Whole Foods Miami; Jorge Drops the Ball AGAIN

This isn't the first time I've written about the Whole Foods in Miami. Overall, it's a nice place to shop; the staff is friendly and courteous and for the most part, helpful.

But not always as helpful as the could or should be, at least at the management level. Sure, they're polite. They look you in the eye, and promise to "address the situation."

They just don't actually DO anything.

In my review of their opening, I did have one major complaint:

...they have a shelf labeled "WHEAT ALTERNATIVES." They had a shelf of breads from Sami's Bakery, but beware!! Two of the choices actually are wheat breads. They shouldn't be in that section at all, and I've mentioned it to someone stocking the shelf last week, but no change has been made. Hopefully, other people with food allergies know enough to read the labels, but if they don't realize that Sami's isn't exclusively a GF vendor, there could be serious consequences.

In fact, at the bottom of that review, there's an update:

I emailed the store manager, and the problems with the WHEAT ALTERNATIVE shelf have finally been addressed.

And why did I think that? Because I received this email in response to my complaint about that shelf:

Hi Christopher,
Thank you for your detailed email.  You are absolutely right with your observations.  I will address all your concerns.  Please continue to communicate any other concerns.
Jorge Sosa
ASTL WFM Coral Gables

Of course, those concerns were not addressed; wheat-bearing breads kept finding their way to the wheat-alternative shelf. I'd mention it to the person behind the bakery counter, who would vaguely nod and look away, or the stock person, who would promise to ask his supervisor. Finally, I asked to see the store manager.

What I got was Jorge.

Jorge is a pleasant enough guy. He came right over, and agreed that the item clearly didn't belong on the shelf. He even asked the stock person why the stuff was there, and the stock guy replied that Sami's made wheat free products. They do; but they don't make EXCLUSIVELY wheat-free products, any more than Coca-Cola makes EXCLUSIVELY sugar free soda. Jorge concluded that Brooke, the bakery manager, just lumped all the Sami's products together, assuming they were all wheat-alternative. Honest mistake.

I pointed out that the problem wasn't so much that they were keeping all the products together; the problem was that they were all together in a section dedicated to products that didn't contain wheat, an allergen that affects a significant portion of the population. People should read labels, but most folks will trust Whole Foods to label its foods correctly. And if they do that here, that will lead to hives, nasal congestion, airway congestion, abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting, muscle cramps, and joint pain. It's not pleasant to have a wheat allergy.

He promised - AGAIN - that it would be addressed, and that he'd discuss it with Brooke, and that they'd remind staff not to make assumptions regarding brand and food allergies.

I saw no reason not to believe Jorge; he said he understood how serious food allergies were, and that he'd address the problem.

But he didn't. The problem wasn't addressed, it still hasn't been addressed.

I was in there today, and there were the offending loaves, lo-carb wheat bread mixed in with the "Wheat Alternative" products. So I went to the Costumer Service desk, and in short order I was talking to Jorge again.

"Oh, yes," he said. "I remember you. We talked about this before. I'll take care of this."

"Great," I said. "I'll wait."

That stopped him. "What?"

"I'll wait here while you fix it. You can pull the loaves off the shelf, or take down the sign; whatever."

This flummoxed him. "I'm going to address it. I'll meet with Brooke and take care of it."

I pointed out that that is what he told me LAST time, and here we are.

"I did address your problem; I met with Brooke and took care of it." he repeated

"Obviously not," I replied, "because here we are, and there it is."

"I'm sorry sir, but I will take care of it." Very polite, but firm.

"Great," I said. "I will watch you do it, and we can all sleep tonight."

"I'm not going to fix it NOW; we have a system."

Just so you know, we're talking about a dozen loaves of bread; he could have dumped them into a grocery cart and been done with it. That's all I was expecting. A show of faith on his part. But I didn't get it.

"Jorge," I said as patiently as I could, "you've had MONTHS to address it, and you haven't. MONTHS. Does somebody have to get sick before you'll take care of this?"

"No, I don't want anyone to get sick! I will take care of it"

"Great! So fix it. I'll wait, so I know that it's been done."

"Not right now - but I will address it. Is there anything else I can do for you?" his eyes are glazing over, and he's starting to sweat.

"After someone ends up in an emergency room? You are telling me you'd rather let people get sick than actually take care of this problem."

"No, I'm not saying that! I will address it, but not now! Is there something else?" his smile is forced. I'm pretty sure he was wondering if he could have security throw me out.

The thing is, there was absolutely NO reason for Jorge not to fix it right then. What if it had been rotten meat, or moldy produce? The effect is exactly the same; the person who consumes it gets sick. All I was asking was for him to move a few loaves of wheat bread off of the "wheat alternatives" shelf. And he would not do it.

Now I have to wonder, would he pull that rotten meat? I'm not so sure, now. And now I have to wonder what OTHER products are mis-labeled in the store; are all those products REALLY organic? What about the vegan items? Customers trust that their grocers are putting the right products on the right shelves.

