Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News. Delighted to have him here.
Speaker 1: Safe to say he changed how we think about grocery
Speaker 1: store supermarkets, made us start to care about how and
Speaker 1: who is producing the food we eat. John Mackie co
Speaker 1: founded Whole Foods Market back in nineteen eighty. Amazon bought
Speaker 1: it in twenty seventeen. One store in Austin now more
Speaker 1: than five hundred today in the United States, in the
Speaker 1: UK and Canada, John co authored in New York Times
Speaker 1: and Wall Street Journal best selling book. It was titled
Speaker 1: Conscious Capitalism, Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, and his
Speaker 1: follow up was Conscious Leadership Elevating Humanity through Business. He's
Speaker 1: written cookbooks about diet, health, longevity, and more. Now he's
Speaker 1: written about his personal and professional journey as CEO of
Speaker 1: Whole Foods for more than forty years. It's all in
Speaker 1: that new book. It is entitled The Whole Story Adventures
Speaker 1: in Love, Life and Capitalism. We welcome John Mackey here
Speaker 1: in our Bloomberg Interactive Story.
Speaker 2: Hello, how are you fantastic?
Speaker 1: It's great to have you here. I want to start
Speaker 1: with where you guys started, and I'm curious what you
Speaker 1: think turned out even better? Than you thought from that
Speaker 1: first single store in Austin, And what might you have
Speaker 1: liked to have seeing Gon differently if you could change that.
Speaker 2: I mean, we were just kids, Renee and I. I
Speaker 2: was when by the time it opened, I was twenty five.
Speaker 2: Her name was twenty one, so I didn't have a
Speaker 2: business background, neither did she. But we were very young
Speaker 2: and idealistic and energetic, and in the first store was
Speaker 2: actually called Safer way back in nineteen seventy eight, it
Speaker 2: was vegetarian store, and we just wanted to sell healthy
Speaker 2: food to people, earn a living and have some fun.
Speaker 2: I mean in a lot of ways. That continued all
Speaker 2: through Whole Foods Market's destiny. We didn't have big growth
Speaker 2: plans that kind of came along after we relocated that
Speaker 2: first store, which was in an old Victorian house on
Speaker 2: a non commercial street. It was not a great place
Speaker 2: for a store, but the first real whole Foods market.
Speaker 2: When we also emerged with another small natural food store,
Speaker 2: there were our friends and together we changed the brand
Speaker 2: a Whole Foods Market. Fantastic location, and the store just
Speaker 2: took off, and then we had a terrible flood nine
Speaker 2: months after we opened up. Didn't we built. We knew
Speaker 2: we built in one hundred year flood zone. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: we had one hundred year flood in the first year
Speaker 2: and first and it had been seventy years since there
Speaker 2: had been a flood like that in Austin. So that
Speaker 2: caused us to need to get a second store, and
Speaker 2: then that was successful too, and then a third store,
Speaker 2: and then I suppose we really started thinking bigger back
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty nine when we opened our first store
Speaker 2: in California. We were California dreaming and we opened one
Speaker 2: in the Bay Area in Palo Alto, California. That took off,
Speaker 2: and it's kind of like, wow, maybe we could even
Speaker 2: be a national company. So it's just changed a lot.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't It wasn't like we were MBA students
Speaker 2: that had done this market research and decided we were
Speaker 2: going to build this national company. We were just young
Speaker 2: kids kind of having fun, and for lack of a
Speaker 2: better term, it was much more organic than that. Very
Speaker 2: very good tim You got to thank you, hey, would.
Speaker 1: You have liked anything to have gone differently? Like if
Speaker 1: you could change things?
Speaker 2: You know? A question I get asked a lot by
Speaker 2: media is something like, if you could go back and
Speaker 2: tell your younger self. What would you want to tell
Speaker 2: your younger self? And I kind of have three jokes
Speaker 2: that go along o. The first joke is it wouldn't matter,
Speaker 2: he wouldn't have listened to me. And the second joke
Speaker 2: is I would have told him not to get involved
Speaker 2: with that woman. And the third one is is the truth.
Speaker 2: I don't think I would tell him anything because I
Speaker 2: mean not that I didn't make any mistakes. I made
Speaker 2: a ton of mistakes, and I could have saved that
Speaker 2: younger self from making mistakes, but then I wouldn't have
Speaker 2: learned the lessons I needed to learn. And it all
Speaker 2: turned out so well, right.
Speaker 1: So even to sale to Amazon, I think so.
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, I mean people ask me if I
Speaker 2: have regrets, Do you regret selling to Amazon? And the
Speaker 2: answer is no, I regret the circumstances that that made
Speaker 2: that the best alternative for us? What was the best alternative?
