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Nov
15

How To Steal From Whole Foods

Category: Weird, Whole Foods Tags: shoplifters, stealing food, theft, Whole foods Leave a Comment

Sodanie Chea

I have probably stolen more from Whole Foods markets than any living person; I’ve also probably spent more money there. Whole Foods is the only place I spend money. When I look at my bank statement, it is Whole Foods, Whole Foods, Whole Foods…as far as the eye can see.

When I started working on genius.com, Whole Foods was our first “angel investor” – without stealing all the food I stole from the Berkeley Whole Foods [1], I would never have been able to spend a year bootstrapping, working on the site full-time.

When genius.com got funding, I demanded comped Whole Foods before I asked for a paycheck. During Y Combinator we would get about $500 of groceries a week delivered [2] (I was addicted to gluten-free muffins at the time…).

As Genius.com grew, so did my Whole Foods appetite. When I resigned, I was in the habit of expensing $100 A DAY at Whole Foods; my co-founders would yell at me and I would get all defensive and say “well I need protein and protein costs money!”

The day before I left the company, I went to Whole Foods for one “last expense” – I got a $100 tub of probiotic green powder and 2 bottles of Veuve Clicquot. I also made 2 giant salads and went crazy at the bulk bins. It was May, but I was stocking up for the Winter of Discontent…
I got home and I had a crisis; I was like “holy shit! How am I going to survive without unlimited free Whole Foods?!”

In fact, losing my unlimited free Whole Foods is the best thing that ever happened to me. It is the main reason I am glad I’m no longer with the company. I am a lot less fat now, and I feel like an animal living in the jungle [3]. Free company meals are a bad thing – food is a pharmakon [4] and it ought to be scarce.

I’ve now cut down my Whole Foods budget to about $30 dollars a day, and I’ve been able to do this largely because of a return to stealing. $30 might sound like a lot, but I eat about 4,000 calories a day, so it is no easy feat…

Last week, some friends sent me an article on kaleandcigarettes.com about “How to Hustle Whole Foods” – the dude who wrote it is a fucking chump. His advice is to buy an avocado separately and add it to your salad. Gee, that’s great! Brilliant idea! That way I can get green avocado juice all over my hands and shit…

His article was so stupid that I decided to write my own guidebook on “How To Steal From Whole Foods,” and here it is:

BULK BIN HUSTLES:

The code for almonds is 6269. Really, that is the code for conventional almonds ($7.99/lb) – but for me, it is the code to All Almonds. Organic ($10.99/lb). Italian ($16.99/lb). Sprouted ($19.99/lb). If it is an almond, it is 6269.
That is “bulk bin hustle 101” – the more advanced techniques take code abuse even further. In the Bay Area, because they love the environment, they only let you put bulk bin items into paper bags. You can’t see through paper bags, so – if you go to the right cashier (MORE ON THIS LATER) – in the Bay Area, your code for EVERYTHING in the bulk bins is 1819 (the code for popcorn, $1.99/lb).

Back in my bootstrapping days in Berkeley, I would always fill up bags with 2-3 pounds of $19.99/lb pistachios – or sometimes even macadamia nuts! – and 1819 it…that’s how I built genius.com [5].

But now that I live in LA, I stick to 6269ing, and you should too. If you are using other almond codes, you’re just throwing money away, plain and simple…

GO “POUND FOR POUND” AT THE SALAD BAR:

Very simple rule. Not even a rule, more an aspiration: for every pound you buy at the salad bar, you should be eating a pound while you make the salad.
In fact, I’d say best practice is to buy a pound and eat a pound. Simple. As the rapper Drake famously said, “Buy a pound, eat a pound, that’s the motto n**** YOLO.”

Get a napkin when you enter the store and stick it into your pocket – you will use this later to clean your hands before you dress your salad and head to the register.

The KEY to this technique is to eat the bite-sized items at the salad bar: I stick to felafel balls, dolma, rosemary potatoes, beets, plantains and hard-boiled eggs [6].

You should obviously try to eat fast, but never put so much in your mouth that you can’t just stop chewing and feign normalcy if the security rolls up.

SOUP CONTAINERS – NOT JUST FOR SOUP:

You can put anything into the soup container and pay for a soup. Think about it….
This seems like an opportune section to introduce a sub-theme to everything related to the salad bar: be mindful of weight! Don’t ever buy beets, or tomatoes – think of the weight/calorie ratio! The reverse is true as well: cilantro at the salad bar is in fact a tenth of the price of cilantro in the produce section [7].