With a store like Whole Foods, it's an entirely greater area of responsibility; we make an effort to go out of our way to Whole Foods, because we are trying to lead healthier lives. Sometimes, it's a matter of choice; we feel that "organic" products are healthier, or we're seeking a wider variety of choices to support a diet that meets a moral imperative. And many of us go there because we have special dietary needs that are not met at main-stream markets.

Jorge dropped the customer service ball. And he was stupid about it; having admitted that this was a repeat of a problem that he'd promised I wouldn't see again, he utterly failed to resolve it; not only to MY satisfaction, but to any reasonable standard of service.

It's unacceptable for a manager to fail so miserably at customer service. The fact that he could have fixed the problem inside of two minutes with minimal effort only underscores his utter lack of commitment to meeting his customer's needs.

I accepted his promise that he would "address" the issue on two separate occasions. Since the problem wasn't solved, it was time for Jorge to step up his game. Instead, he made the exact same empty promises, KNOWING that he'd already broken them.

That makes Jorge worse than merely incompetent; that makes him a liar. Either he lied when he told me that he'd addressed it earlier, or he's lying to me now. Or he's lying about understanding the problem.

The bottom line is that Jorge had a chance to prevent people from getting sick, and he chose not to do it. He apparently thinks it's better to risk people's health and well-being than to actually do his job. Maybe he didn't want to offend Brooke; maybe he thought that the store's bureaucracy was more important than the health of his customers. By doing nothing, by putting it off until a staff meeting sometime in the future, he has put his customers at risk of illness, and that's unacceptable.

I find it hard to believe that Whole Foods is a health store that doesn't give a crap about your actual health.

Happy New Year; hope you don't spend it over the toilet. Which is more than I can say for Jorge Sosa.

UPDATED! Whole Foods Coral Gables: Store Review and Gluten Free Assessment

You might have heard that the Whole Foods in Coral Gables finally opened. I've actually been there twice, but the first time I wasn't thinking about writing a review.

Tere has published her review, and a few others have also published their reviews. The other reviews tend to be about the selection of organic goods, or 'green' products, and the amenities of the store. I'll mention the store's physical plant, too, but my primary reason for shopping there is to fulfill my special dietary needs. And that's how my review is skewed.

I suffer from celiac disease. It's an inherited condition; basically, I can't tolerate a protein called 'gluten', which is found in wheat, barley, and rye. There is only one treatment option: a diet excluding those grains, and derivatives of those grains. The good news is that there are lot of foods I can eat; the bad news is that wheat is often added to them. I read a lot of labels.

I still do most of my shopping at Publix; rice and potatoes are GF. Fresh vegetables, most frozen ones. Meat, chicken and seafood are fine, as are most dairy products. Lots of staples, and even Publix is adding more GF products to its shelves all the time.

But there are some GF foods that I have to travel to get; GF breads, pastas, snacks and prepared frozen dinners. I can get a few items at Healthland on Miracle Mile (and do!) and I can find a few more at Wild Oats. But the best selection until now was the Whole Foods in Aventura. I've been waiting for the San Remo store for a long time.

THE STORE ITSELF

The first thing I have to comment on is parking: or rather, FINDING it. All the signs for their parking garage are found on the side of the building the parking entrance is actually ON. There's nothing in front of the store (where there is a valet parking service) or the other side that tells you that there is a garage. Once you find it, it's Exceedingly Well Managed. There were at least a half dozen employees direct traffic up there. It won't last, of course. That's a lot of traffic management, and I consider this a design flaw of the store. You shouldn't need that much manpower to manage traffic flow for a supermarket.

I found a spot - not really that difficult despite the number of cars up there - and headed for the Garage entrance to the store. There are two decent sized elevators down, but no stairs or escalators going down. There is an escalator going UP, and it's along side an ingenious rail system to bring your grocery cart up. Unfortunately, they have to use one of the two elevators to bring the carts back DOWN. I consider this to be another notable design flaw in the store. Elevators can only hold so many people, and you inevitably end up with a bottle neck. The design should have included a staircase or escalator down into the store.

But things pick up once you're in the store: you have a choice in carts: of course you have the traditional carry basket and standard rolling cart, but you have a THIRD choice: comething like a large carry basked, but on wheels with a handle to pull it. And there's a fourth design that is two metal baskets stacked over each other on four wheels. Oh, and the motorized things for people who need them.

My last comments on the plant: the beer case isn't well located, and again this is just poor design, and the express lanes are in the middle of the other lanes, making them hard to find and hard to get through. There's a reason they are placed at then ends of the cashiers in virtually every other store in the country. I'm not impressed with the layout of the store overall. Traffic flow is hampered by the transitions between the traditional aisles in the center of the store and the produce section on one end and the....um, all the other stuff at the other. What stuff? The bakery, the wine department, the deli, the cheese shop, the coffee shop, the a la carte counters, and the Sushi Maki concession. That's right, they don't simply serve sushi, they have Sushi Maki doing it.

