Whole Foods owns me

Dec 14, 2007 - 23:11 PM PST

i keep meaning to write about Whole Foods (and Aubrey keeps encouraging me to) and then i always get sidetracked. But today something happened and immediately afterwards i knew i wanted to write a quick blog about how ridiculous it is.

i work for a company called Capers, it's a fairly awesome community based organic and natural food store in Vancouver. There used to be four Capers locations in Vancouver but a couple of months ago Whole Foods bought Wild Oats (and Wild Oats owned us) which meant, of course, that Capers was now part of the Whole Foods umbrella. They have since closed one of the Capers stores (which was really quite inevitable and we were prepared for that possibility long before the merger) and now we are all being 'intergrated' into Whole Foods systems. Our departments are called different things: the Deli Department is now the Prepared Foods, Natural Living is now Whole Body, Front- End is now Guest Services etc. My job has changed quite drastically. In Capers terms i was a Store Accounting Coordinator and just recently i applied to and got (yay!) a position that is somewhat equivalent in Whole Foods, which is Payroll Benefits Specialist.

On to the tid-bit.

So today i went to my first PBS training session and early on in the morning we were informed that Capers will no longer be accepting paper applications. All applicants have to apply online. Hmmm. "They" (captial "T" say that only having online applications has not lowered the amount of applications they receive at the store level but i bit my tongue and didn't open up the can of worms of how limiting it is not to accept paper applications at all. Not everyone has a computer, not everyone has access to the internet, not everyone is computre savy. Meh. From my stand-point, sure, i mean - even i applied to Capers originally online, but that doesn't mean i would promote the idea that EVERYONE would have to and that if you can't get to a computer to fill out an application that there is no way you can be considered as an applicant.

It's all rather silly.