John Mackey Quotes
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Whole Foods Market tries to embody all of the principles of conscious capitalism all the time, but like any person or company, we sometimes fall short.
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Starting my own business was kind of a wakeup call in a number of different ways. I had to meet a payroll every week, and we had to satisfy customers, and we had competitors that we had to compete with in order to have those customers come into our stores, and we had to compete with other employers for our employees.
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It started when I moved into a vegetarian co-op back in the '70s, and that's really when I had my food consciousness awakened. I learned how to cook, and eventually I became the food buyer for the entire co-op. Not long after that, I went to work for a small natural food store in Austin, and I became very excited and passionate about it.
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We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state, and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.
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I really do believe that America has this weight problem - obesity issues - and we have all these diseases that we get - heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases - that are primarily lifestyle diseases.
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Food is intensely pleasurable, and people are afraid that if they change the way they eat, they'll stop having pleasure.
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If you have a mental model that says big corporations are fundamentally greedy and selfish and exploitative, you don't really want to have an exception to that model. It's much easier to say, 'Yes, Whole Foods has been corrupted.'
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I'm very encouraged by millennials and their drive to make the world a better place.
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I've always thought the main argument for organic was more environmental than a health argument. I just don't think spraying a lot of pesticides into the environment on a routine basis is a good thing.
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The stakeholder approach to business sees integration rather than separation, and sees how things fit together.
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I think it's absolutely essential that the people that work for a company need to feel that they're part of something bigger - that it's not just a job.
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We knew it was going to be a market, and we knew it was a food market. Well, what kind of food market? It's kind of natural foods, kind of organic foods. So, we eventually settled on Whole Foods Market.
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The great thing about a culture is that once you really get it going, it evolves on its own. It's self-organizing. It's dynamic. It just feeds on itself.
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Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.
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One of the sad things about retiring is that you just become increasingly irrelevant. The world flows around you, and you don't seem to be impacting it any longer.
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I used to boast that Whole Foods was sort of recession-proof. And obviously I've been proven wrong. So I'm not boasting about that any longer.
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At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning, our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community.
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You can't live if you don't eat, but you don't live to eat. And neither does business exist primarily to make a profit. It exists to fulfill its purpose, whatever that might be.
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One of the most important things we do is we've organized our stores and our workforce into teams.
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I like games that are complex - the deeper you get into the game, the more there is to learn.
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Human beings are made up of many different values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other.
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We wanted to preserve as many jobs as possible, so when our sales continued to decline in August 2008, we did about a 5 percent reduction of our global staff. But in order not to cut any more jobs, we froze everybody's pay and put a hiring freeze on.
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People need to eat whole food plant foods, primarily... whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. That diet supports our lives. We ought to live to be 90 or 100 without getting any diseases.
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Free-enterprise capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress ever conceived. It is one of the most compelling ideas we humans have ever had. But we can aspire to something even greater.