GLUTEN FREE:

As expected, the store has a wide variety of GF foods spread throughout the store. But lack of clear labeling makes them difficult to find unless you already know what you want. Wild Oats has a GF tag that is very obvious, and they simply tag the shelf next to the product's SKU label. Another chain goes a step further, using color code in addition to the big "GF".

They have all the pastas you'd expect, and the best selection of GF flours and baking mixes I have ever seen. Mixes for cookies, cakes of all flavors, breads and muffins - there are a lot of choices from a lot of manufacturers.

They have a good selection of GF pizzas, but they only carry one brand of frozen crust, and it's not the best one by a long shot. Guess I'm still trekking to Wild Oats in Pinecrest for that. Similarly, there wasn't a lot of selection of frozen bagels.

They do have a freezer case of their own GF product line, and the cakes, scones, cookies and pies are pretty good; the breads, on the other hand, are very dense and crumbly, and not like anything that I call bread. But if you like pie, you're in business.

They had some GF meals from Glutino that I haven't seen before, and they are quite good. With the GF selections from Amy's, the Tandoor Chef, and the Ethnic Kitchen, I now have a tasty selection to pop in my microwave when I get home from a long day at work.

They also had some GF corn dogs; I LOVE corn dogs, and the ones at the regular markets add wheat flour to the batter. I can't wait to pop these in the oven.

Over in the Baker section, they have a shelf labeled "WHEAT ALTERNATIVES." They had a shelf of breads from Sami's Bakery, but beware!! Two of the choices actually are wheat breads. They shouldn't be in that section at all, and I've mentioned it to someone stocking the shelf last week, but no change has been made. Hopefully, other people with food allergies know enough to read the labels, but if they don't realize that Sami's isn't exclusively a GF vendor, there could be serious consequences.

So they had a shelf of "wheat alternative" breads that only actually had ONE type of wheat-free bread, a shelf of croutons from Sami's, and a shelf of millet snack chips from Sami's and a shelf of millet lavash from Sami's, they didn't have any hot dog or hamburger buns from Sami's. They also didn't have any of the similar products from the Deland Bakery. The Deland products are actually a little better than Sami's, but just barely. Deland makes a killer GF bagel, and this Whole Foods isn't carrying any Deland products. They really should.

Another bewildering lack: they aren't stocking Redbridge Beer. This is a gluten-free beer from Anheuser-Busch, making it the first mass-produced GF beer in general distribution. They were carrying New Grist, another GF beer, but they've priced it higher than I've seen it at other stores, and frankly, Redbridge is a better beer. The Publix on Monza carries Redbridge, so it's not a disaster for me, but it's an odd thing to skip.

The other odd thing is the location of the beer case: usually, it's adjacent to the wine section. Beer and Wine, what could be more natural? Instead, it's tucked several aisles away from Wines, as if the Wine department doesn't want to be sullied by the presence of beer. In fact, the beer section isn't near ANY of the other refrigerated cases. If you use logic to find stuff, you will be as stumped as I was. It took me fifteen minutes to find it. It's inexplicably in the coffee and tea aisle, which has its own refrigerator case for iced teas.

And do you know what's REALLY odd about that? Across the store, and adjacent to the Wine Department, they have an entire COFFEE SHOP. They not only MAKE coffee by the cup for you, they actually ROAST beans there. They have bins of fresh-roasted coffee, and bags of whole-bean and ground gourmet coffee ready to go, as well as some gourmet teas.

And it's half the store away from an aisle of coffee and tea products! It's about the most stupid thing I've ever seen, after hiding the beer in the same bizarre location.

To be fair, the fact that they roast beans fresh in the store balances the idiocy of putting coffee beans and teas in two completely different places. I like fresh coffee, I grind my own beans for every pot, and now I can get the beans fresh out of the roaster. But they'll need to stock Redbridge if they want me to quit grumbling about the beer section.

Overall, my experience at Whole Foods was a positive one. The store has been crowded both times I've been in, but the staff seems to be maintaining its cool, and they've been keeping shelves stocked and lines moving smoothly. There were lots of tasting stations, and they caused the same traffic jams they do in every store, but no worse. The store is clean, the staff is friendly and helpful, and once you know where the parking is, getting in and out is no worse than any other store. I am mildly disappointed in the GF selection, but only because it leaves me still having to visit other stores to complete my shopping. (I've only been to one store EVER that had it all: Ada's, over in Fort Meyers.)

One last note: I did want to put in a request for my "missing" products at the suggestion board by the cashiers: I've done this at the Aventure store with good results. This store has the board up, but no suggestion slips, pencils, or a box to slide them into.

Grade: B+

**************************************************************
I emailed the store manager, and the problems with the WHEAT ALTERNATIVE shelf have finally been addressed. He also added products from the Deland Bakery to those selections.

No luck yet on bagels, pizza crusts, or RedBridge beer. Sigh.

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