Some speculations on Whole Foods


Whole Foods Winston-Salem, before the lunch rush

It’s interesting how much buzz there has been about Amazon buying Whole Foods. Even people who’ve hardly ever been inside a Whole Foods and who don’t use Amazon (people like my brother) have been talking about it. Everyone seems to suspect that this transaction may be the leading edge of big changes in how all of us shop.

At the Winston-Salem Whole Foods earlier this week, I said to the checkout guy, “What do y’all think of your new owners?”

I got a somewhat testy response that I interpreted to mean that Whole Foods employees have gotten tired of answering questions. No doubt many of the questions are hostile. He responded as though I had asked what’s going to change. Apparently that’s the question most people are asking. Anyway, his testy response was that he has no idea what it all means, that he’s not on the board, doesn’t get to sit in on the meetings, and has no idea what it’s all about. Ouch. Perhaps he also was expressing a bit of nervousness. After all, some of the stories that have been written about Amazon buying Whole Foods have speculated that checkout people will soon be replaced by machines. Note to Amazon PR types who came across this through Google Alerts: You need to communicate with Whole Foods employees and reassure them, if you can. They may be freaking out.

I’ve read a good bit of the commentary on this. Everybody is speculating. The liberal media — for example Salon, or Vox — have a strong dislike for Amazon and seem to assume that Amazon will roboticize Whole Foods stores and squeeze small organic farmers into bankruptcy, to the benefit of Big Organic.

I fear they may be right on the matter of the small organic farmers who farm with a conscience, as opposed to Big Organic, which farms with the intent of taking advantage of a market in which they can get away with charging a lot more for what they sell. On the other hand, if big players can do truly good sustainable farming and grow beautiful and exuberant produce (rather than pale and inferior stuff which just happens to have an organic sticker on it), then how much of a bad thing is that? That’s all about how organic farmers are monitored and the standards they are held to. Amazon will need to be very careful about buying only from honest, well-monitored organic operations. Luckily, Amazon has the resources to do that. They’d better get it right.

However, as for roboticizing Whole Foods stores, I just don’t think that is going to happen. Certainly Amazon has roboticized its warehouses and shipping operations. But that’s all out of sight of the customer. It’s different with Whole Foods. Amazon’s PR people will make it clear to Amazon’s management (though I feel sure that Amazon’s management already gets it) that Whole Foods will now become the brick-and-mortar public face of Amazon and that they’d better make it pretty.

If Amazon wanted impersonal brick-and-mortar operations that lend themselves to mechanization and roboticization, then they’d be competing with low-end stores such as Aldi. Why buy a top-of-the-market operation like Whole Foods just to turn it into Aldi? That would be destroying a large chunk of Whole Foods’ value, the value for which Amazon paid a lot of good money.

One of the wisest commentaries I’ve read suggests that what Amazon wants is a network of delivery centers. Whole Foods has 431 stores in upscale locations. You order online whatever you usually order from Amazon (probably not groceries). And then, the next day, or maybe even later the same day, you drive to your local Whole Foods and pick up your order. While you’re at Whole Foods, you have some ice cream, or some coffee, or a pizza, or lunch. And maybe you even shop for groceries. Whole Foods stores actually devote a considerable percentage of their floor space to food, drink, and reasonably pleasant places to sit down for a while, WIFI included. Bottom line: Amazon has new options for lower-cost and quicker delivery, plus they draw a whole bunch of new customers into Whole Foods stores. Would you want all those new Whole Foods customers to have an Aldi experience? Of course not. Whole Foods stores would now be competing with Starbucks, with every retailer at the mall, with the grocery stores, and even with the local Barnes & Noble, if you’re lucky enough to have one. You can get anything you want there, and you can still paw the lettuce and sniff the canteloupes before you buy them.

It’s devilishly clever.

Would I go there? You darn right I would, if Whole Foods will spiff up and enlarge its stores, keep them teeming with cheerful and contented employees, and sell only the best of what America’s — and here I emphasize America’s — organic farmers can produce. If the new customers that came over from Costco still want a case of canned green beans or half a ton of Pepsi, then sell it to them through the warehouse delivery system, not in the holy space of the Whole Foods store. And since the Pepsi-buyers will be Trump voters who have the manners of Walmart shoppers, please design your stores so that we old Whole Foods customers can avoid the Republicans (and they us). This may be your biggest problem, Amazon. Whole Foods customers and Walmart customers don’t mix. It’s a culture war, you know.

