The boycott of Whole Foods we helped spur a couple weeks ago continues to gain new members. And now the UFCW is involved:
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union and CtW Investment Group, an arm of several unions including the Service Employees International Union, are part of the boycott effort and say Mackey should be ousted as CEO of the grocery chain.
They also are pushing for the Bravo cable network, owned by NBC Universal-General Electric, to drop Whole Foods as the sponsor of its popular “Top Chef” show.
CtW also pushed for the ouster of Ken Lewis at Bank of America. The UFCW has fought with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Whole Foods and Bashas Inc. over unionization efforts.
"Mr. Mackey attempted to capitalize on the brand reputation of Whole Foods to champion his personal political views, but has instead deeply offended a key segment of Whole Foods consumer base," CtW Investment Group's Executive Director Bill Patterson said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which is part of Change to Win, said it will be giving out information to Whole Foods shoppers about health care reform. The group said Mackey's op-ed was an "attempt to undermine Obama's health-care reform."
A Facebook group created to get spread the word on the boycott now has almost 30,000 members (update: mark hit). Help them to that mark if you can.
Update:The New York Times reports on a picket at the grand opening of a new Whole Foods in New York.
(h/t HouseOfProgress in Quick Hits)<!--Session data-->
The Whole Foods Boycott, now nearing 15,000 members on Facebook alone, is putting financial pressure on the grocery company. Monday the stock took a big drop but partly rebounded during today's trading. That is, before CNN ran a story critical of CEO John Mackey at 5 p.m.
The company was already under some stress before the boycott, according to CNN:
Whole Foods, like most other retailers, has struggled to grow its sales through the recession as consumers..... clamped down on their spending or shift more of their purchases to lower-priced offerings.....
Michelle Chang, analyst with investment research firm Morningstar, said the company has been struggling with declining store sales for the past three quarters.
They've been trying to lose their high-price image, said Chang. She said the retailer's acquisition of rival Wild Oats in 2007 also was a "costly endeavor" and its international expansion hasn't been as successful as it had hoped.
So it probably wasn't a great time for the CEO to alienate most of his customers.
"Whole Foods relies heavily on its brand and image," Chang said. "Any concern about its image would damage sales heavily."
"Whole Foods holds a certain appeal to consumers and if it deviates from that it could see some negative reaction from consumers," she said.
The above quotes are from the meat of the story, the lead is even more devastating:
Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey is known for his tendency to shoot from the hip.
This time, Mackey may have shot himself -- and his company's brand -- in the foot by getting too personal on the very public issue of health care reform which has sparked calls to boycott the grocer.
"Certainly when our customers tell us they are unhappy to extent that they are boycotting our stores, we are concerned," said Libba Letton, spokeswoman for Whole Foods. "We don't want them to leave us."
So this story ran at 5 p.m. today right during after hours trading. Guess what happened to Whole Foods (WFMI) stock? Details inside.
Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey has struck a nerve with his anti-worker, anti-common good, failed libertarian arguments in the Wall Street Journal. It's important that we push back hard against this CEO ideologue who seems intent on joining the right wing noise machine.
Mackey is essentially promoting a bankrupt free market philosophy as the anecdote to a failing public commons. It's been known for quite a while to those of us who have worked in and around the food industry that Whole Foods' CEO is anti-union and anti-consumer co-op. Yet many advocates of natural and organic foods and many progressives and liberals have continued to support Whole Foods with their dollars.
After I moved back to NJ from Minneapolis I patronized Whole Foods for their meats even though I knew from interviews with Whole Foods butchers and meat cutters in Minnesota and Texas that Whole Foods feed lots much of their beef at the end of their life cycle -- even the natural and organic cuts. And I always shook my head at the lack of locally sourced produce, fruits, eggs and dairy at Whole Foods, even in a Garden State like New Jersey.
But what choice did I have in winter and early spring? New Jersey lacks the great collection of local food co-ops that Minnesota boasts and the resources for locally raised chicken and pork like southeast Minnesota, southwest Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa. And Whole Foods is a pleasant shopping experience. Many of the smaller Whole Foods have a great market feel to them, and Whole Foods' stores are well merchandised, exceptionally clean, and make great use of lighting. Rather than overwhelming you with signage, the flow and format of the stores guides you to where you need to be.
It's a good place to shop from a merchandising perspective. However, Mackey and Whole Foods fail to live up to their mission statement and fail to fully respect the lnterdependent Web of Life of which we are all a part.