THE SECURITY GUARD IS YOUR HOMIE:

There are two kinds of Whole Foodses: those in which the security guard is a homie, and those in which the security guard is not a homie at all. Unfortch, the best Whole Foods tend to have asshole security whereas the more “ghetto Whole Foods” (especially “college town / college campus” Whole Foods) have friendly security.
RULE OF THUMB: the younger the security guard, the more he is your homie. I used to roam around LA, going to all of the different Whole Foods, because variety is the spice of life (see my article “Review of Every Whole Foods in Los Angeles” – the fruits of my Whole Foods wanderlust). Nowadays, as I get more desperate, I am sticking to my home base, WHOLE FOODS WESTWOOD, because the security guard is my homie and he’ll let me do whatever I want…

FRUIT HUSTLES:

Since I am paleo, I have an important rule: I never pay full price for fruit! It is sweet poison. The Ur-fruit of thieves is the grape. Every Whole Foods has grapes year-round, and it is an unspoken rule that you’re allowed to eat the grapes without paying. The only thing is: other customers get mad if you make the bushel look untidy, and they will rat on you, so it is better to simply take a whole cluster of grapes, and cleanly sever it from the mother, rather than pluck your grapes one-by-one.
Figs are pretty easy to steal too, when the season is right. Apricots are also doable, but you have to split them down the middle, so it works much better with unripe apricots.

Apples and pears are pretty much impossible to steal – but – if you’ve noticed, most Whole Foods put apples and pears in a complimentary “kids’ bin” at checkout. I figure I am a “child at heart,” so I always take one of those [8].

If a certain kind of apple is on sale, you can also change tags to get the cheaper price on other apples. If you want to be really aggressive, you can put a cheap apple sticker on an expensive organic peach (you’ll only get away with this if the cashier is truly a homie, however…)

CHOOSE YOUR CASHIER WISELY:

the worst thing in the world is a Nazi cashier! They have the power to thwart certain hustles…
I don’t care if I have to wait in a long line, I will bide my time for a sympathetic cashier [9].

Sorry to get all sexist/racist here – I love all people, I swear it – but, in case you’re at a new Whole Foods and you don’t know who the cool cashiers are yet, the most sympathetic cashiers are young, male minorities. Women, old-timers and whites are far, far more likely, in my experience, to fuck with your shit.

FALSE OLIVE BAR / SALAD BAR DICHOTOMY:

Olive bar is more expensive than salad bar. If you ever get anything from the olive bar, you’re a chump. Just put the olives in your salad dogg!

CONCLUSION:

I didn’t state the most important rule, which is you should never leave Whole Foods hungry! What you ate while you were shopping: that was your meal. What you bought is your next meal. Makes sense, no?

I call it “The Whole Foods Diet.”

Sourced from thoughtcatalog.com

Oct
18

By IHWIR Admin

10 TYPES OF CUSTOMERS YOU MEET WHILE WORKING IN THE WHOLE FOODS BAKERY

Category: Uncategorized Tags: Whole foods Leave a Comment

There were a great many things that I enjoyed about working at Whole Foods, particularly in the bakery — not least of all the enthusiastic parents and excited kids, the repeat customers who considered me and my coworkers a sort of tangential social circle, and anyone who was psyched as fuck to get a free cookie (I was profligate with the free cookies). However, because the store markets itself as if it is necessarily moral and responsible to shop there, it also necessarily comes along with some very colorful personalities. I think that some of the people who shopped in the bakery, specifically, had real existential crises: They were in a store that was supposed to be “healthy,” but here they were confronted with fat- and sugar-laden cake! Their brains short-circuited and they became the following people:

1. People who manufacture reasons to be contemptuous. It was October, and we were decorating the large cupcakes with a swirl of either white-and-orange frosting or chocolate-and-orange frosting because it was seasonal and kids love that shit. There was one customer who had come in repeatedly to express her disgust at the cupcakes, and one night she came in while my very outspoken coworker was closing to do just that. She complained about the orange swirl. She told my coworker, “If this were ‘Cupcake Wars,’ you’d lose.” (Oh. Good thing it’s a grocery store, then.) My coworker offered to re-frost a cupcake for her, but the customer instead responded by asking to speak with a manager … about the orange swirl on the cupcakes. She walked away from this interaction with a free six-pack of cupcakes, by the way, which just goes to show that if you complain about literally anything at Whole Foods, chances are you can get something for free.

