You could be perfectly justified in your opinions about what he says about Health Reform. However, you should be aware that newspaper headlines are not written by the author of the articles They are written by the editors of the newspaper. So the word “ObamaCare” was written by the Wall Street Journal, not by the Whole Foods CEO.
Wishing you all the best.
Fuck all y’all who have any problem whatsoever with a person choosing with whom they do business.
I make choices like that all the time. I’ll decide to do business with a place again if I liked the atmosphere, the selection, the friendliness of the employees, the proximity to my house, the cute waitstaff. I go almost exclusively to one grocery store here because they don’t require me to have a plastic fob on my keychain in order to get the prices advertised.
We all make choices on how we spend our money for all sorts of personal reasons, many of which have nothing to do with “what object can I walk away with at what cost” and instead have to do with how we feel doing business at a given establishment.
People are throwing around the word ‘boycott,’ when the OP merely said she wasn’t going to shop there anymore (maybe that’s the same thing, but I have a feeling like some nuance is lost). Regardless, if I feel better about myself and my shopping experience going somewhere other than WF, then you bet I’m going to shop somewhere else. There’s nothing wrong with that choice, no matter what the reason, because my personal feelings are exactly what the business is targeting.
As Gonzomax said:
The experience soured for him and he went elsewhere. You can agree or disagree with his politics, but telling him he’s stupid for not spending his money in a place where he wasn’t having as positive an experience as he felt he should be getting? Ridiculous.
Who has a problem with it? It’s his money.
Equipose has a habit of lying in political threads. :shrug: Same old, same old.
From the Saturday hate mail-apalooza over at Daily KOS:
Sounds like they’re going to do some mass email forwarding too !
I wasn’t aware he was a restaurateur.
Now, I can tell you an interesting story about a local guy named Osama around here that did run restaurants - he seems to have fled the country and nobody seems to know where he is. Financial crimes, looks like.
Considering that I didn’t know this when I went to his steakhouse/sports bar, and considering that this establishment is now owned by another individual that I don’t have any conflict with, I won’t feel guilty should I return, though this isn’t my go-to hangout.
I don’t think Beck’s former sponsors really need to worry. It’s a big country, with plenty of other potential customers. All this hurts Beck more than it hurts them. He needs them, they don’t need him - especially if their business image suffers for sponsoring him.
I don’t pay enough attention to political threads, but I know that editors give the titles to OpEd pieces, and I easily might have attributed one to the author of the piece without thinking. Screw you for assuming the worst of people and implying that Equipoise said that with intent to deceive instead of accidentally.
Regardless of the accuracy of the posts, if I had to choose which one of you wasted my time in this thread, it’d be you.
Ah yes, the Accidental Liar.
The last time I set food in Whole Paychecks I fled in horror about twenty minutes later.
Cherries were two dollars extra a pound. The very same cream cheese brand was a dollar more than at a ShopRite twenty minutes down the road. From chicken breasts to frozen corn to peanut butter every single item I looked at was at least twenty percent more.
I will never set food in the place unless I have no other choice.
I’m just saying, and again, I have minimal background memory for SDMB political threads, that attributing the headline of an OpEd to the author is a pretty benign mistake, and is one more easily explained away by error than deceit, IMHO.
A critical difference is that segregated businesses were actively engaging in immoral business practices. The people who did sit-ins at lunch counters were protesting the fact that those lunch counters refused to let blacks sit in.
In this case, people are getting theri panties in a twist not over anything Whole Foods is DOING, but over a simple opinion held by the person who owns it. If you boycotted every business whose owner(s) held a different opinion from yours, you’d never be able to patronize any businesses.
Of course, you can do anything you want with your money, but I’m a little skeptical over people basing their decisions over what comments get play in the paper. I mean, really, that’s what the OP is about; this CEO got quoted in an article they read. That’s the difference. Probably a hundred businesses or more patronized by the OP have CEOs or directors who oppose this health care bill. They just don’t happen to have gotten into the paper.
