New Yorker article about Mackey - Whole Foods [Archive]

daynurse

12-28-2009, 02:02 PM

Food Fighter

Does Whole Foods’ C.E.O. know what’s best for you?

by Nick Paumgarten (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/nick_paumgarten/search?contributorName=nick paumgarten) January 4, 2010

<DL class=size sizset="22" sizcache="16"><DT> </DT></DL>

https://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/01/04/p465/100104_r19188_p465.jpg
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.


<DL sizset="30" sizcache="16"><DT>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. </DT></DL>

A year ago, Mackey came across a book called “The Engine 2 Diet,” by an Austin, Texas, firefighter and former professional triathlete named Rip Esselstyn. Basically, you eat plants: you are a rabbit with a skillet. Mackey had been a vegetarian for more than thirty years, and a vegan for five, but the Engine 2 book, among others, helped get him to give up vegetable oils, sugar, and pretty much anything processed. He lost fifteen pounds. This thinking about his body dovetailed with a recession that left many shoppers reluctant or unable to spend much money on the fancy or well-sourced food that had been the stores’ mainstay. Mackey, in a stroke of corporate transubstantiation, declared that Whole Foods would go on a diet, too. It would focus on stripped-down healthy eating. Fewer organic potato chips, more actual potatoes. He told the Wall Street Journal in August, “We sell a bunch of junk.”
The repudiation was rash, since Whole Foods would still be selling junk, of a kind. Mackey, an unrepentant foot-in-mouther, as often a fount of exasperation as of inspiration, tried to explain that his comment had been misunderstood. Mackey has been bewildered by the way some things that he has said or done have brought trouble on him and Whole Foods. Public opinion can be capricious and—when you’re a grocer, a retail brand, and a publicly traded company—hard to ignore or override.
Two years ago, Mackey passed through one of the roughest stretches of his life. The Bush Administration, in an uncharacteristic spasm of antitrust vigilance, was fighting Whole Foods’ purchase of a competitor, Wild Oats, contending that the merged company would unfairly corner what the Federal Trade Commission called the “premium natural and organic supermarket” sector. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Mackey: for nearly eight years, he had been secretly logging onto an Internet message board devoted to Whole Foods stock under the sock puppet, or pseudonym, “rahodeb” (an anagram of Deborah, his wife’s name), praising his own company, disparaging Wild Oats, and throwing in a flattering remark about his hair (“I think he looks cute!”). Mackey, for years a media and stock-market sweetheart, was suddenly recast as a monopolist, a fruitcake, and a sneak. The share price fell, and, even though the government eventually let the deal stand (with a few concessions from Whole Foods) and gave the sock puppetry a pass, many wondered how Mackey managed to hold on to his job.
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During this period, Mackey sought succor in spiritual practice. He engaged a friend, a follower of the Czech transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof, to guide him through a therapeutic session of holotropic breathing. “I had this very powerful session, very powerful. It lasted about two hours,” Mackey said in an inspirational CD set he released last year called “Passion and Purpose: The Power of Conscious Capitalism.” “I was having a dialogue with what I would define as my deeper self, or my higher self.” He had a pair of epiphanies, one having to do with severed relationships that needed healing. The other was that “if I wanted to continue to do Whole Foods, there couldn’t be any part of my life that was secretive or hidden or that I’d be embarrassed [about] if people found out about it. I had to let go of all of that,” he said. “I’m this public figure now.”
He couldn’t “embarrass the company,” he told me. “I have to grow up”—he is fifty-six. “I can’t have affairs with women. One of the things that happened was you have more money and you have more opportunities for such things. And those are sort of off-limits. You can’t do that. Think of Mark Sanford, in South Carolina.”
His vows of discretion apparently allow for a great deal of latitude. He talks openly about his fixations and eccentricities—most of them, anyway. (“I am not going to talk about my sex life,” he told me, without my having asked him to.) His blend of guile and guilelessness is peculiar. “I no longer drink alcohol around journalists,” he said. He worries that he reveals too much. He can’t help but speak his mind, out of which spring confounding ideas and conventionally irreconcilable contradictions. The man who has perhaps done as much as anyone to bring the natural-foods movement from the crunchy fringe into the mainstream is also a vocal libertarian, an orthodox free-marketer, an admirer of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand. In the 2008 Presidential election, he voted for Bob Barr—Ron Paul wasn’t on the ballot.
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.

“Food Fighter” continues (https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=2)
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten#ixzz0b1TggoUD (https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten#ixzz0b1TggoUD)

vdeva

01-10-2010, 03:51 PM

Read this today....another Mackey claim: Global Warming not human driven

Whole Foods Market has long dominated the natural and organic food scene, and most liberals who shop there believe they're putting their money where their mouth is. But the grocery's CEO, John Mackey, has used the bully pulpit the store's success has provided to oppose first labor organizing, then health care reform, and now to deny human-caused climate change.
Mackey's Wall Street Journal op-ed eschewing health care reform made waves this summer, spurring protests and a Facebook group calling for a boycott. But now Mackey has gone a step further, telling the New Yorker that he thinks the science on climate change is still unsettled.
Mackey, a libertarian, echoes a familiar conservative talking point when says he worries that climate "hysteria" will lead the government "to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty." But he goes even further, hypothesizing that warm temperatures cause prosperity -- instead of, you know, the opposite.
Of course, Whole Foods, as a company, continues to do some pretty trailblazing things, including powering its stores with renewable energy and engaging in conversations about the environmental impact of the food we eat. To this extent, Mackey's customers have successfully wielded the power of the purse.
But they've also bought and paid for Mackey's climate-denying bullhorn. And the company has conspicuously declined to join business groups that are forming to push for sustainability and, yes, even climate regulation, which is where the rubber really hits the road.
So Whole Foods fails as a model of doing well by doing good. Does it deserve a boycott?