Whole Foods has a bad habit that I’d like to see them quit. I complain about it regularly, both on the corporate web site and at the customer service desk at my nearest store. We all should complain. That’s to stop importing so much stuff. I abhor, for example, the garlic imported from South America. It may be labeled as organic, but it’s also inferior garlic — badly cured, blemished, sometimes moldy. I’d much rather buy healthy-looking garlic from Gilroy, California, that isn’t organic, if it’s obviously better garlic (as it certainly would be if it came from Gilroy).

Maybe my view of what’s up with Amazon and Whole Foods is skewed by the fact that those two companies already get most of the money I spend. If they keep their standards up and make it fun and easy, then they’ll get 96 percent of what I spend. The rest of my spending would go to the local hardware store and to the Tractor Supply where I buy organic chicken feed. One thing that is not efficient at present for Amazon Prime are heavy items that are expensive to ship — 40 pound bags of chicken feed, for example, or even four-pound bags of cat food. Local pickup would change the economics of Amazon Prime.

Ultimately, I wonder if there isn’t something sustainable in a one-stop supply line. All those thousands of retail stores and big box stores (and the driving to and fro) suck up a huge amount of overhead and energy — and time. As long as the delivery system is efficient and sustainable (and involves far fewer cardboard boxes — the bane of Amazon Prime) then maybe it wouldn’t be an all-bad example of creative destruction.

I am cautiously optimistic.

Rich young creeps and their creepy visions

What is it about young tech billionaires that makes them so creepy?

Partly, I’m sure, it’s the character flaws that they seem to have in common — hubris, arrogance, the assurance of superiority that goes along with their being very smart and having made themselves very rich. They also see themselves as visionaries who have been anointed to lead us all into a brave new techno-utopian future brought about by the consumption of their products (and in which, coincidentally, they will be even richer). They also tend to be monomaniacs: Their idea is the one true master key to our exciting utopian future.

Why is it that their visions of the future almost always make us gag?

Just yesterday, I came across a link on Facebook to an article in Wired magazine with the headline: “Why you will one day have a chip in your brain.” Thanks for the heads-up on that, Wired magazine.

Remember Google Glass? Back in 2013, a tech blogger wrote this about Google Glass: “According to Google CEO, Sergey Brin, Google’s latest product innovation is meant to end the social isolation of smartphones as you often miss the events going on around you while playing with your phone. Google Glass eliminates that distraction as you enjoy your life while wearing glasses and have all the functions and commands of your smartphone without having to divert your attention to your phone.” Wow, Sergey. What could go wrong?

To be fair to Elon Musk, he has a broader and more mature sense of the future than do some of the lesser tech billionaires, yet he also assumes that, without the gifts that tech entrepreneurs intend to bring us, our future will be a bleak and empty one. Just recently, in talking about space exploration, he said, “There have to be reasons you get up in the morning and want to live.” Thanks, Elon. I can’t wait.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring us virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and a “global community” — with Facebook, of course, at the center of it. In his recent manifesto about the future of Facebook, Zuckerberg puts this line in bold: “In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” Thanks for the infrastructure, Mr. Zuckerberg! And by the way, thanks for all the benefits your social infrastructure provided us during the 2016 election, particularly your focus on making your infrastructure (to use your words) supportive, safe, informed, civically engaged, and inclusive. With Facebook’s help, we’re sure on our way to building a super-duper global community!

And thanks, all you guys, for reminding me why I’m hiding in the woods.


Sergey Brin


Elon Musk


Mark Zuckerberg

Increasingly violent and authoritarian propaganda

⬆︎ National Rifle Association ad

⬆︎ Trump assault ad: Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States, talking directly to the American people

If I were a right-wing propagandist, my big concern right now would be heading off catastrophic damage to the Republican Party if (though I would say when) Trump voters see their man impeached, destroyed, and sent to prison. Many people will want to believe that it was all just a liberal conspiracy. You can be sure that the propaganda will be there to help them believe that, and, if possible, to try to use Trump’s downfall to reinvigorate rather than weaken the right-wing project and the Republican Party.

I’m afraid we’re already seeing the first pieces of this propaganda. The Trump video is crude, but the NRA video is sophisticated in its crudeness and has already been viewed millions of times. The message is clear enough: Liberals are a threat, and guns and fists are appropriate.

This is not fringe stuff, either. The NRA has about 5 million members. Trump is president of the United States, and James Mattis is his secretary of defense.

