The Anarchist's Cookbook

The ideas have been put to the test as Whole Foods slowly opens larger stores in labor markets where untraditional management may seem, simply, weird. This February, Whole Foods opened a signature store in Manhattan, in the new Time Warner building at Columbus Circle. It is the largest supermarket in Manhattan, with 59,000 square feet. The ceilings are airy, the cafe is skylit, the aisles are so wide that two shopping carts and a baby stroller -- three abreast -- can easily slide past one another. The Columbus Circle Whole Foods is a carnival of comestibles. The prepared-foods area includes a sushi bar, staffed at lunch with 11 people; a pizza bar with 14 kinds of pizza; a coffee and tea bar; a salad bar with 40 items; and a daily hot-lunch bar that includes separate arrays of Asian, Indian, and Latin food. The produce section recently offered 15 different varieties of organic greens, including dinosaur kale; the meat case held four dozen kinds of meat. The store has 30 checkout stations, a single bank-style line, and a line monitor to speed customers to the next open cashier.

But as gorgeous, and even sexy, as it is, the food is really not the challenge. It's the people. Columbus Circle opened with 292 people on staff, which means some of the 14 teams had 50 or more members, a hard group to wrangle. The key is one of Mackey's favorite metaphors: yogurt culture.

Of those 292 staff members, 70 came from other stores. With their understanding of the company, they were the starter culture, in Mackey's metaphor, launching the fermentation that would turn Columbus Circle into a true Whole Foods store. Some even took lesser titles just to get into Columbus Circle. The store has a team leader and two associate store team leaders, both of whom were previously running their own stores in Georgetown, Maryland, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, before coming to New York.

Although Whole Foods is pricey -- customers have ruefully nicknamed it "Whole Paycheck" -- the opening staff was quickly swamped by the business in New York. Three months after it opened, Columbus Circle now has 468 team members, including 140 people on the cashier/front-end team alone, more people than used to work in a whole store.

Aaron Foster, 22, a two-year company veteran, came to Columbus Circle from a Philadelphia Whole Foods. He's a cheese buyer, and standing at the cheese display, he's pondering the tension in Whole Foods' values -- as he puts it, to "further the goals of sustainable agriculture and artisanal food production while being as big as we are and growing as fast as we are." A customer comes up. "Excuse me," she says, "I'm looking for a certain cheese." She's abashed. "It begins with a C." Foster is all ears. "It's one syllable," she says. Foster focuses on the roster of C cheeses in his brain. "I bought it yesterday at Dean & DeLuca!" the woman offers, as if this might be helpful.

"Comte," Foster suggests.

"That's it!" the woman says, and they head off to get her some.

Barry Keenan is working the fresh-seafood case with full-throated theatricality, calling the weights of the salmon and the shrimp he is selling before the scale can display them. "I shopped at the Whole Foods in Chelsea all the time," the 32-year-old says. "I figured I'd put in my application; they hired me in September."

So is Whole Foods a New York kind of workplace? Keenan laughs. "Not at all. People here are used to being trod on. I was in the restaurant business 10 years. I got no benefits of any kind the entire time, not to mention, say, a lunch break." The restaurant veteran has no qualms about working retail at the seafood counter. "They have a lot more respect for you as a person here."

Indeed, Chris Hitt, who was at Whole Foods for 16 years and who left as president in 2001, says, "Customers experience the food and the space, but what they really experience is the work culture. The true hidden secret of the company is the work culture. That's what delivers the stores to the customers."

http://images.fastcompany.com/magazine/84/wholefoods_duck.gif) no-repeat top center; padding-top: 45px;">Wendy Steinberg, 44, has worked at Whole Foods since 1992 (her husband works at Whole Foods, too), and she is now one of the associate team leaders at Columbus Circle. She has a story from her first year at the company, when she was working in a store in Providence, Rhode Island.

"I was on break, in the break room. I hadn't been a team member more than six months, and there was this guy in the break room. He was sitting there, with his hands crossed, with this big 1970s-style Afro, just checking things out. We talked. He asked me a lot of questions. I had no idea who he was. I figured he was just another team member."

Finally, says Steinberg, "I was like, who are you, anyway?"

That was John Mackey.

"He's an observer," Steinberg says of her CEO.