indulgences been so pleasurable.

I don't now if I'll be getting the Whole Foods job I was waiting to interview for. If the HR department is creative in their background check, I most certainly won't. And it's hard to say if I'd really want it, anyway. Whole Foods, from parking lot on up seems a large-scale embodiment of a certain, stealthy hypocrisy which makes me nervous. I wonder if I'd be able to look into the faces of all those self-righteous shoppers who are content in the belief that they are doing their part by taking a sample of salmon pate I'm offering them, and give them a friendly demo. Do they really believe that all it takes is just a little more money spent in grocery bills? I begin to wonder if Whole Foods isn't just the latest, most seditious development in American consumerism exploiting our optimistic belief that we can always have our cake and eat it too. It's certainly a beautiful dream.

 

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