Speaker 2: If I could go back to that time, I'd make
Speaker 2: the same exact decision, and the deal has worked out
Speaker 2: pretty well for Whole Foods. I mean, people don't realize
Speaker 2: that Amazon let us drop our prices. We need to
Speaker 2: lower our prices to combat the whole paycheck narrative, and
Speaker 2: they helped us. We couldn't have done that on our
Speaker 2: own as a pro public company, not easily. It would
Speaker 2: have been the markets wouldn't have tolerated the short term
Speaker 2: sell off in the stock, but we dropped it four
Speaker 2: times in the first two years. Under Amazon, they took
Speaker 2: the long term view. And then they also raised the
Speaker 2: pay of everybody in our company in the first six
Speaker 2: months they made you know, they went in with a
Speaker 2: fifteen dollars minimum wage and everybody else had to go
Speaker 2: up from there. So Amazon, and then when COVID hit,
Speaker 2: I mean, how could Whole Foods have possibly done all
Speaker 2: that the delivery Amazon's technology. So Amazon has been a
Speaker 2: great partner for Whole Foods.
Speaker 3: It's been a couple of years since you retired as CEO,
Speaker 3: and I'm wondering if today you can walk into a
Speaker 3: Whole Foods and just buy something, you mean, without being recognized,
Speaker 3: not without being recognized, but without being critical, or without
Speaker 3: finding yourself that you're working, or without finding yourself. Can
Speaker 3: you just go in there and shop without thinking about
Speaker 3: this was your entire career.
Speaker 2: You know a couple of points. The first one is
Speaker 2: if you're an entrepreneur and you create a business. It's
Speaker 2: a little bit like you're a parent and you have
Speaker 2: a child. Your child grows up and you can guide
Speaker 2: that job, but the child's not you, and the child's
Speaker 2: going to make some choices you don't agree with, and
Speaker 2: that's okay. You still love your child. So his whole
Speaker 2: food's doing exactly everything I would if I was still CEO,
Speaker 2: and the answers of course not. But one of the
Speaker 2: gifts that I gave to my successor, Jason Beekle, who
Speaker 2: who is the one I wanted? I picked Jason and Amazon.
Speaker 1: We just caught up with him at Milkin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jason's amazing, And one of my gifts to him
Speaker 2: was not to be hovering and watching and second guessing him.
Speaker 2: Just you know, as I have a mantra now it's
Speaker 2: not my problem any longer. And that's a gift to
Speaker 2: Jason because then people aren't coming to me complaining about
Speaker 2: stuff they know I'm not going to listen to him.
Speaker 1: Is capitalism? You co founded that movement and simply put,
Speaker 1: it's right. You know, we're thinking about business benefiting everybody,
Speaker 1: multiple stakeholders. Many would argue, you know, we talk about
Speaker 1: it in the business environment too, right, A lot of
Speaker 1: investors saying got to think about multiple stakeholders. The Business
Speaker 1: Roundtable like talks about it, so you know, I feel
Speaker 1: like we talk a lot John about the wealthier individuals
Speaker 1: at a company are doing really, really well and it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily trickling down. Has conscious capitalism, I'm curious how
Speaker 1: that has evolved in thought for you if it still holds, I.
Speaker 2: Mean conscious capitalisms. Now, I feel like it's being attacked
Speaker 2: on two fronts. It's being attacked. The traditional capitalists are
Speaker 2: attacking it because they're concerned. They don't want to lose control.
Speaker 2: They don't want the owners to lose control of the business.
Speaker 2: And rightly so the owners and the investors get paid last,
Speaker 2: after all the other stakeholders are paid. But then on
Speaker 2: the we'll say on the left, the anti capital list,
Speaker 2: there's trying to weaponize it in order to take power
Speaker 2: from traditional capitalism. And it's like, no, no, conscious capitalism
Speaker 2: is not an economic system. It's a management philosophy. It
Speaker 2: just really has some very basic principles. First principle is
Speaker 2: is that every business has this potential for higher purpose
Speaker 2: besides only making money. I mean my body produces red
Speaker 2: blood cells. If I to stop producing them, I'm going
Speaker 2: to die. But that's not my purpose in life to
Speaker 2: produce red blood cells. Business must make money or it
Speaker 2: will die. But that's not exactly why it exists. Why
Speaker 2: does it exist to create value for its customers. That's
Speaker 2: why it exists. Doctors heal people, teachers educate, Architects design things,
Speaker 2: Engineers construct things for customers. So do this business and
Speaker 2: so it has this higher purpose and it should articulate
Speaker 2: that higher purpose that unifies stakeholders together.
Speaker 1: Well, then do you think there's enough of conscious capitalism
Speaker 1: going on in society? There's capitalism going on, but do
Speaker 1: you think there's enough of conscious capitalism going on?