Ethan Nichtern, a Buddhist, Whole Foods Shopper, and founder of the Interdependence Project has a must read essay on our collective responsibilities to one another and John Mackey's failure to embody this in his Wall Street Journal commentary. Nichtern writes:
"the Buddhist teachings on the truth of interdependence don't allow us to stop at the level of individual health and wellbeing. The more we pay attention to reality, the more we see the total impossibility of taking care of our own bodies and minds without taking care of others. The more we see interdependence -- that our lives do not happen in a vacuum, separate from the lives of others -- the more we realize that our own health is inextricably bound up with the health of others. If you are healthier, then I am healthier, and vice versa. This is true physically, this is true psychologically, and this is true communally.
If John Mackey wants to take his failed libertarian ideals and his Whole Foods brand into battle against President Obama and meaningful healthcare reform than I say bring it on. Not only will we fight you on the healthcare front, we'll extend the battle to EFCA and workers rights and right on into agriculture and organic standards.
We'll fight hard to get back to a true free market economy where an abundance of farmers, local markets, small businesses and regional chains supply locally raised and grown foods to our tables. We'll fight hard for a free market economy where butchers and food workers make middle class wages and can afford to live in pleasant communities with good schools, good libraries, and abundant recreational opportunities. And we'll fight hard for collective bargaining and the right to organize to ensure that butchers and other workers earn middle class wages and are treated with dignity and respect.
Our public commons have been failing for a long-time because of people like John Mackey. It's time we became the change we believe in and not let failed libertarian ideals and naked corporate greed hijack our opportunity to move the nation forward.
Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey has struck a nerve with his anti-worker, anti-common good, failed libertarian arguments in the Wall Street Journal. It's important that we push back hard against this CEO ideologue who seems intent on joining the right wing noise machine.
Mackey is essentially promoting a bankrupt free market philosophy as the anecdote to a failing public commons. It's been known for quite a while to those of us who have worked in and around the food industry that Whole Foods' CEO is anti-union and anti-consumer co-op. Yet many advocates of natural and organic foods and many progressives and liberals have continued to support Whole Foods with their dollars.
After I moved back to NJ from Minneapolis I patronized Whole Foods for their meats even though I knew from interviews with Whole Foods butchers and meat cutters in Minnesota and Texas that Whole Foods feed lots much of their beef at the end of their life cycle -- even the natural and organic cuts. And I always shook my head at the lack of locally sourced produce, fruits, eggs and dairy at Whole Foods, even in a Garden State like New Jersey.
But what choice did I have in winter and early spring? New Jersey lacks the great collection of local food co-ops that Minnesota boasts and the resources for locally raised chicken and pork like southeast Minnesota, southwest Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa. And Whole Foods is a pleasant shopping experience. Many of the smaller Whole Foods have a great market feel to them, and Whole Foods' stores are well merchandised, exceptionally clean, and make great use of lighting. Rather than overwhelming you with signage, the flow and format of the stores guides you to where you need to be.
It's a good place to shop from a merchandising perspective. However, Mackey and Whole Foods fail to live up to their mission statement and fail to fully respect the lnterdependent Web of Life of which we are all a part.
Ethan Nichtern, a Buddhist, Whole Foods Shopper, and founder of the Interdependence Project has a must read essay on our collective responsibilities to one another and John Mackey's failure to embody this in his Wall Street Journal commentary. Nichtern writes:
"the Buddhist teachings on the truth of interdependence don't allow us to stop at the level of individual health and wellbeing. The more we pay attention to reality, the more we see the total impossibility of taking care of our own bodies and minds without taking care of others. The more we see interdependence -- that our lives do not happen in a vacuum, separate from the lives of others -- the more we realize that our own health is inextricably bound up with the health of others. If you are healthier, then I am healthier, and vice versa. This is true physically, this is true psychologically, and this is true communally.
If John Mackey wants to take his failed libertarian ideals and his Whole Foods brand into battle against President Obama and meaningful healthcare reform than I say bring it on. Not only will we fight you on the healthcare front, we'll extend the battle to EFCA and workers rights and right on into agriculture and organic standards.
We'll fight hard to get back to a true free market economy where an abundance of farmers, local markets, small businesses and regional chains supply locally raised and grown foods to our tables. We'll fight hard for a free market economy where butchers and food workers make middle class wages and can afford to live in pleasant communities with good schools, good libraries, and abundant recreational opportunities. And we'll fight hard for collective bargaining and the right to organize to ensure that butchers and other workers earn middle class wages and are treated with dignity and respect.
Our public commons have been failing for a long-time because of people like John Mackey. It's time we became the change we believe in and not let failed libertarian ideals and naked corporate greed hijack our opportunity to move the nation forward.
