| John Mackey | |
|---|---|
John Mackey, May 2009 |
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| Born | August 15, 1953 Houston, Texas |
| Residence | Austin, Texas |
| Alma mater | University of Texas at Austin |
| Occupation | CEO of Whole Foods Market |
| Salary | US$1[1] |
| Spouse | Deborah |
| Parents | Bill and Margaret Mackey |
John Mackey (born August 15, 1953) is an American businessman. He is the CEO of Whole Foods Market which he had co-founded in 1980. Named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003, Mackey is a strong supporter of free market economics. He is one of the most influential advocates in the movement for organic food.[2]
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John Mackey was born in Houston, Texas in 1953 to Bill and Margaret Mackey. He has a sister and a brother. He was student of philosophy and religion at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s, and worked at a vegetarian co-op.[3] Mackey eventually became vegetarian. He now identifies as a vegan.
Mackey had a longtime relationship with Mary Kay Hagen.[3]
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 began his first health food store, Safer Way, in his garage in Austin in 1978,[2] with his girlfriend Renee Lawson Hardy. They had met while working at a vegetarian co-op.[3] They dropped out of university.
They borrowed $10,000 and raised $35,000 more to start a vegetarian grocery store which they named Safer Way.[3] It was the first vegetarian supermarket in Austin and all of Texas.[3] The two ran the market on the first floor, a health food restaurant on the second, and lived on the third story of their building. In two years, they merged Safer Way with a natural-foods store and renamed the business Whole Foods.[3]
Mackey built Whole Foods into a national organization, with outlets in major markets across the country. Along the way he bought out smaller competitors. In 2007 Whole Foods took over a major natural foods supermarket competitor, Wild Oats Markets, Inc.
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 a lawsuit. He claimed the petition circulated by the Association infringed on Whole Foods Market's intellectual property right.[4]
Whole Foods was the first grocery chain to set standards for humane animal treatment.[2] Mackey was influenced by animal rights activist, Lauren Ornelas, who criticized Whole Foods' animal standards regarding ducks at a shareholder meeting in 2003. Mackey gave Ornelas his email address and they corresponded on the issue. He studied issues related to factory farming and decided to switch to what he considers veganism. He advocates tougher animal standards.[5]
Despite Whole Foods' welfare standards, Mackey has been criticized by abolitionist vegans such as Gary L. Francione. He believes the Whole Foods company policies betray the animal rights position.[6] By other accounts, Mackey is the "driving force" behind significant changes in animal welfare. For instance, he started a non-profit foundation, the Animal Compassion Foundation, to address making animal welfare more economically viable.[7]
In 2006, Mackey announced he was reducing his salary to $1 a year, would donate his stock portfolio to charity, and set up a $100,000 emergency fund for staff facing personal problems.[8] 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, Mackey earned a total compensation of $33,831, which included a base salary of $1, and a cash bonus of $33,830.[9] In 2009, he again took a salary of $1, as well as receiving compensation amounting to $710,077.[10] He has instituted caps on executive pay at the company.[1]
Mackey is a major philanthropist who has contributed up to $1 million a year to animal welfare groups and other charities.[3]
In a debate in Reason magazine among Mackey, Milton Friedman, and T. J. Rodgers, Mackey said that he is a free market libertarian.[11] He said that he used to be a "democratic socialist" in college. As a beginning businessman he was challenged by workers for not paying adequate wages and by customers for overcharging, during a time when he was hardly breaking even. He began to take a more capitalistic worldview, and discovered the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.[12] Mackey is an admirer of author Ayn Rand.[13]
Mackey co-founded the organization, Freedom Lights Our World (FLOW, to combine his commitments to "economic and political freedom as well as personal growth, social responsibility, and environmental stewardship." [14] He supports such changes as green tax shifts, environmental trusts, world legal systems to allow the poor to create legal businesses, and a citizen's dividend to help the poor in the developed world.[15]
Mackey opposed the public health insurance option that ultimately did not become part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Mackey thinks a better plan would be allowing consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines and use 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]
John Mackey is known for his strong anti-union views, having once compared unions to herpes in that "it won't kill you, but it's very unpleasant and will make a lot of people not want to be your lover." Whole Foods, along with Costco and Starbucks, teamed up in 2008 to attempt to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act.
Whole Foods Market is one of only two non-union Fortune 500 companies listed by Forbes among the "25 Best Companies to Work For" in 2005. Mackey ascribes this 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."[18]
An excerpt of Mackey's frankness was demonstrated in an interview with The New Yorker :
...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." [19]
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. He referred to himself in the third person and criticized rival supermarket chain Wild Oats Markets.[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. It 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. 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 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]
On December 24, 2009, Mackey resigned from the position of Chairman of the Board of Whole Foods Market. On his blog he said, "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]