Speaker 2: I would like to be. First of all, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of what I call unconscious conscious capitalists. They don't
Speaker 2: know that they're conscious capitalism. But the second key principle,
Speaker 2: or that the stakeholders are interdependent. That doesn't mean all
Speaker 2: stakeholders are equal, no, I mean the customers are obviously
Speaker 2: the most important stakeholder, that's why the business exists. And
Speaker 2: who's second most important, Well, probably the investors are, and
Speaker 2: then probably the team members are third. After that, then
Speaker 2: you have suppliers, and you have the communities that were
Speaker 2: all part of they're all important, they're all interdependent, and
Speaker 2: a conscious business is going to take care of all
Speaker 2: of them, recognizing the ranking. There is a hierarchy and
Speaker 2: there should be. Business is not people judge business because
Speaker 2: it doesn't act altruistically all the time. And it was like,
Speaker 2: what part of our society does. It's human nature to
Speaker 2: be both both self interested in looking out for yourself
Speaker 2: and looking out for your families first and then, but
Speaker 2: also generous and caring and compassionate. We're both. We're complex beings.
Speaker 2: This bifurcating people and they're either all completely altruist or
Speaker 2: they're completely self and greedy bastards. That's just wrong. That's
Speaker 2: not the way human nature is, and business isn't that way.
Speaker 2: But no other part of our society is either.
Speaker 3: You talk about this in your book, and you learned
Speaker 3: a tough lesson. I think it was back in two
Speaker 3: thousand and nine when you were hiking on a trail
Speaker 3: and you found that the Wall Street Journal had published
Speaker 3: editorial that you had written. They called it The Whole
Speaker 3: Fields Alternative to Obamacare. Eight things we can do to
Speaker 3: improve healthcare without adding to the deficit, and it got
Speaker 3: you in some hot water at the time people are
Speaker 3: boycotting your stores. My question for you is not about
Speaker 3: is not about that. It's about what do you think
Speaker 3: you can say now that you are no longer CEO
Speaker 3: of Whole Foods that you weren't able to say during
Speaker 3: your entire career because you were worried about people boycotting
Speaker 3: stores or people coming after you.
Speaker 2: It's a great question, and I mean, my big learning
Speaker 2: from that experiences is that people do not separate the
Speaker 2: CEO from the company, or at least the founder or
Speaker 2: the entrepreneur company. I thought, look, America, free speech. I'm
Speaker 2: expressing my personal views, but no one saw it that way.
Speaker 2: They saw it. This was Whole Food's views, and so
Speaker 2: and so. There was there were boycotts, and there were bycots,
Speaker 2: and there's hundreds of letters coming into maybe even thousands
Speaker 2: of letters and emails coming into our board demanding I'd
Speaker 2: be fired. So I kicked a hornet's nest. And it's like,
Speaker 2: so I went away from that realizing, Okay, I get it.
Speaker 2: I can't. I don't want to hurt my child, you know,
Speaker 2: So I'm not going to speak up the board actually
Speaker 2: instructed me never ever again write an op ed piece
Speaker 2: that we haven't signed off and approved. So so what
Speaker 2: could I say today? I could say anything I wants
Speaker 2: to say, except I'm a place in my life where
Speaker 2: I've concluded that political talk just gets people so riled up.
Speaker 2: Today we're like these two big tribes that hate each other,
Speaker 2: and people are constantly trying to sort you out which
Speaker 2: tribe are you in, because do I love you or
Speaker 2: do I hate you? And it's like, I'm kind of
Speaker 2: not in either one of those tribes because I really
Speaker 2: believe I believe in capitalism, I believe in I believe
Speaker 2: in personal liberty and freedom of speech and freedom of thought,
Speaker 2: and I don't fit into the two big tribal boxes.
Speaker 2: So I can now speak about politics only more or
Speaker 2: less decided I don't want to.
Speaker 1: But is it an interesting coming off the pandemic where
Speaker 1: and George Floyd, the killing of George Floyd, where we
Speaker 1: did see CEOs come out and take positions, and I
Speaker 1: feel like employees wanted their CEOs and leaders to take positions,
Speaker 1: and we talked about the importance of it. So what
Speaker 1: is the balance for a leader who is running a
Speaker 1: company and maybe there are some really important issues out
Speaker 1: there where they should take a stand.
Speaker 2: Here's what I did at Whole Foods during that period
Speaker 2: of time, and this is what I'd actually recommend for
Speaker 2: other CEOs to do as well. First of all, if
Speaker 2: an issue is directly related to the purpose of your business,
Speaker 2: you know, like you should take a stand. Whole Foods
Speaker 2: took stands on animal welfare, seafood sustainability, things that direct
Speaker 2: the organic agriculture, regenerative agriculture. These are things that are
Speaker 2: directly important to our purpose and why we exist. So
Speaker 2: I think definitely those are things appropriate to speak up on.
