The latest issue of Fortune magazine devotes eight pages to a profile of Whole Foods top dog John Mackey. While no one would label Mackey as conservative, the feature story does include the following interesting passage.
Deeply, profoundly, to his core, John Mackey is a capitalist. Though critics over the years have labeled him any number of things—anarchist, socialist, even Marxist—make no mistake, Mackey is a true believer in (mostly unfettered) free enterprise, and his love for it is like that of a convert who finds salvation later in life.
His conversion was not a peaceful one. He had been part of the food co-op movement—and when he abandoned that to start his own for-profit health food store, a group of his friends became ex-friends and gave him the nickname Darth Vader. (He had gone from the light to the dark.) “I got a lot of hate,” he says. “But I didn’t feel like I was evil because I was trying to earn a living and create stores better than the co-op. I didn’t see why I had to apologize for that.”
In many ways Mackey is still the old liberal, granola-chomping hippie he was in his early twenties: He is pro-choice, supports gay marriage, and is for the legalization of marijuana. Yet he also opposes labor unions and once penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed that ran under the headline The Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare that endeared him to the Tea Party. He is a man who resists media training, although he says he is not as brash and provocative as he once was, that he’s not as ego-driven. “He’s so who he is every minute of every day,” says Whole Foods CFO Glenda Flanagan, who has worked with Mackey for 26 years. “He doesn’t change who he is for anybody or any circumstance.”
“If I had adopted the general philosophy of the left, I would have been loved instead of hated,” Mackey says. “I just couldn’t do it. I’d rather be authentic and have my own intellectual integrity and have a lot of people misunderstand me. If they’re going to attack me I can live with it.”