2. People who are racist. One of my coworkers was (well, still is) Taiwanese-American. She didn’t have the best handwriting of all time, but it was by no means appalling. A customer asked her to inscribe a cake, so she did, and when the customer took it, she looked at the cake for a minute, then looked up at my coworker, and said, “I thought Asians were supposed to be perfect,” and then walked away. YUP. On another occasion at a store that had restaurant counters, I was taking my lunch and overheard two obviously very wealthy women talking to each other about “the help” (they used those words). One of them told the other, “You have to get a Mandarin nanny!” as if Chinese people (Mandarin is a language, by the way) are collectibles, and then went on the extol the virtue and wisdom of her Hispanic maid not because she had had really extensive conversations with this woman about her life and experiences, but because her she knew how to get stains out of stuff.

3. People who are just there for the samples. There was an elderly customer who would come in to the bakery, go to the self-serve cookies-by-weight case, and sample as many cookies as she could before someone asked if she needed help. Stealthy old lady! She also refused to buy any of the cakes unless my supervisor had made them, and faced what appeared to be a real crisis when she found out that my supervisor had taken a different job.

4. People who are there because they want to take their anger out on someone. The Whole Foods bakeries do not have nutrition information for all of their in-house products. We got a lot of questions about nutrition information for the in-house granola, specifically. One day a woman came in, seeming irritated to begin with, and asked me the nutritional information for the cherry almond flax granola. I told her what I normally tell people: We don’t have nutrition information, but our ingredients are very similar to most other granolas, so you could at least guess that it was about 200-300 calories per quarter cup. “No,” she said, getting visibly enraged. “I make granola at home, so I know how many calories are in granola. This has nuts and flax seeds, so it has more fat in it than other granolas.” Big question here: Then why did she need to ask? Answer: Because she was having a bad day and felt like a service employee was the right person to take it out on.

5. People who want to convince themselves that you can do things that are impossible.Like the people who are looking for low-fat, low-carb bakery items, who I really, reallywanted to direct to the meat department. (I suggested chocolate-covered strawberries instead.)

6. People who ask unanswerable questions. I had a woman ask me if we had a bakery box, and I said yes, we have several sizes of boxes for the baked goods. I showed her a cake box, and she said, “No, a bakery box, you know? A bakery box.” She gestured her hands around an invisible box. “Like, a bakery box?” I didn’t know how to respond. I’m sure what she was asking for was a plain white box, but Whole Foods only carries branded, brown cardboard boxes. What do you do with that?

7. People who want to feel fancy for knowing French stuff. First there’s the women who awkwardly interrupt their English sentences — usually when they’re speaking to their children- – to insert an approximation of French pronunciation of baked goods, i.e. “Oh, honey, would you like a… *~kwa-SOHN~*? They have almond… *~kwa-SOHNs~* too. Oh, how about a chocolate… *~kwa-SOHN~*?” Then there was the couple who, without provocation, insisted at length to a coworker of mine (who, incidentally, had lived in Paris for some time) that they knew the difference between macaroons and macarons because they had gone to Paris. The woman leaned toward my coworker over the counter and raised her voice as if she were speaking to a child. “In Fraaaance,” she said.

8. Actual French people who are disappointed with you and your shitty croissants. One elderly French customer came in to tsk tsk us for putting powdered sugar on our almond croissants, claiming that that wasn’t the way they were made in France. I’m pretty sure that’s not true, but I wasn’t going to argue with him.

9. Genuinely crazy people. We had one woman who would try to order muffins to be made on the spot 20 minutes before she came into the store, when muffins took 40 minutes to bake. She would go on tirades when we weren’t able to fulfill this order and eventually got herself banned from three stores in the area.

10. People who do not understand expiration dates. Our grab-and-go case — the one with cake slices and cupcakes prepackaged for you to take to the register — generally had expiration dates that were three to five days out from when the items were produced. That’s pretty short — conventional grocery stores use chemical-laden ingredients that allow baked goods to stay on the shelves for two weeks. The five-day expiration date provoked two responses from customers, however: Either they were appalled that we didn’t make everything fresh every single day (oh my god, the waste) and the expiration date was too far out, or they assumed that the expiration date was too soon, and that we had lied about when the products were made.

Sourced from thefrisky.com

Feb
19

By IHWIR Admin