This just makes me cringe. As a former waitress, I know it’s true. As a sometime after church luncher, it makes me overtip wildly.
The dating advice I gave my niece holds in this situation: if the guy you’re with is nice to you and isn’t nice to the waitress … he’s not a nice guy.
It’s smugness. You don’t need to do anything special to be smug; all you need is
a) to be provincial, parochial, insular, or stick-to-your-own-kind-ish, AND
b) have an idea that your own personal outhouse needs no quicklime.
Beautiful.
Ooh! So, I was just at the Whole Foods doing some grocery shopping, and after my husband and I chatted with the checker a bit, we were taking our groceries out to the truck. The checker came running after us into the parking lot, waving the cucumber that we forgot to bag. Everyone had a good laugh, including the people getting out of the car next to where we were parked.
Then we gave the secret holier-than-thou handshake and went about our separate ways.
I haven’t run into many rude or even mean people in natural food stores, any more so than in a regular grocery store–except for an older woman who I kept bumping into at a natural foods coop once. Unfortunately, I kept running into her, a couple of times literally bumping against her or her cart. Which leads me to one of my theories why there may be more rude or grumpy folks in natural food stores: the stores themselves are sometimes too crowded or (more likely) the aisles are too narrow. The co-ops are sometimes the worst; stuff stacked up, co-op members trying to stock the shelves, every where you turn something is blocking the way. Then you go to turn around and this mean lady is on your butt. 
My other theory is that they are paying -way- too much for their food, which Whole Paycheck is known for…that’s enough to make me grumpy, although I’ve never been rude, tmk. I’ve never seen grumpy folks in Trader Joe’s, although that’s another one with too narrow aisles, too much stuff all over the place.
Those are my theories, at least.
I don’t have much occasion to frequent those types of stores. I usually go for a particular product (Yo! Dr. Bronner!) but tend to browse. As a natural born skeptic, the part of those stores I find most disagreeable is all of the woo-woo crap. God forbid, you are waiting to be helped and are stuck waiting for the patchouli brined flake to finish discussing her misaligned Chakras or even worse, carrying on about various other woo-woo favorites like anti-vax, Corporate Conspiracies, aliens or the coolest new guru.
Can’t a gal get a bottle of Dr. Bronners with out the rest of the crap? And who the hell thinks a carrot can in any way, replace a hot dog? I’m always dismayed at the pseudo-food stuff, fake burgers, fake bacon, etc. Why not get a cue from cultures that are vegetarian?? Want good veggies? Get a great Indian cookbook, grab some spices and go to town! Learn to eat veggies for veggies sake.
Thanks for making my day!!
(and yes, I’m gonna steal that line. ) 
Man - why all the hate for vegetarians in this thread? I’ve been a vegetarian for 13 years, and I have to say I get FAR more shit – vast, unexplored planets worth of shit – for not eating meat than I have ever seen a vegetarian give a meat-eater. I eat what I want to eat for my own reasons, others (including my husband and every other member of my family and all of my friends with a single exception) choose differently, which is fine.
Look, it’s like this. Maybe you are one of the good ones. You do your best to be flexible with friends’ selections of restaurants, you let invited event holders know in advance, and you never, ever, condescend to others. Just maybe. Unfortunately, most of your peers are the opposite. They are a royal pain in the ass, and are smug about it. Hence the hate.
I realize that happens, I’m just saying that, as someone who has been a vegetarian for 13 years, and therefore probably a bit more on the lookout for other vegetarians, I know one other person who doesn’t eat meat. I know of perhaps two more people who are tangentially in my social circle and are rumored vegetarians, and one of my brother’s friends has been veg for about a month. And yet in the media, in my previously workplace, with extended family - whenever someone finds out I’m a vegetarian I get shit about it, they make fun of me, they ask if I’d eat a cow if its hooves were planted in the ground. In school they threw chicken wings at me and tried to hide meat in my food. It just seems, from personal observation, to be like US Christians crying “oppression!” I mean, sure, it happens, but it seems to work the other way a lot more from my perspective.
My theory - fewer Southerners.
My secondary theory - it’s more complicated to shop a the natural foods stores. It’s more complicated to bag bulk-bin stuff than grab a few boxes or cans or jars. More people want to read the labels to make sure it contains or does not contain some ingredient of interest. In general, more options and more unfamiliar options. We’ve all known what Kraft Mac & Cheese is since childhood, but this new stuff, what is it? Produce is typically the most complicated part of shopping, and these folks buy even more produce than usual. This more complex activity, which no one really budgets time for, creates more opportunities for interaction and rudeness.
Tertiary theory - people are defensive. They are making visible choices, they know they are surrounded by people who are judgmental about food (maybe even more judgmental than they are themselves!), and their defensiveness makes them touchy. Unless you are buying only bulk-bin fair-trade organic whole grains in reusable containers that you bring yourself, someone in that store probably has something critical to say about your choices.