Some new developments today in the Whole Foods boycott. The purpose, to reiterate, is a show of support for real health care reform and to oppose the Whole Foods CEO who wrote an editorial favoring pretty much the opposite of what we'd like to see in health care policy.
Here are the newest developments: 1) a demonstration at Whole Foods headquarters in Austin today. A couple dozen sign-carrying demostrators came out to agitate for the cause, bringing the boycott right to corporate headquaters. Some local media coverage will likely result.
The other new development concerns the boycott Facebook page which is nearing 10,000 members. It needs just over 500 more members to hit that milestone. Here is a link to it, please help spead the word and get it over the mark. Tomorrow could be a pivotal day. It may be the day Wall Street traders really notice the story. Two publications, the Motley Fool and The Business Insider, ran stories late Friday and this weekend respectively. They took a mostly pro-business stance, not surprisingly, but it served to bring the controversy to investors attention. Fox News was the latest national media outlet to run a story.
The Whole Foods boycott we helped initiate with a post late Wednesday night finally got a response from the company this evening. I'll respond more fully tomorrow with a post here which I'll cross post at the Big Orange Satan. But here are a few things to chew on in the meantime:
1. The apology doesn't come from CEO John Mackey but from the PR team at Whole Foods. It's kind of a "sorry our CEO is an asshat" kind of thing.
2. The PR folks say he was just giving his opinion on health care not Whole Foods' opinion but then they go on to defend his opinion. Huh? When I give my own personal opinion I don't have a PR team which doesn't represent me then go and defend me.
3.They blame the WSJ editors for a misleading headline which made it seem like it was a Whole Foods' position, not just Mackey's but a) Mackey's piece included Whole Foods' health plan as an alternative solution and b) was invited into the WSJ because it was written by the Whole Foods CEO, not just some citizen named John Mackey. In short, their headline was not surprising. And it was clear from the piece he was not a fan of almost every health care reform element the President has advocated.
4. You can't have it both ways. You can't have a CEO against real health care reform, using his CEO status to write high profile opinion pieces, and at the same time say "sorry, it's just his personal opinion. Please keep shopping here because we're a progressive store and many of our employees have tattoos even if our CEO wears an ass-shaped hat."
5. "Coincidentally" this apology comes just as Wall Street noticed the boycott. A piece ran this evening on Motley Fool, a widely read report on stock trading which is affiliated with CNN.com's Money section.In after hours trading the stock continued it's downward fall and finished the day down 2%, a sizable one day drop. The Dow fell 0.82% today and the Nasdaq 1.19%. A few days before his WSJ OpEd, Mackey sold more than a million dollars worth of Whole Foods' stock. Details here.
You can see my earlier post on this here but there have been several new developments. This all stems from a WSJ piece written by the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods called "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare" in which he argues for insurance industry deregulation and a shrinking of the Medicare program. Here are the new developments:
1. A newly formed Facebook group promoting the boycott will soon surpass one thousand members. Not bad for a few hours but please join and send to your friends/family.
2. I cross posted the original Open Left post at Daily Kos this morning and it sat atop the rec list for three hours, useful exposure.
3. The Austin American Statesman (hometown of Whole Foods headquarters) has run a piece on their business blog with a link to both the Open Left post and the Facebook group.
4. The subject "Whole Foods boycott" has been Twittered about 200 times today with links to the aforementioned sites.
Help keep the momentum going and join the Facebook group, send the stories to your own networks, Twitter if you got it. It's only been hours but if we can increase this by an order of magnitude or two it will get significant publicity and send a message to corporate America.
Ok, this is really weird. Today, Bush National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was on Fox talking about whether Bush would boycott the Olympics' opening ceremony, and talked about the issue of "Tibet." Later the same morning he went on ABC and discussed the same issue, but he consistently talked about "Nepal."
(As Think Progress and CrooksandLiars point out, these are 2 distinct places.) Very curious -- is Hadley just a moron? Or is there some diplomacy-speak reason that someone would tell him to actively switch from "Tibet" to "Nepal" between shows?
For the last 3 decades and more companies have virtually shut out citizens from the legislative process.
I consider it important presently to take our politcal fight to some of the companies that give money to regressives in both parties.
I have created 3 telephone campaigns to peacefully take back America and I hope you will join them and tell as many people to make these phone calls as possible.
Some new developments today in the Whole Foods boycott. The purpose, to reiterate, is a show of support for real health care reform and to oppose the Whole Foods CEO who wrote an editorial favoring pretty much the opposite of what we'd like to see in health care policy.
Some local media coverage will likely result. 