Note the anger and insult in the Mattis meme, and note how he reinforces the falsehood that the intent is to take people’s guns away, though gun control is only about keeping guns out of the hands of the wrong people, and limiting military-style wholesale-killing weapons that have nothing to do with self-defense.

More terrifying than the propaganda itself is the knowledge that this is the kind of stuff that gets results with millions of Americans.

And you know what? I’m just about sick of hearing right-wingers profane the word “freedom.”

⬆︎ An authoritarian Facebook meme

Democracy in Chains

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean. Viking, released June 13, 2017, 368 pages.

This book has been out for just over two weeks, but already there are 65 Amazon reviews. With the exception of one 2-star rating, all the ratings are either 5 stars (60 percent) or 1 star (37 percent). The 1-star reviews all cite pretty much the same talking points — that the book is intellectually dishonest, takes quotes out of context, contains inaccuracies, and that it’s a left-wing hit piece on libertarianism and one of the saints of libertarianism, James McGill Buchanan. In addition to the reviews, there many comments on many of the reviews, in which a war is raging.

The author, Nancy MacLean, is the William H. Chafe professor of history and public policy at Duke University. Libertarians can quibble over her quotes all they want, and they can say that we snowflake liberals are subject to “confirmation bias” (though libertarians never are, of course!). Nevertheless, whether I am subject to liberal confirmation bias or not, it seems clear to me that MacLean has landed what ought to be a finishing blow on the libertarian movement. It’s not that we didn’t already know what the libertarian movement is up to. It’s that MacLean’s research takes us much deeper into libertarian history and tears off the disguises of libertarian secretiveness.

MacLean begins her history with John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (1782-1850). Calhoun believed that slavery was a “positive good” that benefited both slaves and slave owners. He believed that individual human rights had to be “earned” (by becoming rich, for example) and that such rights were not bestowed by God or by mere citizenship. Calhoun clearly believed that owning other human beings was just one of his liberties, which presumably he earned by becoming rich. Calhoun was very jealous of these liberties earned by rich people, and there were pretty much no limits to his willingness to abridge the liberties of others — by force, by law, or by perversion of the Constitution) if the majority sought to constrain the power of the rich minority, even if what the rich minority wanted was to own other human beings.

MacLean picks up the Calhoun thread in the 20th Century in Virginia, with Harry Flood Byrd Sr. (1887-1966), who was a Virginia senator from 1933 until 1965. Byrd was a segregationist. He built a powerful political machine that worked for decades to try to keep Virginia segregated. Now what do you suppose Byrd’s theory of government and attitude to the Constitution might have been?

MacLean then turns to James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013). Libertarians know who Buchanan is, because they worship him. Part of the gap that MacLean is trying to close is to let the rest of us know who McGill was. Charles Koch, the second richest billionaire in America, who unfortunately has untold millions of dollars to pour into the project and the many institutions that carry water for him, helped make Buchanan’s career and helped finance the well-funded system which is using Buchanan’s strategies to make the rich richer (no regulation and no taxation), to destroy the social safety net, and to rig the rules so that rich men will have a lock on American government at every level, from now on.

Watching the eclipse

This summer — August 21 — a total eclipse of the sun will sweep across the United States. This is the chance of a lifetime to experience one of nature’s strangest events.

Unless you’re inside a path that is about 70 miles wide, you won’t see as much. A partial eclipse is not nearly as impressive as a total eclipse, because a little bit of sunlight goes a long way. Only on the path will you see a total eclipse. So, if you plan to witness the eclipse, you need to plan ahead and pick a good spot in the totality zone.

Here is a link to Xavier Jubier’s interactive Google map. This map should help you get a general idea of where you’d like to be for the eclipse. Notice that the map also will show you the percent of “obscuration” for locations outside the path.

However, for picking your location in much greater detail, I’d recommend using Google Earth. Download this Google earth file (also from Jubier), which, when opened in Google Earth, will show the path of the eclipse. Then you can use Google Earth to zoom in as close as you like to scout for locations.

A lot has been written about the danger of looking directly at the sun and why protective glasses are necessary if you want to do that. But, in the early 1970s, I witnessed a total solar eclipse in eastern North Carolina. I will never forget it. Lots of people had telescopes set up with special filters.

But looking at the sun during an eclipse is not the part that I found fascinating. Rather, the coolest part was watching how nature responds to sudden darkness in the middle of the day. You’ll want to be around lots of birds, if possible. They’ll go quiet, and as the sky lightens again they’ll start singing again. And yes, during a total eclipse it gets very dark. Not as dark as night, but spookily dark. It’s easy to understand how eclipses terrified the ancients.

