It sometimes feels like everyone I know steals from Whole Foods. For a certain subset of the city’s wealthy-ish, a little shoplifting on your grocery run has become about as mundane as jaywalking. When asked, no one could quite explain why they do it. Some gestured at something like corporate protest; others blamed an unaffordable city. Entitlement, one thief admitted. I’d call it a form of collective nihilism. Everyone has their strategy: “Look like you have money and talk on the phone,” says a casting director of her technique. A graphic designer at a high-end fitness brand labels everything from the hotbar as “soup.”
As I found myself inadvertently conducting an anthropological survey of Hu chocolate theft among creative-director types, I became intrigued by stories of Whole Foods Jail — the mythical storage closets, Amazon return desks, and personnel-only areas of the store that are largely unseen by the law-abiding (or the stealthier thieves). Like Old City Hall Station or Katie Holmes’s rumored private entrance to the Whole Foods at the Chelsea Mercantile, there is a secret topography at play here. I wanted to learn everything there is to know about Whole Foods Jail.
