John Mackey Quotes
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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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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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When we start a new store, we make sure that we transfer enough starter culture from other stores that are already Whole Fooders, who've already incorporated our values and our culture within themselves into the... into the store.
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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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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.
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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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It's not Apple's fault that they're seeking to avoid paying taxes. They're not lying, cheating or stealing. They're following the rules that were created by governments. If the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them.
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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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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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We've always tried to be good citizens in the communities that we do business in.
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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'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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A healthy society rests on three pillars: business, government and civil society, or non-profits. Each has a distinct and important role to play, and all three need to work together synergistically to create the most value for society.
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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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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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Operating under the conscious capitalism model will show that businesses are the true value creators that can push all of humanity upward for continuous improvement.
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Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one's ideological biases wish to see.
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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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Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.
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I think for any small business that's bootstrapped, the overwhelming challenge initially is getting to positive cash flow.
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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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Examine our every action through the lens of how we would feel if it were to become front page news.
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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.