Instead of worrying about glasses and filters, I’d recommend making a pinhole projector, using some white cardboard or corrugated whiteboard as the screen. With the pinhole projector (Google for how to do it), you’ll be able to see the black disc of the moon slowly moving across the sun until everything goes black. If you’re standing under a leafy tree with dappled light on the ground, you’ll see that the dappling of the light is made up of thousands of pinhole projections, in which the gaps between the leaves are the apertures. Thousands of little blurry discs on the ground will turn into crescents, because they are images of the sun.

In short, don’t look up! Instead, look around you, and listen. That’s where you’ll see (and hear) the most interesting stuff.

For an animation describing the astronomy of a total eclipse, here’s a video.

A Tales of the City revival

It had to happen, now that I think about it. Armistead Maupin let his Facebook friends know today that Variety has reported that Netflix is planning a remake of Maupin’s Tales of the City.

The books, which have sold more than 6 million copies, were first serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner starting in 1978. Altogether, there were nine books in the series. There’s a list below.

Even in the early 1990s, Maupin’s books were almost too hot to touch by American television. Britain’s Channel 4 produced the first mini-series in 1993. The series was shown on PBS in 1994, but there were so many complaints about depicting San Francisco LGBT types in a positive light that PBS backed out of a second season. The series later moved to Showtime.

It was “Tales of the City” that made Laura Linney famous.

A revival of Tales of the City thrills me for a number of reasons. For one, I devoured all the books when they first came out. For two, I spent 18 extraordinary years in San Francisco, working at the same places where Maupin worked — at least before he became a rich and famous author and didn’t have to work anymore. It was at an Examiner Christmas party in 1998 that I finally got to shake Maupin’s hand and thank him for the beautiful stories that he brought into the world.

The sad thing, though, is that though Maupin invented an entirely new genre — stories about LGBT people in which they didn’t have to be miserable and die in the end — AIDS happened starting in the early 1980s, and of course Maupin had to write about that. It was a huge setback for LGBT literature, because suddenly the literature was once again about people being miserable and dying.

The books are extremely dated now, period pieces, almost kitschy. The 1990s productions would be very hard to watch now, even with the sterling performances of Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis. But Netflix, I have no doubt, with Maupin looking over their shoulders, will find ways to bring the stories up to date so that they make sense to today’s sensibilities. And do I ever look forward to scenes shot in San Francisco with a 1970s look!

Not everyone knows that, after the first four books were serialized in the Chronicle, Maupin became irritated with the Chronicle’s editors. My old colleague at the Examiner, managing editor Pamela Brunger Scott, poached Maupin over to the Examiner, and the Examiner serialized book 5, Significant Others. After that, the Chronicle poached him back.

To me, this is huge, because the books are so dated that they make little sense to today’s young people. Because the stories seem dated now, some important history — both the history of a literature and the history of a people — was at risk of being lost. In a way, I suppose it’s good that young people no longer can relate, because it shows how much things have changed in the last 40 years. But how things used to be is something that must not ever be forgotten. These are stories which changed many people’s lives, and which changed the world.

1. Tales of the City (1978)
2. More Tales of the City (1980)
3. Further Tales of the City (1982)
4. Babycakes (1984)
5. Significant Others (1987)
6. Sure of You (1989)
7. Michael Tolliver Lives (2007)
8. Mary Ann in Autumn (2010)
9. The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014)


Thomas Gibson, Paul Gross, and Laura Linney


Armistead Maupin in the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom

The Miracle of Dunkirk

The Miracle of Dunkirk, by Walter Lord. Published in the United States by Viking (1982) and in Great Britain by Allen Lane (1983). 324 pages.

Last week, in a post about summer movies, I wrote about the movie “Dunkirk,” which is to be released on July 21 and which seems sure to become a summer blockbuster. I mentioned in the post that I was looking for a good book to read on Dunkirk. I ended up with The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord.

I could not put this book down.

When I started the book, I knew nothing about the author, Walter Lord. I just now looked him up on Wikipedia. He was an American, born in 1917, died in 2002. He was an American blue blood, went to Princeton and earned a law degree at Yale. It is obvious, reading this book, that what fascinates Lord so much about Dunkirk is not the military angle, but rather the human angle, whether foible or great depth of character. The author’s sheer niceness and love of humanity somehow come through on every page, though the story is told by aggregating the memories of the men who were at Dunkirk.

