My daughter woks for a Whole Foods subsidiary called Greenlife.  She was one of those affected. She was told she will be laid off but can stay if she takes a $3/hour pay cut.

I have compiled  several different interviews done by the news media over the years

"Here is an excerpt from the CEO and Co-Founder John Mackey:  Earlier this year the company announced that it will launch a new lower-priced chain called 365. It’s a way to jump ahead on price reductions while the flagship brand moves to take out costs systematically. “We realized that if we started a new kind of store, we could lower our prices immediately,” The thinking behind the new brand—leaning toward price and quality over service—will be built with cheaper material, operated on smaller footprints, and have an assortment of lower-priced goods. “365 is an evolutionary strategy,”. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to charge less when you have reduced your own expenses." "No doubt the hourly wage will be lower in the new store format."

"One of their core-values concerning team-members; We recognize there is a community of interest among all of our stakeholders. There are no entitlements; we share together in our collective fate. To that end we have a salary cap that limits the compensation (wages plus profit incentive bonuses) of any team member to nineteen times the average total compensation of all full-time team members in the company. " Not sure what 19 x average means!

"One of the most important things we do is we’ve organized our stores and our workforce into teams.  People need to have that sense of that community, and we need to feel that we’re part of a group, that we’re an essential part of it, that we’re contributing to that group, and that our work… that people depend on us, that our work makes a difference--not only to the larger community but it makes a difference to the people that we’re working with, that if we’re not there, then the team suffers.  " How about the laid off workers they will suffer! This might draw the union in!

" We set an official internal goal in 2000 to be a $10 billion company by the end of the decade. We’re growing at about a 15 to 20 percent clip, and we’ll be close to $4 billion this year, so if we continue to do that, and you look ahead 20 years, we’ll be $30 billion probably."

Personally I think that this last paragraph may be one of the reasons they had to make these job cuts.

Labor is the most accessible controllable in retail.  But then there is Henry's Law: "Sales Volume will always decrease to the level where the help can handle it."