About a decade ago, a designer we’ll call Joanne had a cart filled with Thanksgiving dinner for ten as she idly considered the beauty aisle of the Tribeca Whole Foods. It was there that she noticed a $30 pot of Dr. Hauschka eye cream and made an impulsive calculation. She was about to drop a small fortune on organic potatoes and a heritage turkey — pocketing the eye cream seemed somehow … fair. While waiting to check out, a security guard approached, escorted her out of line, and led her to what she remembers as a small, windowless office near the baked-goods section. Joanne was asked to empty her pockets and complied, forfeiting the Dr. Hauschka. This is how she learned about Whole Foods Jail. (Actual jail, she would learn after being escorted out of the store by police, was the 1st Precinct on Ericsson Place. She got 20 hours of community service.)

It sometimes feels like everyone I know steals from Whole Foods. For a certain subset of the city’s wealthy-ish, a little shoplifting on your grocery run has become about as mundane as jaywalking. When asked, no one could quite explain why they do it. Some gestured at something like corporate protest; others blamed an unaffordable city. Entitlement, one thief admitted. I’d call it a form of collective nihilism. Everyone has their strategy: “Look like you have money and talk on the phone,” says a casting director of her technique. A graphic designer at a high-end fitness brand labels everything from the hotbar as “soup.”

As I found myself inadvertently conducting an anthropological survey of Hu chocolate theft among creative-director types, I became intrigued by stories of Whole Foods Jail — the mythical storage closets, Amazon return desks, and personnel-only areas of the store that are largely unseen by the law-abiding (or the stealthier thieves). Like Old City Hall Station or Katie Holmes’s rumored private entrance to the Whole Foods at the Chelsea Mercantile, there is a secret topography at play here. I wanted to learn everything there is to know about Whole Foods Jail.

A good place to start, I thought, would be talking to people who work as security guards at Whole Foods. An oddly difficult task. In Gowanus, I was passed around like a weird uncle until a general manager on a vape break outside told me to contact their press team. At the Williamsburg location, I tried the pizza counter first, which sent me to a stockist, which very nearly got me into the employees-only section in the basement, but I soon found myself back at customer service. Again I was told to contact the press team. (I did. They declined to comment, too.) On the Upper East Side, it was the same thing. Deflated, I made a last push at my least favorite Whole Foods: the Fort Greene location — a hellacious, windowless space in the basement of a luxury rental building. A security guard parked by the exit upstairs told me to find Mike, “a big guy in a T-shirt.” When I found a man who matched this description, he denied being Mike. I briefly considered dropping a bag of yogurt-bathed pretzels into my bag, a sort of gonzo attempt to learn about Whole Foods Jail by going there, but thought better of it. I took the escalator up and went home.

My gumshoe days behind me, I turned to the internet. Whole Foods doesn’t publish its shoplifting policies publicly (last year’s annual report didn’t even mention theft), but I’ve been able to piece some of it together. Like many retailers, Whole Foods instructs employees not to physically intervene if they see someone stealing. (On Reddit, employees refer to this as the “no-heroes policy.”) And despite long-standing rumors to the contrary, Whole Foods (and Jeff Bezos) apparently isn’t building a dossier on your petty theft, waiting for you to hit a certain threshold before swooping in to ruin your life. And vaguely nonconsensual biometric-data collection, at least for now, seems to be a Wegmans thing. (Only Whole Foods customers who opt in to the Amazon One program have their handprints surveilled.) But you are, apparently, being monitored by a swarm of security officers, some of whom wander the aisles in plain clothes, and Whole Foods’ surveillance tech is improving. And when security officers catch you, they will take you to Whole Foods Jail. Sometimes with glee.

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