John Mackey

John Mackey
Born	August 15, 1953 Houston, Texas
Residence	Austin, Texas
Occupation	CEO of Whole Foods Market
Salary	US$1[1]
Spouse(s)	Deborah
Parents	Bill and Margaret Mackey

John Mackey (born August 15, 1954) CEO of Whole Foods Market, which he co-founded in 1980. Mackey was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2003, and is a strong supporter of free market economics. He is currently one of the biggest advocates in the movement for organic food.^[2]

Personal life

As a student of philosophy and religion at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s, Mackey worked at a vegetarian co-op.^[3] Mackey eventually became vegetarian, and has considered himself a vegan and described as such since late 2003. However, since he eats eggs from his personal flock of free-range chickens,^[2] some say that Mackey could be more accurately described as an ethical ovo vegetarian.^{[citation needed]}

Mackey married his current wife Deborah Morin in 1992. Both practice yoga. They spend the week in Austin and weekends at their 720-acre (291.4 ha) ranch 40 miles (64 km) west of Austin.^[3] Mackey enjoys reading, and participates in two monthly book clubs.^[4]

Mackey has no children with his current wife, but is close to the two children of former longtime girlfriend Mary Kay Hagen.^[3]

Mackey gives away up to $1 million a year to animal welfare groups and other charities.^[3]

CEO of Whole Foods

Background

Mackey began his first health food store, Safer Way, in his garage in Austin in 1978,^[2] with his girlfriend Renee Lawson Hardy, whom he had met while working at a vegetarian co-op.^[3] They dropped out of university (Mackey never got a degree until May 2008 when he received an honorary Bachelors Degree from Bentley College upon giving the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2008^[5]) and borrowed $10,000 and raised $35,000 more to start the business.^[3] The store was strictly vegetarian, like Mackey,^[2] and was the first vegetarian supermarket not just in Austin but in all of Texas.^[3] The two ran a supermarket on the first floor, a health-food restaurant on the second, and lived on the third story. In two years, Safer Way merged with another natural-foods store and became Whole Foods.^[3]

The Organic Consumer's Association has called attention to some of Whole Foods's organic product line. As a result, John Mackey sent a letter to the Association threatening with lawsuit based on the claim that a petition that the Association circulated has infringed on Whole Foods Market's intellectual property right.^[6]

Animal welfare

Whole Foods was the first grocery chain to set standards for humane animal treatment.^[2] He was helped in this by the influence of an animal rights activist, Lauren Ornelas, who criticized Whole Foods' animal standards regarding ducks at a shareholder meeting in 2003. Encountering Ornelas after the meeting, Mackey gave her his email address and they corresponded on the issue. He later wanted to see why she and other animal activists were so concerned with the issue of factory farming and read a dozen books on the subject before deciding to switch to what he considers veganism and fight for tougher animal standards.^[5]

However, despite Whole Foods' welfare standards, Mackey has come under harsh criticism from abolitionist vegans such as Gary L. Francione who view his company's policies as a betrayal of the animal rights position.^[7] By other accounts, Mackey is the "driving force" behind significant changes in animal welfare; he started a nonprofit foundation, the Animal Compassion Foundation, to address making animal welfare more economically viable.^[8]

Letter to employees

According to the BBC, John Mackey wrote a letter in 2006 to all of his staff announcing that he would reduce his own salary to $1 a year, donate his stock portfolio to charity and set up a $100,000 emergency fund for staff facing personal problems.^[9] He wrote: "I am now 53 years old and I have reached a place in my life where I no longer want to work for money, but simply for the joy of the work itself and to better answer the call to service that I feel so clearly in my own heart."

