Customer service

1. Usually when you order meat or cheese at the deli counter (e.g. "I'll have a 1/2 pound of pastrami, please"), the person behind the counter tries to get as close as they can to the weight you ordered but it's often a little over and you're charged for the overage. I've noticed that what they do at Whole Foods is that they only charge you for what you asked for but they give you the little extra for free. So yesterday I asked for a 1/2 pound of roast beef, but it came out to 0.57 when he weighed it. He lifted a bit of the meat off the scale until it read 0.50, printed the ticket, and put the little extra back on the scale. It's a nice gesture and a good example of using customer service instead of marketing or advertising to give a current customer a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company...and it only costs them 20 cents-worth of roast beef.

2. We went out to eat with some friends the other night but the restaurant was tiny, packed, and didn't have anywhere to put Ollie's stroller. So the owner took the stroller and put it in the back of his truck that was parked out in front of the restaurant. (While there, we dined on a cheese plate with, like, 30 to 40 different cheeses on it, some of which were made by the stroller valet himself.)

How Whole Foods is using longer checkout

How Whole Foods is using longer checkout lines to ensure faster checkouts in its Manhattan stores. "Whole Foods executives spent months drawing up designs for a new line system in New York that would be unlike anything in their suburban stores, where shoppers form one line in front of each register. That traditional system, they determined, would take up too much space and could not handle the crowds they expected here."

Whole Foods' stock is going down, but

Whole Foods' stock is going down, but maybe it shouldn't be. "The whole idea of good food and gourmet eating has begun to transcend the PBS-store bag toter."

A list of the 100 best corporate citizens

A list of the 100 best corporate citizens for 2006 from Business Ethics Magazine. Nike is at #13, Whole Foods at #47. (via rp)

With Wal-Mart selling more organic and Whole

With Wal-Mart selling more organic and Whole Foods expanding like crazy, organic foods are moving from the counterculture to "bean-counter culture".

Debate between economist Milton Friedman, John Mackey (

Debate between economist Milton Friedman, John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) and T.J. Rodgers (CEO of Cypress Semiconductor). The discussion centers around Friedman's assertion that "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits". (via mr)

Whole Foods' stock is on the rise,

Whole Foods' stock is on the rise, but how are they doing consumer-wise?.