I wouldn’t say most. But IMO, vegetarians are in the same bin as religious people - they all catch some flak for the egregious asshole-ness of their minority of fanatics. Unfair ? Sure. But that’s the way it is. By definition, we don’t notice the unremarkable.
Ooh. Good theories.
Well, I don’t know about the first one. We don’t have Southerners here.
Thanks for the laugh. I just imagined a guy at a ballpark about to bite into a carrot in a bun slathered with mustard and sauerkraut. Ewww!
I’ve only ever regularly shopped at one health food store, and, actually, I noticed that the customers and staff there were all particularly nice. It could have been just that store, of course.
However, people who eat a lot of health food (or eat exclusively health food) are, IME, slightly more likely to be crazy than people who don’t - they’re obsessive in other ways than just what foods they eat, or have issues with food in general, or are, as someone else said, anti-authority. It’s not being into health food that makes them that way - they’re into health food because they already were like that.
Naturally (heh), there are plenty of health food fans who aren’t crazy. There are also plenty of people who shop at health food stores who aren’t vegetarian, so I’m not sure why this thread has turned into a thread about vegetarians. There are tons of vegetarians who aren’t health food nuts!
I just remembered - there’s one health food shop not far from my house that friends have told me is a terrible place to shop, but that’s mainly because it’s really trendy, hugely expensive and full of people who are buying health food mainly because it’s trendy and expensive. the one time I went there, the people were all extremely Hoxton Trendy and the food was pretty shit. I’d forgotten it was actually supposed to be a heath food shop, because I just remember it as poncey - maybe the health food store in the OP is like that? The people there are rude not because they’re into health food, but because they’re into overpriced, overly trendy food?
See, I’m a vegetarian raising a child with her same-sex partner, and I would have felt pretty much like you did then. Maybe not Chuck E Cheese, though - I couldn’t stand it there myself!
Because a lot of vegetarians who grew up in non-vegetarian cultures haven’t given up meat because they hate meat, but because they don’t want to eat meat for a variety of ethical reasons. Bacon, burgers and so on are part of my culinary culture just as much as they are for meat-eaters. I’m not going to turn Indian just because I decide not to eat meat.
BTW, I don’t think a hotdog is a very good example for a meat product that can’t be replaced by a veggie sausage. Whenever I’ve eaten meat hotdogs it’s been a little difficult to tell the sausage from the bun.
One thing I’ve noticed about Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, both the ones here and the ones I used to go to out in the SF Bay area- the parking lots are always a nightmare. It’s always harder to find parking there than it is at the more mainstream grocery stores. I’m not sure if they have smaller parking lots, are just that much more popular, or what. But I can say that having a hard time finding parking certainly doesn’t help my mood when I’m going grocery shopping.
Bolding mine - I’ve noticed this too, in the TJs/Whole Foods of the world.
I think it’s not people being deliberately rude & entitled, but utterly clueless. Which you might not notice as much in the regular grocery stores with aisles that allow more than one regular-sized cart to get through at one time. But health-food stores, even the major chains, are impossible to move around in. You end up being in someone’s way simply by virtue of existing - and you can’t go anywhere, because everybody else is trying to get to the whole wheat pasta too (near the floor, so it’s of course harder just to excuse yourself, and stick your arm in and grab some).
I love shopping at TJs. I hate doing it when there’s more than 5 people in the store. You can’t get near anything.
I can see two possibilities here.
One, you’re more of a jerk about it than you realize and they’re just giving you crap about it.
Two, they’re the jerks.
The latter one is probably the case.
In addition to the above, if the typical customer at the health food store has had to drive (or bike or walk, god forbid) farther than they would’ve had they were going to their local grocery store, then they’re probably irritated over the traffic/high cost of gas/potholes/crazy Prius driver who just cut them off. And if they’ve driven a longer ways, they’re also feeling guilty (and thus defensive), because they suspect that the environmental benefit of their grocery choices (organic, hormone-free dairy, locally produced, vegan diet, minimal packaging, etc.) is already wiped out by their having driven extra miles to get there.
But perhaps Dalton Trumbo said it best, in his screenplay for Spartacus:
GRACCHUS [to Batiatus]: You and I have a tendency towards corpulence. Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?
I work in the convention business (I’m a banquet chef) and what you’ve described is clearly evident in my line of work. We, from the kitchen to the serving staff, dread hosting the environmentalist and similar-type groups because they are the ones who tend to feel that everything has to be “just so” and “perfect” and will constantly be running the staff’s collective ass off with “we need this” or “fix this for us” or “this isn’t precisely whatever” (not just with the food, but with every aspect of the convention experience). Meanwhile, the more traditional types of groups tend to be more along the lines of “Fooood! Nom nom nom nom… excellent!”
Then again, this could also be explained by the fact that the “do-gooder” groups tend to have a much larger percentage of women attending and involved in heading up the events, but I’d probably be called sexist for suggesting such a thing