I for one can forgive a genius for some stupidity, depending on whether i agree with his genius side of course.
When it comes to this guy, I can say, even after reading this piece, i like what he's done and his personal and business mission. Some of his philosophy and business practices I don't agree with, but it's his business to do as he likes, no one needs to shop at his stores. I like to shop there. I have friends who work there and love working there. I am not a hypocrite for shopping there. Whole Foods has done a lot of good for a lot of people as far as i can tell. The haters can keep on hating, they probably don't care for healthy food anyway.
When I became vegan as long ago as i did, i could never have even
dreamed there would be stores like this all around the country, let alone the products and in house (generic) brands of products they sell. Sometimes you spend a lot there, but i find that it's just because they have so much good stuff. Products they sell that bigger chains sell, in fact are usually cheaper at WF. Anyway let the man say his piece as clearly as he can, although i will say even this writer in the New Yorker seemed to have his bias.
here's a few choice bits from the very long piece:
John Mackey at a store in Austin, Texas. To “the people that really dislike us,” he says, “Whole Foods is a big corporation, so they think that we’ve crossed over to the dark side.” Photograph by Dan Winters.
FOOD FIGHTER
Does Whole Foods’ C.E.O. know what’s best for you?
by Nick Paumgarten
John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market, refers to the company as his child—not just his creation but the thing on earth whose difficulties or downfall it pains him most to contemplate. He also sees himself as a “daddy” to his fifty-four thousand employees, who are known as “team members,” but they may occasionally consider him to be more like a crazy uncle. To the extent that a child inherits or adopts a parent’s traits, Whole Foods is an embodiment of many of Mackey’s. A Whole Foods store, in some respects, is like Mackey’s mind turned inside out. Certainly, the evolution of the corporation has often traced his own as a man; it has been an incarnation of his dreams and quirks, his contradictions and trespasses, and whatever he happened to be reading and eating, or not eating...
The right-wing hippie is a rare bird, and it’s fair to say that most of Whole Foods’ shoppers have trouble conceiving of it. They tend to be of a different stripe, politically and philosophically, and they were either oblivious or dimly aware of Mackey’s views, until the moment, this summer, when Mackey published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal asserting that the government should not be in the business of providing health care. This was hardly a radical view, and yet in the gathering heat of the health-care debate the op-ed, virally distributed via the left-leaning blogs, raised a fury. In no time, liberals were organizing boycotts of Whole Foods. (Right-wingers staged retaliatory “buy-cotts.”) Mackey had thrown tinder on the long-smoldering suspicion, in some quarters, that he was a profiteer in do-gooder disguise, and that he, and therefore Whole Foods, was in some way insincere or even counterfeit. No one can say that he hasn’t brought it on himself...
“I have my own views, and they’re not necessarily the same as Whole Foods’,” Mackey told me. “People want me to suppress who I am. I guess that’s why so many politicians and C.E.O.s get to be sort of boring, because they end up suppressing any individuality to conform to some phony, inauthentic way of being. I’d rather be myself.”...
“He’s a ready-aim-fire guy, and he’s not real disciplined in how he speaks his mind,” Gary Hirshberg, the C.E.O. of Stonyfield, the organic milk and yogurt producer, told me. “He has a really hard time reconciling his public and private selves.” Mackey’s resilience has surprised even those who, like Hirshberg, hold him in high esteem. “John has that Clintonesque ability to hang in there,” Hirshberg said. “He is Whole Foods management’s greatest asset but also, at times, its greatest challenge.”...
To some, Whole Foods is Whole Paycheck, an overpriced luxury for yuppie gastronomes and fussy label-readers. Or it is Holy Foods, the commercial embodiment of environmental and nutritional pieties. To hard-core proponents of natural and organic food, and of food production that’s local, polycultural, and carbon-stingy, Whole Foods is a disappointment—a bundle of big-business compromises and half-steps, an example of something merely good that the perfect can reasonably be declared an enemy of. It’s a welter of paradoxes: a staunchly anti-union enterprise that embraces some progressive labor practices; a self-styled world-improver that must also deliver quarterly results to Wall Street; a big-box chain putting on small-town airs; an evangelist for healthy eating that sells sausages, ice cream, and beer...
