news Toronto Employee Gone Sour Writes Whole Foods a Letter

It begins with an inappropriately grandiose quotation and ends with well-wishes for co-workers, but the heft of a ranty resignation letter from a (former) Whole Foods employee is made up of gripes about the grocery chain and its practices.

The anonymous writer, who emailed the letter to the entire company last Friday, reels off a list of complaints and identifies which of the grocery chain’s “core values” the particular alleged misdeed violates. Some complaints, especially about practices the writer says violate Whole Foods’ green mandate, sound like legitimate concerns, while others (putting down the quality of the store’s prepared food; whining about being reprimanded for being late) weaken the letter writer’s case. But the parts of the letter that personally address individual co-workers by name, calling one a “sociopath” and another a “chauvinist,” really cast shadows on the former employee’s motives. Whether or not his or her beefs with these co-workers are well-deserved, calling these people names in a public letter to all their peers is pretty lame, if you ask us.

The majority of the letter is quoted in this post on Gawker, but they removed people’s names, thankfully, as well as some “boring passages” before posting it. Still, bearing that in mind, and also that the letter is comprised of one person’s unproven allegations (Whole Foods hasn’t responded publicly), anyone who’s dreamed of quitting a crappy job and airing grievances on their way out will probably get a cathartic thrill from reading it.