Lord also wrote, in 1965, a book about the American civil rights era, The Past That Would Not Die. I do believe that Lord was a liberal, like me, and I think that must be the factor that can make a book about war so relevant. This is not a book that glorifies war or that makes little patriotic mascots out of veterans (though it treats the veterans with great respect). I believe I will read Lord’s book on the civil rights era. Obviously he is a writer who deserves to be remembered and kept in print. At least one of Lord’s books, a book about the Titanic (1955), was a bestseller. Lord was a consultant to the director who made the movie about the Titanic in 1997. I would not be at all surprised to learn that this book on Dunkirk fed into the screenplay for the new movie. I will watch the credits carefuly.

Whether or not this book was used by the screenplay writers of this summer’s Dunkirk movie, this book would have been perfect. Lord tells the story through the eyes of Dunkirk veterans, including even some Germans. Lord actually lists his cast of characters in the back of the book. The list is 14 pages long. While reading the book, I wondered how he assembled so much extraordinary detail. He explains this in the back of book with a section on source materials. Partly he relied on written reports filed with the British admiralty. But he also interviewed, and exchanged letters with, many Dunkirk veterans.

Lord’s last chapter, “Deliverance,” occurs on June 4, 1940. That’s the day that Winston Churchill delivered his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech to the House of Commons.

This book is out of print, but it can be ordered from used booksellers on Amazon. Somehow I ended up buying the British edition, though I didn’t realize it. The book was shipped by international priority mail from Goring by Sea, which is just west of Brighton. The book was delivered in nine days. It’s kind of cool, actually, that my copy of the book came from a bookshop right on the channel, not far from the action at Dover. Yup, I’ve been to Brighton, and to Dover, though I’ve crossed the channel only by the tunnel train. I have not been to Dover castle, which was used as headquarters for managing the Dunkirk evacuation. If I’m lucky enough to make another trip to England, I must visit Dover castle.

“It’s up to us, the people”

This is a brief new video with Ken from Signature Views / Signature Reads.

Too hot to fly

This is a nerd post!

The Washington Post has an interesting story today about how flights in and out of Phoenix have been canceled this week because of the heat: It’s so hot in Phoenix that airplanes can’t fly

The story is misleading in that it suggests that particular models of aircraft have maximum operating temperatures. But it’s more complicated than that. Though no doubt there is a maximum operating temperature, there also is a maximum takeoff and landing temperature, which might be much lower.

The efficiency of an airplane, and thus its ability to take off or land on a given runway, actually is a formula with a number of factors. The factors include the weight of the plane, the air temperature, the altitude of the airport, and even the humidity.

Hot air is thinner than cold air. Air at high altitudes is thinner than air at low altitudes. Thinner air affects not only the airplane’s airfoil (its wings); thin air also affects the efficiency of the airplane’s engines. So, to determine whether an airplane can fly in a given situation, a flight computer must make a calculation on all these factors — plus, of course, the runway length and the altitude of any high terrain around the airport that must be cleared.

As a student pilot many years ago, it was easy to feel, just from the controls of an airplane, that airplanes are perky and responsive on cold days, but also that they’re sluggish and much more disobedient on warm, humid days, or at mountain airports.

But the thing that really brought this point home to me was flying on a packed-to-the-gills Air India flight from Bangkok to Delhi some years ago. Those heavily loaded flights into and out of New Delhi, I learned, usually land and take off in the middle of the night. Why is that? Because it’s too hot for the planes to fly during the daytime. And in my limited experience, Air India planes are packed to the max, so air temperature becomes a critical factor.

I wouldn’t worry, though. Today’s airplanes are incredibly sophisicated, and their behavior is easily modeled. If your flight to Phoenix is canceled, it’s because the airlines know their business and their airplanes. Still, unless it’s hotter than the airplane’s maximum operating temperature (which I doubt), the plane would be able to fly with a lighter load, even in the heat. But these days, airplanes tend to be packed, and apparently it makes more business sense to cancel a packed flight than to drag enough people and their luggage off the plane to lighten the plane enough to satisfy the OK-to-fly computation.

Mimosa

Every Southern landscape requires mimosa. We were late in acquiring it, because such old-fashioned items are not always easy to find. Plus, the first effort to get one started failed. But this mimosa, which was planted just last fall, is blooming for the first time. It’s in a chicken-wire cage to protect it from the deer. It will be safe from the deer after it’s tall enough.