Mackey Resigns From Whole Foods Board - Was New Yorker Interview To Blame?

[hatrack]

Under pressure from a variety of shareholders, Whole Foods founder John Mackey has surrendered his position on his company’s board of directors. He will continue serving as CEO, but will no longer be able to vote on board-level decisions.

Just before the announcement, The New Yorker ran a long and entertaining profile of Mackey by Nick Paumgarten. The two events—the publication of the New Yorker piece, quickly followed by Mackey’s board resignation—may not be coincidental. in recent years, buffeted by self-generated controversy, Mackey has sought to exert careful control over his media image. He makes a game effort with Paumagarten. “I no longer drink alcohol around journalists,” Mackey tells him. He adds: “I am not going to talk about my sex life,” even though Paumagarten had not asked. Despite those undoubtedly wise precautions, Mackey emerges from Paumgarten’s gentle piece as a bit of a nut.

We see him engaging in new-age babble, declaring “I am self-actualizing myself” and subjecting himself to something called “the Course.” We find him behaving like a jerk, alienating underlings (“executive-retreat volleyball games had to be scrapped, owing to Mackey’s intensity and his ill-disguised scorn for less capable teammates”) and sending fellow executives into grumpy exile. Mostly, we find him justifying his Randian faith in hyper-capitalism, as zealous as a Christian’s belief in the Resurrection. In green circles, the money shot is probably the bit about climate change—it turns out the founder of the iconic “certified organic supermarket” is a bit of a denier (don’t tell Paumgarten’s colleague Michael Specter). Paumgarten writes:

"One of the books on the list was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming-the Missing Science,” a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he put it, 'no scientific consensus exists' regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow 'hysteria about global warming' to cause us 'to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.' One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, 'Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.'"

EDIT

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-31-john-mackey-whole-foods-conscious-capitalism/

[evan2]

1. Behind every great fortune is a criminal...and in this case, a very

odd duck as well.

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

2. Mackey=Bully

Never trust a person that thinks the sun shines out of their ass, and Mackey thinks he has the full-on coronal discharge with aurora borealis dingleberries. His professional behavior in recent years has been as unsavory as an organic cherry pit spit back into the display.

Mackey has shown himself to be unabashedly corporatist, and it is hubris which compels him to spit in the face of his mostly progressive-oriented customers and staff with his far-right political endorsements and conservative rhetoric. Despite the fact that Whole Foods is still under an antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, the company specifically aims, like Wal Mart, at driving local and regional competitors out of business.

Recently, my workplace, a locally owned natural foods grocery chain, came into their sights. In an attempt to defend themselves from the FTC's antitrust case, they subpoenaed several years' worth of my company's market analyses, expansion plans, and sales figures, all of which is highly proprietary. My company fought this subpoena but lost, and we were forced to supply this data, at our own expense (last estimate was somewhere between $250k-$500k, a lot of dosh for a company with only nine locations).

[steve67]

3. Wal Mart 101

That's the same thing WalMart has done for years. My father owned a small local hardware store when I was growing up in our small town. The big box stores came in and obliterated us and most other small businesses. The local farmers all went to the bib box stores. Now they are being obliterated by corporate farms. Karma's a bitch. Of course this still doesn't solve our problems. Just saying that we as individuals can have a great affect on these corporate behaviors.

[wtmusic]

4. Historically, there's also an inverse correlation between

prosperity and ignorance. :wow: