Come for the overpriced produce, stay for the ugly rhetoric

On Wednesday 01/16th, Whole Paycheck CEO John Mackey called the ObamaCare as Fascist law  while promoting his book on npr's morning edition. And then, shitstorm ensued.

Let's get a few things out of our way. Mackey is entitled to his opinion and he can voice it. I understand the frustration of providing health insurance because of a government mandate as his primary duty is to increase the shareholder equity. ;)

But the paradox here is, you run a store where a gallon of milk costs double or triple the price in a regular grocery store. That's because you sell food with organic ingredients and you've some policies about procuring produce locally, not to sell foods with certain kind of ingredients and all. And who're the typical patrons of whole foods? Hipsters who live beyond their means and Liberal Ladies who drive LandRovers. OK that's stereotyping, but you get the picture. Most of the whole foods customer base which includes above stereotypes and people who fall in between these two extremes voted for Obama and supported his healthcare law.

CEO of an upscale Organic Store which sells $10 soaps and 100 types of cheses and gourmet salts (wtf?) should tread carefully on political issues. Calling healthcare law as fascism is like Zuckerburg making fun of moms who facebook their baby pictures for the lack of productivity or Instagram founder ridiculing people who lounge in Starbucks during working hours and instagram pics of their sugary drinks and sunsets. Those analogies are little far fetched, but what I'm trying to say is why would anybody alienate their customer base, particularly when you're running a business which solely relies on the concept of customer paying high for the greater good of society and sustainability of earth.

And Mackey chose the best platform to reach out to customer base and then blew it. You don't go on Morning Edition and talk ill about healthcare law. No self respecting liberal driving a volvo / sipping her chai latte / eating his granola would miss that. This shit would've flied, if this's Cracker Barrel CEO complaining on Fox news. It could've brought more old people into those restaurants as a freedom appreciation day or some BS name to it. I said cracker barrel as it's the exact opposite of whole foods. And the existence of this restaurant or shop gives you a rough idea whether you're in blue or red area.

Once this shit had hit the fan, Mackey forced to give a pseudo-apology, he likes a Swiss model here in USA.

I believe that, if the goal is universal health care, our country would be far better served by combining free enterprise capitalism with a strong governmental safety net for our poorest citizens and those with preexisting conditions, helping everyone to be able to buy insurance. This is what Switzerland does and I think we would be much better off copying that system than where we are currently headed in the United States.

Government helping poor people buy insurance, isn't that socialism? Or whatever thing which Republicans call as wealth redistribution? Healthcare is screwed up in USA, there's no denial about it. That's how insurance companies make profit. And this whole government take over is utter nonsense. Obama gave a gift to insurance companies, which keeps on giving in the form of healthcare mandate which was first proposed by Heritage foundation in 1989, not a liberal group by any measure. Once a self-responsibility idea supported by Bob Dole (1996 Republican candidate for President) became a government takeover in 2010. I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure that Black man in White House now is just a coincidence.

I don't run any business, so I might be misinformed about many things. But as an employee, I pay my health insurance, and when the rates went up I took the brunt, not my employer. And if whole foods is already paying health insurance, why is he bothered about ObamaCare. Wait, I know ..libertarians don't want government to tell them anything. In that Utopian land, there wouldn't be FDA, FAA, clean air/water act or any law of the land.

 

For Mackey, this isn't a moment he got carried away and said something which he didn't mean. He wrote an op-ed in WSJ in summer of '09 calling it socialism even before the bill was presented in Congress. This is the same genius who was caught bashing Wild Oats in 2005 with a pseudonym on yahoo finance, at that time Whole Foods was trying to take over Wild Oats

My Question here is, is this just the Mackey's Cognitive dissonance where his ideology contradicts their company mission statement and operating model. Or is it just bad PR training which he gets.

Talking about PR, who're the hacks training this guy and that Chick-fil-A CEO. Or all those Republican politicians who just can't resist talking about rape. I feel that I can run a better shop than these clueless numbnuts who're training/advising these CEOs and politicians.  Only if my rich friends are reading this..

Thanks in advance for your seed money fellas.