Back 15 years or so ago, I went to whole foods and purchased outrageously expensive tomatoes and other products because they not only were in theory grown witho

Back 15 years or so ago, I went to whole foods and purchased outrageously expensive tomatoes and other products because they not only were in theory grown without a bunch of potentially harmful chemicals but they _TASTE_ better. Buying tomato's, even in season, at the local grocery store usually results in tasteless, pulpy (or rocky) products. Same for pretty much every other fruit/vegetable. They also carried "strange" things like rice milk, and premium cheeses, and a bunch of other things frequently not found in the normal supermarket chains. So the prices were insane (resulting in stories about $35 bags of cherries and other nonsense) but the product quality generally matched. Fast forward a few years, and as whole foods grew they stopped being able to get the small batch products picked at peak ripeness or produced at artisan quantities. Instead they contracted out to giant organic agribusiness and the quality fell, while at the same time the traditional supermarket started carrying some of these premium products. Today, probably 90% of the smaller whole foods products are available in similar forms at the local supermarket. Sure I guess whole food still has artisan quantity products, but finding them can be difficult in their supermarket sized stores. So, whole foods is really just a victim of their own success. In my case, to many tasteless vegetables later, I simply stopped making the effort to drive to their stores.