If you don’t want to deal with shipping for “softies”, then you can always make a road trip. Any excuse to get the hell out of PIT is a good excuse.

Andy B is exactly the kind of mind numbled robot that WF is counting on. What about all the little cute birdies, and bald eagles that are turning into feathered spam by these rotating avian-o-matics?

You should talk to people that have applied to work at WF. The reason why the employees of WF think the have the right, nay, the *DUTY* to lecture the hoi polloi is they truely believe they are the chosen ones. Never has the ego of someone being paid $10/hr to stack veggies been so great.

WF is a cult.

Secondly, while I agree that there are plenty of worse places than Whole Foods, and I could care less about buying live bugs, the lecture aspect of the place can certainly be irritating if you let it get to you. The marketing tricks disguised as “helpful information” are ridiculous. Whole Foods doesn’t really care about us all the way some people seem to believe it does. It’s a corporation, folks! This ain’t Ma and Paw on the farm telling you the plain truth. Do you think the WF execs actually can’t sleep at night thinking about the treatment of their bugs? As psu suggested, it’s probably expensive to ship them and they don’t sell well. The annoying part is that WF can frame it in a mushy way that is supposed to make us cheer for how concerned and responsible they are. What a bunch of hooey.

Andy B is right that an employee with the temerity to lecture one of these women on “breast milk good, formula bad” (which was what the employee in question actually said) does not deserve profanity. What they actually deserve is to have a sippy cup shoved up their ass.

You: Hi, I’d like a two pounds of Chilean sea bass.

WFM: I’m sorry, sir, we don’t carry Chilean sea bass because it’s overfished, and natural stocks are dangerously low. Are you sure you don’t want something else?

You: No, I want only Chilean sea bass. What you probably don’t know, friend, is that the Chilean-sea turret worm, a magnificent species of sea worm that is millions of years old and whose secretions have recently been shown to be the mother ocean’s primary means of holding deadly algal blooms in check, is on the verge of extinction because of predation by its only known enemy, the toothfish — commonly known as Chilean sea bass. Friend, don’t you see? If we don’t *reduce* the Chilean sea bass population, we could very well lose the turret worms altogether!

WFM: (stunned silence)

Sure, breastfeeding is almost always better for the child, but *almost* is a key word — there are exceptions, and people who for whatever reason cannot breastfeed really do not need busybodies, no matter how good their intentions may be, lecturing them about how they feed their children.

Also, have you heard some of the rants people get about breastfeeding? What you’re characterizing as “stand[ing] up for healthy kids” often actually gets delivered as a sanctimonious “You know, you might as well be blowing smoke into the baby’s face if you’re going to abuse it by using formula, you terrible terrible parent”.