While CEO of Whole Foods Market in 2008, he earned a total compensation of just $33,831, which included a base salary of $1, and a cash bonus of $33,830.^[10] In 2009, he again had a salary of $1, this time with no bonus and no stock options.^[11] He has instituted caps on executive pay at the company.^[1]

Political views

Libertarian ideas

In a debate in Reason Magazine among Mackey, Milton Friedman, and T.J. Rodgers, Mackey said that he is a free market libertarian.^[12] He has said that he used to be a "democratic socialist" in college, but when he began a business and barely made money while being accused by workers of not paying them enough and customers of charging too high prices, he began to take a more capitalistic worldview and discovered the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Friedman.^[13] According to an article published in The New York Times on August 2, 2009, Mackey is an admirer of author Ayn Rand.^{[citation needed]} In Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems published in March 2009, Mackey explained that he co-created a new organization, Freedom Lights Our World (FLOW)[3] in order to combine his commitments to "economic and political freedom as well as personal growth, social responsibility, and environmental stewardship." ^[14] The book, which serves as an explanation of Mackey's libertarian views, proposes various changes to legal systems to empower entrepreneurs to solve global problems, including green tax shifts (Ecotax), environmental trusts (See Capitalism 3.0 [4]), improvements in developing world legal systems to allow the poor to create legal businesses (Institute_for_Liberty_and_Democracy), and Citizen's Dividend to help the poor in the developed world.^[15]

Views on healthcare reform

Mackey is a vocal opponent of the public health insurance plan currently being debated in the US; instead, Mackey believes a better plan would be allowing consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines and using a combination of health savings accounts and catastrophic insurance, as Whole Foods does.^[16] Mackey's statement that Americans do not have an intrinsic right to healthcare led to calls for a boycott of Whole Foods Market from the Progressive Review and from numerous groups on Facebook.^[17]

Unions

Mackey has said about unions, "The union is like having herpes. It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover."^[18]

Mackey explains his perspective on unions:

"Unions as they evolved in the United States became very adversarial, untrusting, and opposed to the success and prosperity of the business. This is my major objection to unions today — they harm the flourishing of the business for all the stakeholders. Instead of cooperation between stakeholders, they focus on competition between management and labor. Instead of embracing the notion of the 'expanding pie' vision of capitalism — more for everyone, or win-win — they frequently embrace the zero-sum philosophy of win-lose."^[19]

Whole Foods Market is one of only two Fortune 500 companies listed among the 25 Best Companies to Work For in 2005, a fact which Mackey ascribes to his pro-employee philosophy. He supports non-adversarial unions and advocates their legalization in the U.S. "It's illegal in the United States for there to be company unions — special unions which are formed and controlled by the employees and managers of the company to represent their interests and collectively bargain on their behalf. These type of unions are legal in many countries such as Japan, but are illegal in the United States. Instead the law requires that all unions be outside unions. I believe this law should be repealed and that company unions should be as legal as any other kind of voluntary association."^[19]

Yahoo Finance postings

On July 20, 2007, The Wall Street Journal^[20] revealed that Mackey was, for at least seven years, using the pseudonym "Rahodeb" (an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah) to post to Yahoo Finance forums referring to himself in the third person and criticizing rival supermarket chain Wild Oats Market.^[21] The Federal Trade Commission^[22] approved a complaint challenging Whole Foods Market’s approximately $670 million acquisition of its chief rival, Wild Oats Markets, Inc., and authorized the FTC staff to seek a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in federal district court to halt the deal pending an administrative trial on the merits. After an extensive regulatory battle with the FTC, a federal appeals court consented to the deal and Whole Foods officially completed their buyout of Wild Oats on August 27, 2007.

In May 2008, after an SEC investigation cleared him, Mackey started blogging again. In a lengthy 2,037 word post, he wrote about why he began blogging in the first place and how his upbringing drove him to defend himself and Whole Foods. He admitted he made a mistake in judgment, but not in ethics.^[23]

Resigns as Chairman

On December 24, 2009 John Mackey resigned from Chairman of the Board of Whole Foods Market. On his blog he sites that "John Elstrott will now take the title of Chairman of the Board, which will accurately reflect the authority and the responsibilities that he has had for many years." ^[24]

See also

• Sustainable business

References

External links

• John Mackey Profile
• John Mackey - Libertarian Advocates for Self-Government
• John Mackey's blog on the Whole Foods Market website
• FLOW A non-profit co-founded by John Mackey that is dedicated to "liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good" and described as "a transpartisan movement combing idealistic initiative with free enterprise principles to systematically work toward a better world."
• Welcome to "Whole-Mart", CommonDreams.org, May 2, 2006.
• Inspirational Graduation Speech, Bentley College, 2008.
• [5] Whole Foods Market, December 24, 2009