Speaker 2: But then it's like all the social justice stuff that's
Speaker 2: not really Whole Foods markets. We can't solve all the
Speaker 2: problems in the world we've got. We're a mission driven
Speaker 2: business and we have to focus on our business. So
Speaker 2: I remember telling team members that were wanting me to
Speaker 2: speak up on these issues, and I said, listen, I
Speaker 2: believe in freedom of speech. So whatever you want to
Speaker 2: do when you're not at work at Whole Foods, you
Speaker 2: should do that. You want to advocate for certain political changes,
Speaker 2: you should do it. But while you're working for our company,
Speaker 2: we want you to focus on the purpose for why
Speaker 2: we exist, and we're here to nourish people in the planet,
Speaker 2: and so that's a big cause to help people be healthier,
Speaker 2: eat healthier food, work on that on our time, and
Speaker 2: then do whatever you want on your time. And because
Speaker 2: I can't separate myself as again and I don't, as
Speaker 2: I told you from the two thousand and nine things,
Speaker 2: there's no way I'm going to come out and take
Speaker 2: these political stands right. I can't even my board and
Speaker 2: wouldn't let me do it anyway. We got kicked really
Speaker 2: hard on that one. I I'm never going to do
Speaker 2: it again.
Speaker 3: I understand that idea of sort of staying in your
Speaker 3: lane when you're a business, but I also think that
Speaker 3: in this day and age, there are issues that can
Speaker 3: affect a business even if you don't think they will.
Speaker 3: We were talking about affordable housing earlier and the fact
Speaker 3: that the majority of New Yorkers don't earn enough to
Speaker 3: live in New York City at a rate that would
Speaker 3: be deemed you know, affordable thirty percent of your salary.
Speaker 3: So what happens to a business if it can't find
Speaker 3: employees because the people can't live in that area where
Speaker 3: the business is.
Speaker 1: I did a whole piece when you guys opened in Detroit,
Speaker 1: like it was a big deal to go into that area.
Speaker 2: First of all, I do I really empathize for that position,
Speaker 2: because I know when I was CEO Whole Food is
Speaker 2: that most of our team members that work in our
Speaker 2: Manhattan stores don't live in Manhattan, right They're living in
Speaker 2: the Bronx or Queens or Brooklyn or some other place.
Speaker 2: So I am empathetic to that. However, I have a
Speaker 2: different you know, I mean, I'm going to speak up
Speaker 2: on politics. Really briefly. I mean, the reason we don't
Speaker 2: have enough affordable housing is because we've regulated it out
Speaker 2: of existence. And I always people ask me what to
Speaker 2: do about this problem. I say, we ought to create
Speaker 2: just like some countries create enterprise zones where the rules
Speaker 2: don't apply. There'd be so if a city like New
Speaker 2: York would set aside and places in Manhattan that would
Speaker 2: be sort of free building zones where they wouldn't have
Speaker 2: any taxes for housing. Affordable housing would not be taxed,
Speaker 2: would be no real estate taxes. You'd have different sets
Speaker 2: of regulations, say on the disability acts. You go to
Speaker 2: Europe and you don't have all of the you don't
Speaker 2: have to put an elevator in everywhere and these areas.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying those regulations aren't good, but I'm saying
Speaker 2: if we want to have more affordable housing, that really
Speaker 2: drives the cost of housing up. And thirdly, manufactured housing
Speaker 2: is the way to do it to make affordable housing.
Speaker 2: If you look at where most poor people in America live,
Speaker 2: they live in mobile homes. They live in manufactured housing,
Speaker 2: which is far more affordable. That's not really legal inside
Speaker 2: many cities. But if we allowed manufactured housing to come
Speaker 2: in and deregulate some of these areas, you would find
Speaker 2: Manhattan could have plenty of affordable housing.
Speaker 1: Interesting, we have forty five seconds left. Your book is
Speaker 1: called The Whole Story. There's so much more in there,
Speaker 1: and I wish we had more time. I don't know,
Speaker 1: why do you want people to read this book?
Speaker 2: This book is first of all, it reads like a novel.
Speaker 2: It's fun, it's full of joy, it's full of love.
Speaker 2: I mean, the things that I talk about in the
Speaker 2: book are creativity, entrepreneurship, and love. And this traces my
Speaker 2: own personal growth both emotionally, psychologically as a leader, and spiritually.
Speaker 2: It's a fun read. I really think people read they're
Speaker 2: going to like it.
Speaker 1: I hope you can come back because you obviously have
Speaker 1: lots to say and it's really engaging and fun. So
Speaker 1: good luck with it. Maybe when it comes back to
Speaker 1: paper book paperback, Rather have you come back? John Mackie,
Speaker 1: he's co founder of Whole Foods Market, joining us here
Speaker 1: in studio his latest book. His new book is entitled
Speaker 1: The Whole Story Adventures in Love, Life and Capitalism. So
Speaker 1: joining us here in our studio