A Whole Foods Fight in Boston

[Marcus Bryant]

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/1...ight-in-boston

[Oh, Gee!!]

Crazy white people

[RandomGuy]

Piffle. People are getting all pissy over the closure of a sub-par grocery store?

Laura Derba, Whole Foods' president for the North Atlantic region, thinks that "The issue in Jamaica Plain is change." What it isn't about, she says, is Hi-Lo workers now being out of jobs. "We held a job fair for them," she points out, "and 28 [of 40] came. And 20 or so of them have been hired by Whole Foods."

Did Hi-Lo provide health care to its 40 employees? Anti-Whole Foods activist Ms. Pardew admits she doesn't know, adding that "the stories we hear from [Hi-Lo] employees is that they weren't great employers."

In contrast, last year Whole Foods ranked 18th on Fortune magazine's "100 best companies to work for." The company will provide health care to 70 of the 100 employees in the J.P. store. And while activists complain that the store "is unaffordable to many families in Jamaica Plain," an informal survey by Boston Globe blogger Rob Anderson found that "Comparable pasta, cereal, and soap products were all cheaper at Whole Foods than at Hi-Lo, and the store much vilified as 'whole paycheck' had the cheapest milk of any store in the city."

and:

As activists focus their ire on Whole Foods, check-cashing shops that dot Jamaica Plain and the Rent-a-Center a few short blocks from the Whole Foods construction site operate free of pickets. Though both types of business are frequently accused of demanding usurious interest rates that exploit the poor, they possess one important advantage over Whole Foods: They are immune from aesthetic charges of yuppification.

Chalk another one up to "there's one in every crowd"

[boutons_deux]

not worried about losing a store, they are worried about WF presence upgrading the COL for the poor current residents (rents, taxes), aka gentrification.

the payday/taxday lenders (many are subsidiaries or investment targets of Wall st) probably do as much damage to the poor locals as gentrification.

[ChumpDumper]

My sneeze caused my cold.