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