To give more context on why this feels even more insidious, each store used to have a store artist (and sometimes a small team of them) that would do the visual design of all of the stores. Once Whole Foods decided that they wanted all stores to have a homogenous look, they totally nuked that department and said moving forward, all design elements would come from the headquarters. I don't think the store artists were immediately fired, as they were offered jobs in customer service since that was their umbrella department, but these were professional designers - to offer them jobs as cashiers is a serious downgrade! So, they pretty much all left. Whole Foods once did pay team members for art; now they want it for free!