Whole Foods Confirms Oklahoma City Lease

What a difference eight months makes:

Whole Foods confirmed Wednesday the chain has a signed lease to open a store in Oklahoma City.

The confirmation was provided through the company's marketing department via Twitter in response to a question by The Oklahoman regarding rumors that have been ongoing for the past two years.

Whole Foods is one of the nation's leading grocery chains that specializes in natural and organic goods and operates more than 270 stores in North America and the United Kingdom.

The chain has only one store in Oklahoma — a former Wild Oats store in Tulsa acquired as part an acquisition in 2007.

I call that good news. The first, and only, Whole Foods I've been in was in Orlando while on vacation and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We bought Cuban food to eat back in our room and it was almost as good as Grandpop Pete's. I'm looking forward to Whole Foods coming here and spending a ton of money on stuff I can get cheaper that tastes just as good.

Unhappy Tasters

Though I don't like going there, you won't find me slagging on Wal-Mart. What they manage to accomplish every day is nothing short of a miracle. But that's not the only reason why this is so satisfying:

Kummer buys two batches of nearly identical groceries at Wal-Mart and Whole Foods. He has them prepared in a restaurant kitchen and invites taste testers to make a blind side-by-side comparison. The Whole Food grocery set cost $50 more, $20 of which is spent on top of the line chicken breasts (Wal-Mart didn't really offer equivalently high-end meat.)

The taste testers preferred the Wal-Mart veggies overwhelmingly, with complaints about the meat and dairy. "The tasters were surprised," he writes, "when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal and they learned that in a number of instances they had adamantly preferred Walmart produce. And they weren’t entirely happy."

No, it's not enough that Wal-Mart can deliver food that's just as good, and in some cases, better, than you can get at a high-end place like Whole Foods. When snooty food tasters find out they prefer they cheaper stuff, do they slap their foreheads in hapless amusement? Do they smile and shrug their shoulders and maybe let out a little laugh at their own folly? Do they come away from the experience, a little wiser about the nature of food and how it gets to their table? No. They get angry.

Geez Louise.

Don't get me wrong. I've been to Whole Foods exactly once and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It'd be great if we could get one around here. But as much as I dislike going to Wal-Mart, I find myself going there time and time again because they have what I need at a good price. It's the free-market system at its finest.

Curse those people at Wal-Mart.

More On The Whole Foods Boycott

Ann Althouse joins the fray over the Whole Foods boycott:

What delusion! I'll bet the liberals and progressives keep going to Whole Foods, which is about a high-quality selection of goods sold in a pleasant, slightly posh environment. I don't think people are going there to make a political statement, and I don't think people will boycott it to make a political statement — or at least not to make a statement about their support for health care reform, which, you may note, people are not fired up about. People are fired up against the legislation, and Whole Foods may gain some new customers, but we longtime Whole Foods shoppers go there for personal benefit and indulgence (which may include a smidgen of feeling good about greenness and "fair trade").

(Althouse's post is really about The Moderate Voice's less than moderate voice when writing about the Whole Foods boycott so click on over and read the whole thing.)

I haven't come across anything so far about this boycott's affect on Whole Foods but it's probably too early to tell. But if we had one here in Oklahoma City and I wasn't already shopping there, I'd start. (I didn't blog about it but we visited the Whole Foods in Orlando and had a great time there. Came away with a delicious take-home Cuban meal we ate in our hotel room.)