Food Fighter

Does Whole Foods’ C.E.O. know what’s best for you?

by Nick Paumgarten (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/nick_paumgarten/search?contributorName=nick paumgarten) January 4, 2010

<DL class=size sizset="22" sizcache="16"><DT> </DT></DL>

https://www.newyorker.com/images/2010/01/04/p465/100104_r19188_p465.jpg
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.


<DL sizset="30" sizcache="16"><DT>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. </DT></DL>

A year ago, Mackey came across a book called “The Engine 2 Diet,” by an Austin, Texas, firefighter and former professional triathlete named Rip Esselstyn. Basically, you eat plants: you are a rabbit with a skillet. Mackey had been a vegetarian for more than thirty years, and a vegan for five, but the Engine 2 book, among others, helped get him to give up vegetable oils, sugar, and pretty much anything processed. He lost fifteen pounds. This thinking about his body dovetailed with a recession that left many shoppers reluctant or unable to spend much money on the fancy or well-sourced food that had been the stores’ mainstay. Mackey, in a stroke of corporate transubstantiation, declared that Whole Foods would go on a diet, too. It would focus on stripped-down healthy eating. Fewer organic potato chips, more actual potatoes. He told the Wall Street Journal in August, “We sell a bunch of junk.”
The repudiation was rash, since Whole Foods would still be selling junk, of a kind. Mackey, an unrepentant foot-in-mouther, as often a fount of exasperation as of inspiration, tried to explain that his comment had been misunderstood. Mackey has been bewildered by the way some things that he has said or done have brought trouble on him and Whole Foods. Public opinion can be capricious and—when you’re a grocer, a retail brand, and a publicly traded company—hard to ignore or override.
Two years ago, Mackey passed through one of the roughest stretches of his life. The Bush Administration, in an uncharacteristic spasm of antitrust vigilance, was fighting Whole Foods’ purchase of a competitor, Wild Oats, contending that the merged company would unfairly corner what the Federal Trade Commission called the “premium natural and organic supermarket” sector. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Mackey: for nearly eight years, he had been secretly logging onto an Internet message board devoted to Whole Foods stock under the sock puppet, or pseudonym, “rahodeb” (an anagram of Deborah, his wife’s name), praising his own company, disparaging Wild Oats, and throwing in a flattering remark about his hair (“I think he looks cute!”). Mackey, for years a media and stock-market sweetheart, was suddenly recast as a monopolist, a fruitcake, and a sneak. The share price fell, and, even though the government eventually let the deal stand (with a few concessions from Whole Foods) and gave the sock puppetry a pass, many wondered how Mackey managed to hold on to his job.
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During this period, Mackey sought succor in spiritual practice. He engaged a friend, a follower of the Czech transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof, to guide him through a therapeutic session of holotropic breathing. “I had this very powerful session, very powerful. It lasted about two hours,” Mackey said in an inspirational CD set he released last year called “Passion and Purpose: The Power of Conscious Capitalism.” “I was having a dialogue with what I would define as my deeper self, or my higher self.” He had a pair of epiphanies, one having to do with severed relationships that needed healing. The other was that “if I wanted to continue to do Whole Foods, there couldn’t be any part of my life that was secretive or hidden or that I’d be embarrassed [about] if people found out about it. I had to let go of all of that,” he said. “I’m this public figure now.”
He couldn’t “embarrass the company,” he told me. “I have to grow up”—he is fifty-six. “I can’t have affairs with women. One of the things that happened was you have more money and you have more opportunities for such things. And those are sort of off-limits. You can’t do that. Think of Mark Sanford, in South Carolina.”
His vows of discretion apparently allow for a great deal of latitude. He talks openly about his fixations and eccentricities—most of them, anyway. (“I am not going to talk about my sex life,” he told me, without my having asked him to.) His blend of guile and guilelessness is peculiar. “I no longer drink alcohol around journalists,” he said. He worries that he reveals too much. He can’t help but speak his mind, out of which spring confounding ideas and conventionally irreconcilable contradictions. The man who has perhaps done as much as anyone to bring the natural-foods movement from the crunchy fringe into the mainstream is also a vocal libertarian, an orthodox free-marketer, an admirer of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand. In the 2008 Presidential election, he voted for Bob Barr—Ron Paul wasn’t on the ballot.
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.

“Food Fighter” continues (https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=2)
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten#ixzz0b1TggoUD (https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten#ixzz0b1TggoUD)