Of course, Whole Foods has always held itself up as a paragon of virtue. It is an article of faith that it is, as Mackey often says, a mission-based business. It has seven “core values,” which are, broadly speaking, commitments to the fulfillment and equitable treatment of all “stakeholders”—customers, employees, investors, and suppliers—as well as to the health of the populace, of the food system, and of the earth. Whole Foods’ claim to righteousness is, in many respects, its unique selling point. If the mission is sincere, so is the commitment to making money. Mackey is adamant, and not merely unapologetic, that his company—any company—can and should pursue profits and a higher purpose simultaneously, and that in fact the pursuit of both enhances the pursuit of each. “Whole Foods itself is a market-based solution,” he said. “We’re a corporation. We are in capitalism. We have to compete with Safeway and Wal-Mart and Kroger and Wegmans and Trader Joe’s. What’s odd about it is that that’s what we’ve always been. We’re not a co-op.” To “the people that really dislike us,” he said, “Whole Foods is a big corporation, so they think that we’ve crossed over to the dark side. Kind of the Darth Vader myth, that somehow or another we’ve become bad because we’ve become large.”...
Mackey says that he was not as close to his mother, who died in 1987. “The last thing she asked me, she said, ‘John, promise me you’ll go back to school and get a college degree.’ I said, ‘Mom, I’m not going back to school. I’m doing Whole Foods.’ She said, ‘I wish you’d just give up that stupid health-food store. Your father and I gave you a fine mind, and you’re wasting it being a grocer.’ ” That was their final conversation. “I was so proud of my own honesty and my own candor and my own integrity. But she died thinking that I was a failure and that I didn’t love her, and, I mean, why put your mother through that on her deathbed? I wish I could take that back.”...
Mackey is an example of what you might call the auteur C.E.O. Like Steve Jobs’s, his personality is entwined in his company’s. He doesn’t bother with day-to-day operations; he’s not a technician or a face man. When he’s asked what it is he does, exactly, he describes a kind of philosopher-king, who brings big ideas to bear. Mackey, an outspoken critic of executive overcompensation, pays himself a dollar a year. No one at the company can have a salary more than nineteen times what the average team member makes. (On average, an S. & P. 500 C.E.O. makes three hundred and nineteen times what a production worker does.) Last year, the highest salary went to Walter Robb, the co-president and chief operating officer, who made just over four hundred thousand dollars (supplemented by a bonus and stock options). The average hourly wage was sixteen dollars and fifty cents...
At lunchtime and in the early evening, the store teems. The layout is diffuse, with a series of food stations—pizza, seafood, Indian—occupying the slack space between the packaged goods and the meat, cheese, and fish. (One Austin resident and Central Market partisan told me, “The store is a reflection of Mackey’s personality. It has a fuck-you layout.”)...
“We’re trying to do good. And we’re trying to make money. The more money we make, the more good we can do.” By this, he had in mind not the traditional philanthropic argument that more money earned equals more to give away but, rather, that a good company—that is, his company—which sells good things and treats its employees, shareholders, customers, and suppliers well, can spread goodness simply by thriving...
Mackey has on several occasions acted on criticisms. At a shareholder meeting in 2003, animal-rights activists staged a protest over duck, which led him to examine the meat business more closely. This inspired his vegan conversion, and persuaded him to overhaul the meat-procurement process. Some criticize Whole Foods for selling meat at all. A few years ago, Mackey told Grist, a Seattle environmental magazine, “Sure, I wish Whole Foods didn’t sell animal products, but the fact of the matter is that the population of vegetarians in America is like 5 percent, and vegans are like 25 or 30 percent of the vegetarians. So if we were to become a vegan store, we’d go out of business, we’d cease to exist. And that wouldn’t be good for the animals, for our customers, our employees, our stockholders, or anybody else. If I were to take Whole Foods in this direction I would be removed as CEO.”
Read the
whole New Yorker article here.
btw. since this article was written, i was informed, by the CEO of
The Veggie Grill (an incredible high quality vegan fast food chain, I recently discovered in Southern California), That John Mackey has since resigned as the "chairman" of Whole Foods (but still remains its CEO).