Too many people confuse eating organic or even being a vegetarian or vegan with some automatic altruism or concern for the earth and it’s people. I know more than a handful of die-hard Whole Food fans who don’t give a shit if their organic granola comes in a pound of packaging or if their cleaning lady has to work extra hard because they’re making her use nothing but vinegar.
I have to admit, I have spent more than my fair share of lunch money at Whole Foods, but Michael Pollan made some really interesting points and discoveries in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that made me question some of their fairytale-like food ‘stories’ as well as the logic of prizing organic food from Peru over local stuff from family farms who haven’t gained organic certification for whatever reason (occasionally just that there is no non-organic-certified feed available in the area and they don’t want to truck some in over hundreds of miles).
While the guy’s got a point in some of his piece, being concerned for Americans’ health and eating habits does not quite work when you’re selling them $14 frozen rice milk and $2 apples.
While I do think that these should be available, for many of the near poor or working poor these can be a disaster.
I had a lowish deductible of 250 at one point, the problem was I just didn’t have it, so I ignored a sore throat. About three weeks later I woke up with achy joints and a horrid rash and headache. I had ignored strep throat and gotten scarlet fever. I was somewhat lucky in that the other option is rheumatic fever. 20$ worth of antibiotics would have saved a whole lot of people from exposure and me from risk of permanent heart damage. We need to be encouraging people to go to the doctor at the strep throat stage, not discouraging it. High deductibles wind up functioning almost like no insurance at all because people wait until things are an emergency rather than dealing with them when they are minor.
Among the things that make me snicker at how naive liberals are is their notion that corporate leaders of their pet corporations are as naive as they are from the standpoint of socialism as public policy.
It may be bad business to take public positions which annoy your customer base, but the facts are that business leaders heading up robust corporations didn’t get there by being personally socialistic.
What?! He doesn’t the government should run healthcare?! I am shocked. SHOCKED.
I’m willing to pay the extra for fresh fruit and veggies that aren’t all cut and bruised and about to start rotting, and for frozen veggies that aren’t all freezer-burned and chock-full of yummy stems and stones. But that’s all, regular shopping - canned and jarred and boxed staples and even milk - still come from a regular grocery store.
Nor do I much care about the owner’s political beliefs. If a business offers me value for my money, they’re going to get my money. Even the example of a restaurant with Bush stickers plastered everywhere wouldn’t bother me too badly, unless the waiter introduces himself with, “Hi, my name’s Tad, and I’ll be your proselytizer tonight. Our special is a nice Focus on the Family membership.”
Some companies make their money off their brand image. Whole Foods is one of them. Their customers like believing that this “isn’t an ordinary company” and that extends to the beliefs of its CEO. Since he’s GAINED customers by presenting himself as one kind of person, he can lose customers when they discover he is also another kind of person (or he isn’t the sort of person they thought he was).
And when you work with companies, you don’t always have choices to shop in line with your beliefs, but since that’s sort of the Whole Foods thing, it isn’t surprising that some people are saying they’ll boycott.
(I suspect, based off what I’ve read, that he is much less committed to both health and the environment than how he chooses to present himself - and that he presents himself in a certain way because he is smart enough to realize its good business…oops.)
A number of people, discovering that Mackay isn’t necessarily the guy they thought he was, will say they will boycott. Then they’ll come back discovering that in their market, Whole Foods carries the best selection of what they want (and their prices on SOME things are lower than other places). Other people will try someplace different, and discover the organic grocer market has really changed over the past few years. Others will give less of their business to Whole Foods. Others are just blowing smoke.
Um, guys (a couple of you, anyway), the CEO of a publicly traded company is not the owner of the company. He or she is just an employee.
Mackay was the founder as well as the CEO - so while he isn’t the owner, his relationship with Whole Foods is a lot more intimate than a hired gun CEO brought in three months ago to run the place. (And I’m sure he retains a significant ownership stake - he is certainly “an” owner - and probably one with enough shares to be able to significantly affect a shareholder vote.)
That’s what we have Trader Joe’s for.
Their prices still beat Whole Paychecks any day of the year.