Opinion
Mackey: Intellectuals have historically disliked business and distrusted its motives
“Intellectuals are the ones that don't like business, and intellectuals have never really liked business. I'm not saying all intellectuals, just as a general rule, as Deidre McCloskey calls it, the clerisy. Has always been skeptical about business, and has alwa…”
Assertion Supported
Mackey: Whole Foods had zero store failures in its first 20 years
“We didn't even have a store that failed for like the first 20 years of the history of the company. Every store we opened was a success.”
Insight
Mackey: Maximizing shareholder value requires optimizing the entire stakeholder system
“If you cheat any of your constituencies, any of your stakeholders, or try to sell them short, you can get away with it in the short term. In the long run, feedback loops are created, and your business sub-optimizes. So, I just realized to create the most value…”
Insight
Mackey: CEOs should stay out of politics to avoid hurting their business
“So the short answer, Jeff, in a way, is I think you should stay out of politics if you're a CEO. You can obviously have your personal opinions, but you're always going to be seen as speaking for the company, and if you do controversial things, you're going to …”
Disclosure
Mackey: Whole Foods considered going private with up to $13B in debt
“If you go private, which is an alternative Whole Foods looked at, you're taking on, we'd have been taking on, gosh, probably 1211, 12, thirteen billion dollars in debt under our balance sheet, and if the business turned down, you could go bankrupt.”
Disclosure
Mackey: Stepping down as Whole Foods CEO involved conflict with Amazon executives
“I didn't want to work as hard, and I wanted to do some other things in life, and I just knew, and I was having some conflict with some of the Amazon executives as well.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Mackey: Whole Foods was the highest-volume US natural grocery within six months
“Within six months, we believe, based on our own research, we were the highest volume natural food store in the United States.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mackey: Supermarket Cost-Cutting to Fight Walmart Created Whole Foods' Opportunity
“And Walmart was on the march, and all the supermarket companies were, and there were lots of independents back then before the chains, sort of, that changed too over, over time, but they were all terrified of Walmart, and so they, and they wanted to compete wi…”
Insight
Mackey: Founders must prioritize market demand over personal preferences to avoid failure
“You have to make a distinction between what you may personally want, and what the market wants. And there, and there's a, If you don't ultimately sell what people want to buy, you're gonna fail.”
Assertion Partly supported
Mackey: 350,000 people boycotted Whole Foods after 2009 WSJ op-ed
“We were, had protests all around the country, and 350,000 people, and within a couple of weeks signed a Facebook petition to boycott Whole Foods Market. Hundreds of letters were sent to our board of directors demanding that I be fired.”
Assertion Partly supported
Mackey: Whole Foods dropped prices significantly four times in two years post-Amazon merger
“And it, in the first two years of that merger, Amazon let us drop our prices significantly four times.”
Assertion Partly supported
Mackey: Whole Foods and Amazon signed acquisition deal six weeks after meeting
“Six weeks after that first meeting in Seattle, we'd signed a deal. It was like a whirlwind romance.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
John Mackey delayed Whole Foods' Amazon integration until his retirement
“In other ways, I held it back, and once I was gone, then they could move in the directions that it needed to evolve in. In some cases, that's maybe a little tighter a little closer to Amazon. They're a little more integrated into Amazon. I held them back from …”
Assertion Supported
Mackey: Safer Way launched on $45,000 from friends and family
“Renee's family and friends, my family and friends, and yes, my dad, I didn't have any money, my dad loaned me 10,000 dollars for my share of the investment at five percent interest. So, so that's how we got started. We needed 50, but we only had, we only were …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mackey: Whole Foods' Hardest Scaling Barrier Was Market Size Skepticism
“I mean, the hardest barrier Whole Foods for us scaling was convincing people that this wasn't just, ah, that there was a market for it. I was told, you guys are a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies, and we don't think that's a very big market. I he…”
Opinion
Mackey: Removing father from board and selling to Amazon were hardest business decisions
“That was the most difficult thing I've ever had to do in business, to be honest. That plus, I'd say the sale to Amazon was also a difficult decision, but I had to do it.”
Insight
Mackey: College degree density was Whole Foods' top predictor of success
“In our case, the biggest indicator was college degrees. Who has a college degree? And the places that had the most college degrees, not surprisingly, also had the highest income.”
Assertion Supported
Psychedelics shifted John Mackey's trajectory away from traditional professions
“I think because I experimented with psychedelic drugs back in my, ah, early twenties that, that took me off that path, and I began to see, I became a seeker, I was looking for the meaning of life, and I studied, I went back and forth between two universities, …”
Assertion Supported
John Mackey met his Whole Foods co-founder in a housing co-op
“I thought I'd find a girlfriend there, and I did. The woman that I co-founded Whole Foods with.”
Assertion Supported
Mackey: Safer Way lost $23K and half its capital in year one
“The safer way is we lost money the first year. We lost half our money, 23,000 dollars in the first year, and Renee and I were not really taking any money out”
John Mackey