Columbia Heights News - Washington, DC - Whole Foods Market

Help Bring Whole Foods Market To Columbia Heights!

Would you like Whole Foods Market to come to Columbia Heights? You can join our campaign to bring Whole Foods Market to the DC USA retail complex! The best way for you to voice your support for Whole Foods is to email Karen Riley at karen.riley@wholefoods.com. Karen Riley is the real estate coordinator for Whole Foods Market. She can demonstrate the level of our support directly to the Whole Foods team working on the negotiations. Please be as descriptive as you can in your emails. Please also cc or bcc your emails to Ms. Riley to us at info@columbiaheightsnews.org. We need to keep a running tally of how many messages have been sent to Whole Foods Market so we can gage how much more work we need to do. The more people who can email Whole Foods Market the more powerful our collective voices will be! It looks like we are facing an uphill battle but as a community we can make a difference! Please spread the word!

Saturday, May 17, 2008

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Whole Foods Market - Why Are We Doing This?

Written by Columbia Heights News

Saturday, 21 January 2006

The vast majority of those who have emailed us have expressed strong support for Whole Foods Market coming to the DC USA retail complex in Columbia Heights. But our public endorsement of Whole Foods Market has caused some of you to question our motivation. We would like to take a moment to explain where we are coming from and why we are doing this.

My wife and I shop at Whole Foods Market and would love to see one in Columbia Heights. That and the fact that we are homeowners in Columbia Heights are the only personal stake we have with Whole Foods Market coming to the DC USA. But that sentiment alone was not what drove us to make this issue such a focal point on our website for the past few days. At the launch of Columbia Heights News, we actually believed that it was a done deal, that Whole Foods Market was indeed coming to DC USA.

But two weeks ago someone on the Columbia Heights listserv indicated that Whole Foods Market had backed out and would not be coming to our neighborhood. We all of a sudden received a flurry of emails from disappointed and concerned residents asking us if this was indeed true. We had no answers but we decided to take the initiative to find out. We began making phone calls to the DC USA developers and Whole Foods Market representatives. How do have such connections? To tell you the truth, we don't. The contact information for the involved parties are not difficult to obtain. There's a large sign outside the DC USA site with all the DC USA partners and their phone numbers. You can just as easily find all the appropriate contact information on the internet.

When we first reported our findings and provided some indication that the deal between DC USA and Whole Foods was still alive, more people began emailing us expressing their support. But the very next day, everything seemed to slam to a halt when Marc Katz of H & R Retail, the leasing agent representing Whole Foods Market, told us that the deal was off and that there was nothing that we as a community could do. My wife and I were indeed disappointed and if it were just us, we would have left it at that. But now we felt we had hundreds of people depending on us.

We set out to see if we could talk directly to the Whole Foods Market team that was directly involved with the dealings with DC USA. With some luck we were able to reach Karen Riley, the real estate coordinator for Whole Foods Market. Ms. Riley admitted that there were some obstacles in the way but by no means was the negotiations over. She was kind enough to provide us a lot of information and a glimmer of hope. We felt it was our responsibility to inform the community and impress upon you just how important it is to write Karen Riley and express your support if would like to see Whole Foods Market to Columbia Heights.

We know that there is a huge segment of the population in Columbia Heights and surrounding neighborhoods that we are not reaching with this website. Obviously we cannot speak for them. But over 90% of those who have emailed us directly expressed your support for bringing Whole Foods Market to Columbia Heights. That gave us enough incentive to build a platform for you to speak up and direct your support to the appropriate people.

As of this writing, we know that at least seventy-six individuals have emailed Ms. Riley to express your support. If you have not copied us on your email nor sent us a message indicating that you have written Ms. Riley, we cannot include you in our count. If you have written Ms. Riley ( ) and have not informed us, please do so by sending us a quick email at .

We are very impressed with what some of you have written to Ms. Riley. Many of you have made a great case for bringing Whole Foods to Columbia Heights and provided new angles that we never thought of. We thank you very much for your efforts.

We still have a lot of work to do. There has been a significant drop off of people writing to Ms. Riley. Every voice counts. Please do all you can to try to get the word out and get people who support Whole Foods Market to write Karen Riley. And again, for those who have written to Ms. Riley, please send us a quick email telling us that you did if you haven't already done so.

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