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Dear Disgruntled Former Whole Foods Employee,
I read with great interest the open letter of resignation that has prompted your fifteen minutes of internet fame. I sympathize with your position. It’s demoralizing to find that your place of employment fails to live up to its attractive façade.
I occasionally shop at Whole Foods myself. It isn’t my primary source for groceries – it’s not the most convenient store for me to get to, and some of its products are rather pricey for my needs. But it is one of few places that offer dairy and produce grown in Massachusetts when the farmers markets aren’t in season, and that’s important to me. The people who ring up my order appear, for the most part, friendly and relaxed. They must be laboring pretty intensely to suppress their seething rage. Or perhaps they’re just keeping it under control by liberal consumption of organic herbal tea and Bach’s Flower Essences.
I knew I was going to like you when you opened with my favorite quote from British statesman and orator Edmund Burke. It is true that when good men do nothing, evil will prevail. So I can only assume that you did everything you could during your five or six years of employment to counteract the systemic flaws in the Whole Foods machine. Since these matters are of great importance to you, you must have done plenty of market research to find out how Whole Foods can better align itself with the other grocery chains who are recycling, conserving energy, and buying locally-produced foods. I’m sorry that your findings fell on deaf ears.
I notice that values are important to you, and that you hold in disdain those who fail to act in accordance with their purported principles. You’ve probably given a lot of thought to your own values with regards to your employment and your community. I am curious to know which of your values led you to the conclusion that publicly castigating your colleagues was a good idea. Was it “caring about your community?” Or perhaps it was “supporting team member happiness and excellence.” I’m sure you had a good reason to say the things you said. I imagine you feel much better now that you’ve said them.
Finally, I wonder what you are doing with your time these days. I hope you have found a new place of employment that is in harmony with your values, your sleep schedule, and your access to transportation. I hope you are now gainfully employed at a company that eschews all that needless advertising, powers all of its stores with solar panels, and gives out iPods (locally-sourced, of course) as holiday gifts. I assume that for passionate, principled people like yourself, jobs like this are not too difficult to come by these days.
Yours in solidarity,
Amanda
P.S. If I may, I’d like to offer just one piece of constructive criticism on your missive: I recommend that when you write a scathing open letter to your next former employer you proofread. It won’t take much of your time; there are actually some Windows 95-era tools that will do it for you.
