City Paper was on the scene to interview the protesters.

Single Payer Action promised yesterday to picket Whole Foods stores in New York, Austin, and D.C., and today, picketing they are: Neatly, sweetly, and sweatily, making the lunch scene at 1440 P St. NW the most bucolic  in the history of organic-food-store protests.

Holding up a piece of orange poster board three times as wide as she is that reads "Boycott Whole Foods," Carol Kramer is just waiting for Whole Foods CEO John Mackey to take it all back so that she can resume being a Whole Foods customer.

When asked if she misses the salad bar, Kramer makes a delighted face and then winces.

"I miss being in there," she says, nodding towards the door.

But single payer, or at least a public option, is more important to her than the salad bar, which she will not visit despite having driven all the way from Fredericksburg, Va.

Many of the picketers are former Whole Foods customers. And for a few of them, boycotting Mackey's stores has been a long time coming.

Adrienne Pine, a professor of anthropology at American University, admits that she's known about Mackey's "right-wing libertarianism" for a while now, but that his Wall Street Journal op-ed was "the straw that broke the camel's back," and the reason she switched from Whole Foods to co-ops and farmers' markets.

Pine came to the P St. location today to tell people that Whole Foods employees work under "very bad conditions" and that Mackey is a "notorious union buster" and a "key player in fighting the Employee Free Choice Act."

When pressed to name other bad conditions, Pine gives the same answer as United Food and Commercial Workers Executive Assistant to the President Mark Federici, whose crew is also handing out fliers: Mackey is bad for workers everywhere because he's anti-union and anti-health care.

Single Payer Action's Sam Husseini doesn't say much about unions, but he loves the idea of the U.S. modeling itself after and improving upon Canada's medical system.

"There are some problems [with Canada's system]," Husseini says, but "we're more technologically advanced than Canada and we can do it better."

Husseini can't name any improvements off the top of his head, and declines to comment on how an effective store boycott might affect low-level Whole Foods employees. Instead he refers Washington City Paper to Russell Mokhiber, the founder of Single Payer Action and the author of a viral essay which ends with this call for action: "Don't spend another penny at Whole Foods until John Mackey and his right wing friends are defeated. And single payer is enacted."

Mokhiber, dressed in all black, says that his efforts, among those of other Whole Foods protesters, have inspired "rightwingers" to start shopping at Whole Foods. He's fine with that.

"The CEO can say what he wants," Mokhiber says.

Protesters can boycott, and  "we'll let the organic tortilla chips fall where they may," he adds with a grin, after which he admits that he just came up with that phrase this morning.

But it seems the guilt just isn't strong enough today. One young man, upon reading Russell's tract, exclaims, "Fuck yeah! Keep on with the health care stuff," and then makes a bee-line for the salad bar.

Update: We now have a video of interviews with the protesters.

Photo by Andrew Beaujon.

Today: Lefties will picket the Whole Foods at P Street. Tomorrow: Righties will respond by handing out Whole Food CEO John Mackey's Wall Street Journal editorial. In the near future: At least one person plans to boycott Wal-Mart to punish the mega retailer for pulling its ads from Glenn Beck's show.

To all of the above, a newsflash: Boycotting is a) wrong and b) doesn't work.

Let's start with the stock prices: Mackey's value has only gone up since the boycott threats. Why? Because people love his store so much that their response has been, "I disagree with what he wrote, but I don't want to shop anywhere else." To investors, this makes Whole Foods appear bullet proof. After all, it may have the most liberal clientele of any national chain in the country, and its owner is a card-carrying libertarian. Not enough people are willing to shop at an inferior grocery store just because they disagree with Mackey's politics–especially since Whole Foods is a model of corporate responsibility in every sense of the word.

Second, even if it were possible to stage a revenue-affecting protest at the P Street Whole Foods (and it's not in this day and age–my generation doesn't protest, we twitter), the people to feel the pinch first would be store employees. The same employees that Whole Foods critics have frequently touted as needing union representation (and who would, in all likelihood, probably lose money by unionizing). Assuming single payer fanatics could arrange an effective boycott, is a cashier's job worth their cause?

And Wal-Mart protesters, please, stop. If you keep this up you'll just be proving that you're as dumb as everyone says you are. (And you and I both know you're not dumb, you're actually really good at prioritizing your financial needs.)

Speaking of government-run programs: Cash for Clunkers ends Monday after putting almost half a million new cars on the road at a cost of $3 billion and hemorrhaging participating dealers due to untimely reimbursements. If my math is right, that comes out to around $6,564 in tax dollars per car. The cap was supposed to be $4,000. So what does that mean? It means that approximately $2,500 per car went to other stuff. Call it a transaction fee or call it bumblefucking, it still means one thing: The only entity that can get away with promising to spend one amount of money and then actually spending 55% more than promised is the U.S. Government.

Don't get scammed, y'all!

Not directly, though. The following morning, Craney says, as many as a dozen GOP loyalists will be at the very same P Street Whole Foods, weather permitting, distributing literature defending Mackey's point of view, including copies of the Wall Street Journal op-ed that touched off this whole debate.

"We're trying to show the other side of the health care debate in D.C.," he says, "and how it affects District residents."

LL raised the possibility, given the well-recognized progressive bent of Whole Foods soppers, that Craney et al. might find themselves subject to a barrage of $3 organic tomatoes.

"We'll bring rain coats for the rain," he says, "but not for the tomatoes."

Craney notes that he's been subject to some Whole Foods-related abuse before. He says he regularly drives his Jeep Grand Cherokee, bearing John McCain and Rudy Giuliani bumper stickers, to the Tenleytown location. "I can't tell you how many times I get stuff put on my car that says something...snide." His favorite: "Something about about how either Rudy Giuliani or John McCain would not like how I parked my SUV."

They'll be there from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturday.