Listen Whole Foods, I'm gonna need you to calm down..

If you exist in that realm of New Yorkers who are to any degree self-respecting, health-conscious, or not completely destitute, you consider Whole Foods your grocery store of choice if it is convenient - the haven where pretentious vegan lesbians, aloof yoga instructors, women who think they are good mothers, and the common man can all meet and scour for sustenance.


But beneath the pristine, green, and aesthetically pleasing surface is one simple thing.

A MESS.

While in Whole Foods the other day for my lunch, I really observed for the first time just what the FUCK is exactly going on in that fucking place and I was astonished. 

First, I went at lunch time to the Columbus Circle location, so I realize that me bitching and moaning about how crowded it was is not fair.  But it wasn't the crowd... it was the utter lack of organization.  I couldn't tell whether I was at the salad bar or the steerage deck of the Titanic during the sinking.  Everyone was darting around aimlessly with their little brown boxes, all on a specific time limit, all hungry.  No one makes eye contact, there are no real lines of any sort, and the unspoken rules of human manners are somehow acceptably exempt from this place. 

The salad bar has no organization either.  They're like, oh sure, I guess we'll put some beets here and maybe some chickpeas... of yeah and some lettuce, I guess.  Listen salad bar designers, quit smoking those blunts and try to put the dressing next to the lettuce. The other day the worker man told me that there was no chicken for the day. I wanted to kill his family.

The dressing bottles feel like what I would imagine the skin of sumo wrestlers to feel like, the selection is actually very sparse but strangely spread across about forty different stations.  They don't have chicken, but they just happen to have Ricotta and olive raviolis (which are, admittedly, quite good, but obviously beside the point.)

Once I have put my boiled egg and spinach leaves into the brown box that resembles what I buried my hamster Honey in when I was 8 years old, I go to... The Line.

The Line is the worst part of all, because they have those lanes, you know, with the faggoty little colored screens that say the register numbers, and those transsexual voices telling you which register to go to - corresponding to which lane you are standing in.

REGISTER FIVE, REGISTER TWENTY, REGIS-REG-REGIST-R-R-REGISTER NINE

And inevitably, some geriatric or New Age music enthusiast is not going to understand the system and cut you in line... or take your register even when it isn't theirs because they were waiting longer and felt justified to cut you.  NOTHING in this WORLD pisses me off more than THAT right there.  I begin to have heart palpitations and become RAGEFUL when someone cuts me in line at Whole Foods. I don't care if you have a crying infant hanging off of you.  If you cut me in line at Whole Foods because my number popped up but you were physically present first, then tough shit.  It's just luck, and it's just the system, and I have no qualms with shaking that child in your hemp papoose, ma'am, I just really don't.

Then after you've purchased your hamster coffin spinach leaves for $97.85 from the vacant, tired employees, the battle to find an open seat in their little fucking high school cafeteria is the icing on the whole grain whole foods cupcake.

Ugh.  I'll probably go again today.  Because at the end of the day, it is there, it is better than the rest of what New York offers in terms of grocery stores, and it sure beats getting a sandwich at the deli where you have to deal with overweight, chain-smoking black women, cat hair, and the employee speaking in some terrorist sounding language on the the phone for 45 minutes while you are standing right in front of him with the one pack of gum you want to buy.

Listen.  If you see something, say something.