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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. WF charges 2-3x as much as a "regular" grocery store and prides itself on "ethics" and "sustainability". Why are we even having this discussion? Why aren't those employees fairly compensated and protected?

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Where do these “2-3x as much” figures come from? Their prices are not much different from Vons in my experience, they just sell a lot of premium items they you won’t find in your local vons - but for stuff you find in a regular supermarket - they charge around the same. And their 365 products sometimes are even cheaper than non organic alternatives

I also find many of the 365 products are made differently in some subtle ways vs. other store brands or big-label items. One example I came across recently was ginger ale; the 365 version has less carbonation and is sweetened with cane sugar (vs corn syrup), so it had a substantially different taste than the name brand (Seagram's) I picked up when the 365 brand wasn't available.

Not person you're responding to, but I think it's fair to say that they sell pricier products - in some cases, yes, even 2-3x, than where some get their groceries. My parents do a lot of their shopping at dollar stores and they're just far less expensive.

But of course you're comparing here different products of the same "type," a box of cereal versus an entirely different box of cereal by an entirely different manufacturer, so I think they were misleading without that context. Also, pricier products doesn't necessarily mean bigger margins.

>Why aren't those employees fairly compensated

They are, otherwise they wouldn't have agreed to work there. Not one person who works for Whole Foods is employed by force.

We agree to many unfair things day to day. It's not clear to me that accepting a contract means that the contract describes a fair arrangement. Fairness is also highly subjective; the employer, for instance, likely has a different opinion as to what is or isn't fair compared to the mass of employees. It's quite possible that even you and I have different ideas of what is and isn't fair. This is precisely why philosophers across the political spectrum have criticized the structuring of society on the basis of the abstract idea of 'fairness'.

They are agreeing to work there because the alternative would be the streets/moving back with parents/enlisting in the army.

They are agreeing to work an essential front line job most likely without health insurance, which means that they will have to purchase health insurance off of the state or federal exchange which may or may not be a garbage high deductible plan with a $2-5k deductible. What will most likely happen is that the same workers if not offered insurance from their employers will just forgot insurance and hope/pray that they don’t get sick. In which case for a mild Covid case (80%mild in the younger adult workers that typically occupy these jobs) then they come to work sick and infect the whole place workers and customers both.

I remember in Seattle checking out at a Trader Joe’s in January in Seattle and the checker looking like absolute death and obviously had a cough but was still working, understandably some people have rent to pay but to suggest this isn’t happening everywhere that doesn’t at least offer decent insurance/hmo coverage would be nuts.

The solution is at the very least to force decent health insurance for all retail workers, or emergency subsidies for all grocery workers health insurance until Covid is over.

The only people who need to consider the fairness of a transaction are the parties involved. With their consent to the contract, and the determination that no force was used, we can objectively consider the transaction to be fair. The inherently subjective nature you describe of extending judgement to the masses will never be as true a reflection of fairness as is the parties' own judgement.

>The only people who need to consider the fairness of a transaction are the parties involved

I disagree, and my disagreement is shared by contract and employment law in many places which places restrictions on what can be arranged through a contract. I'm skeptical that the only inputs that "need" considering is the mutual 'consent' of both parties.

"Why aren't those employees fairly compensated and protected?"

I think we all know why.

There's no such thing as ethical consumerism. That image of "ethics" and "sustainability" is just branding to appeal to woke liberals who have the disposable income to buy their groceries at Whole Foods.

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