¡Join the fight!
I'm caught somewhere between total dismay, slight interest, and head-shaking disbelief on this one:
Whole Foods to give greater employee discounts to workers with lower BMI, cholesterol Read more...
As rather breathlessly reported in the AP on Christmas Day, John Mackey is stepping down as Chairman of the Board for Whole Foods Market, and the reporter credits pressure from an activist investment group called CtW. From the AP story on ABC News:
At Whole Foods' annual shareholders meeting in March, CtW Investment Group, a shareholder activist group that works with union pension funds, unsuccessfully proposed that the CEO and chairman roles be separated. The grocer said it has been receiving these proposals for three years. Read more...
John Mackey CEO of Whole Foods went on John Stossel's brand-new show on Fox Business News last week in what seems to be Stage 2 in his rebranding of Whole Foods.
Long-time critics of Mackey's will point out out that the man has never been shy about airing his conservative, libertarian politics. True, but he's never gone on Fox with an arch-conservative opiniojournalist in order to bash liberal ideals quite like this, to my knowledge. Read more...
Huffington Post is reporting that John Mackey says he voted for ultraconservative libertarian and abortion rights foe Bob Barr in the 2008 election.
Wonder if Michael Pollan wishes he never defended this dude.
Last night, a friend on Twitter (who runs this excellent blog) asked me if I thought John Mackey should be fired for his remarks in the Wall Street Journal on health insurance reform, which got me thinking that maybe I should delineate my feelings about Whole Foods, the boycott, and the dust-up as a whole, just so regular readers know where this blog stands. Read more...
No I don't. I adore saying I told you so.
In the recent hubub over at Whole Foods Market, It looks like there's now a trackable and dramatic drop in brand perception of Whole Foods, directly traceable to the vocal outburst from customers angry about CEO John Mackey's Wall Street Journal editorial. Check out the stats over at Mashable's As Whole Foods Boycott Grows on Facebook, Brand Perception Drops. But here's the lowdown: Read more...
Regarding Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and his Wall Street Journal editorial, Ben Wyksida, a writer for The Nation, says in Huffington Post:
"Some people today have argued that what's really galling is how dramatically Mackey's op-ed betrayed and antagonized his own customers. That he doesn't understand his brand, and he's swatting at a hornets nest by being so vocal against health care. DailyKos had a useful piece; the great blog Fair Food Fight is all over this."
Matthew Yglesias: "On Boycotting Whole Foods":
If Whole Foods shareholders were to start to wonder whether having their corporate brand dragged into the health care debate is really a smart use of their assets, I would call that a good thing.
Common Dreams on John Mackey and the Boycott of Whole Foods (these might be song lyrics, not an actual editorial -- I'm not quite sure).
The "Whole Foods Boycott" Facebook page hit 10,000 members and 665 wall posts in 3 days, as of Sunday. Read more...
Our buddy Zachary Adam Cohen of Farm to Table wrote a terrific piece about a month ago called Where are the Conservatives in Local Foods? that was reposted all over the solar system. Read more...
Just got off the phone with General Manager Dan Gillotte of Wheatsville Co-op in Austin, TX. Wheatsville is like a scurrying rodent/mammal in the Age of Dinosaurs, scurrying to avoid the bigger competition of Whole Foods Market's flagship store (and corporate headquarters) and City Market, WFM's gargantuan rival. Read more...
