John Mackey Quotes
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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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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 really think people should live to be 100 years old pretty much disease-free. I think that's our genetic potential.
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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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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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Profits are one of the most important goals of any successful business, and investors are one of the most important constituencies of public businesses.
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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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I was in my early 20s and open to alternative lifestyles. I thought, 'I bet you get a lot of attractive, interesting women in a vegetarian co-op.'
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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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I kind of have this sense of mission now when we talk about success: I'd really like Whole Foods to contribute to the healing of America, and the success of that may be measured in decades rather than in months, but I think we're on the way to doing it.
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While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system.
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Not everyone is born to run a $4 billion company. There is no magic formula. I've learned, and I've grown by learning. That's why I've enjoyed being in business so much: It's stretched me.
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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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Every man, woman and child consumes, on average, 43 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 13 days, that adds up to a five-pound bag of sugar.
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The more profit we make, the more stores we can open, the more donations we can make to our community, the more responsible citizens we can be for the environment. It's all interactive. It's all connected together. There's no separation.
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I'm very encouraged by millennials and their drive to make the world a better place.
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The right actions undertaken for the right reasons generally lead to good outcomes over time.
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I reject the premise that liberal and libertarian values are necessarily in conflict. In fact, I often self-identify as a 'classical liberal.'
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If you're growing very rapidly, it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, in a way, because the growth kind of bails you out.
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The original entrepreneur may initiate the initial purpose, but, in a sense, like a parent that has children, the children have their own destiny, and at some point, that can veer off away from the wishes the parent might have for it.
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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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More than once in the history of Whole Foods Market, the company was unable to collectively evolve until I myself was able to evolve - in other words, I was holding the company back. My personal growth enabled the company to evolve.
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I always like to say that our brand or our philosophy has always been kind of this marriage between the 'food as indulgence,' and it's also been about 'food as health,' that food is vitality.
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We do take seriously our responsibility, and growing ability, to educate people about healthy eating and giving them greater access to nourishing and affordable fresh food.