Whole Foods didn’t so much come to Milwaukee. It landed. It might as well have arrived from another planet. As a huge grocery store with more than 140 places to sit – couches included – and two flat screen TVs, it’s a place where you can order a draft beer or glass of wine and just linger. There’s also an espresso bar, gelato station, pizza place, and a kitchen where you can order a meal for any time of day. Or you can just buy groceries.
Whole Foods is a microcosm of the changing American city. It took decades to figure out that a few couches and coffee are a good idea in a bookstore. Today a building may mix offices, condos, stores, spas and even a hotel. Just a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable to put a grocery store in a medical complex, as Whole Foods has done here. Urban density is ending the segregation of work, shopping and living spaces, creating a proximity that makes cities more exciting and more humane.
For decades, grocery stores had gotten ever bigger, morphing into warehouses designed for only one purpose. There was nothing to do or think about other than filling a cart. Come, shop and get out.
Whole Foods is like a village with its own geography. It’s a place to wander, linger and observe, or do nothing at all. Instead of treating customers like stock boys at a warehouse, Whole Foods assumes they are complex, fickle creatures. You can fill your cart and sit down to make a phone call, or watch the Packers game. There’s no need to hurry. You are having an experience.
There are other local stores that have started offering such comfort. Outpost on Capitol Drive has its amenities, G. Groppi Food Market in Bay View is a charming delight, and many coffee shops have refined convivial spaces. But there is no 55,000-square-foot store in Milwaukee that cuts itself down to size and makes more nuanced interior spaces than Whole Foods. No local store is so dynamically embedded in a neighborhood or so likely to raise the value of surrounding real estate.
Instead of being attached to a huge parking lot, Whole Foods is connected to a medical complex on a defining corner (Prospect and North) in a dense urban neighborhood. Twenty-five percent of its patrons come in through the store’s pedestrian entrance – probably more walk-in traffic than any grocery in town. This will only grow over time. Whole Foods is poised to become the fulcrum for the most vibrant urban space in Milwaukee.
Each entrance is a different store. From North Avenue is what might be called the “no cooking store,” a vast array of ready-made food, starting with tacos and moving on to sushi, desserts, salads, soups, hot plates, and the deli and pizza station. To the right is cheese and wine. Just off North is a more intimate entrance with an espresso and tea bar, lounge area and bakery.
There are two entrances from Farwell. One passes through the medical building to the produce section right next to the customer service station. About 75 percent of shoppers arrive at the main entrance on an escalator that rises from the underground parking. They encounter tasteful signage explaining the “core values” of Whole Foods, then see a small waterfall flowing into an enormous bouquet of flowers. It’s soothing, yes, but almost like a shrine, a parody of new-age tranquility. Still, Whole Foods just might lower your blood pressure.
At every turn, little things cut the store down into comfortable neighborhoods and distinguish one department from another. Floors change colors in concert with the décor. Even the music varies, and some areas have no music whatsoever. Custom-made soffits that conform to the exact dimensions of the counters below define the various freestanding stations. Connecting top to bottom creates volumes that define a space.
Generally, the distinctions between different parts of the store are subliminal, just enough to register. When you pass from produce to fish, it feels like entering a new alcove, but it’s mostly in your head.
The Whole Foods experience is very tactile. There is even a large sign describing the store’s different finishings. Surfaces have uncommon textures and a richness that provides variety and relief from the potential monotony of an interior that stretches for a city block. I found myself wanting to touch everything.
Lighting adds interest and dimension, much like artists do when they direct our eyes to move around a composition. One scene leads to another. The meat and fish are bathed in fiber optic light that reveals texture, like an old master painting. The more picturesque open areas are highlighted by a perfectly balanced light that heightens the store’s warm palette of colors. The style is subtler, with less lighting contrasts than at Metro Market, (above left) the flagship store of Pick ’n’ Save in Juneau Village. Whole Foods (above right) looks as though it has been styled for a spread in Martha Stewart Living magazine. It is somewhat idealized and poised, yet not too fussy.
Though this Metro Market aisle is twice as bright as the one at Whole Foods, the hazy glare and the undifferentiated shelving at Metro Market creates a blurry cloud of product. It feels like a maze. Metro Market is supposed to be a classy, upscale place, yet this aisle feels like a low-income housing project. Brutal efficiency trumps any other human desire.
No aisle in Whole Foods terminates into more of the same. The end of an aisle is darker than at Metro Market, but sprinkled with highlights that can vary. Subtle contrasts add detail, so products do not congeal into indistinguishable sameness. Boeing is consulting Cirque du Soleil to achieve the same kind of effect in their airplanes.
And yes, the lighting at Whole Foods makes people look good, too.
There are also some things you’ll never find in Whole Foods. Vendors do not pay for shelf space, so there are no glossy signs hyping their products. In fact, there are no such signs anywhere because they’re all printed on mat surfaces. Nothing competes with the food in Whole Foods.
It’s an enormous conceptual shift to imagine a grocery store as a genial place. In the middle of the grocery side of Whole Foods is a counter serving grilled sandwiches and beer. It’s an intimate little island that seems to be there for no apparent reason. I was surprised how easy it was to sit and enjoy a sandwich in the middle of people shopping for groceries.
Even if you never stop to eat or to watch TV, these are civilizing amenities. As is the lounge area where couples sip coffee and read newspapers. All that relaxation slows down the metabolism of the place. People bring laptops and sit at the long counters that ring the store and face the street. It’s easy to find the bathrooms. There is free WiFi throughout the store.
Because customers stay longer, Whole Foods makes more money. It’s smart. But it’s also far more hospitable. Tired? They offer you a seat. Thirsty? No problem. You have choices. You can be efficient or not.
A mixed-use building like Whole Foods is the logical extension of a mixed-use city, which embodies our mixed-use nature. Cities become less sterile and more humane when everything is more integrated and intimate, when the experience is textured and layered.
Whole Foods exemplifies how we can make cities that are convenient, hospitable and easy to navigate on foot. It’s good business and public policy to make our built world less monotonous and more welcoming. Give people a place to be and they won’t want to leave.
