恶人谷

August 17, 2009, 4:43 pm
Whole Foods Fight
By Eric Etheridge
Of all the sideshows to the Great 2009 Health Care Debate, the Whole Foods boycott may take the prize as the most unexpected.

Last Wednesday, John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to opine that “we clearly need health care reform,” but arguing against the solutions being put forward by the administration: “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.”

Mackey went on to offer eight ideas for reforms, including these four:

Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Reaction from pro-reform Whole Foods shoppers was swift and vociferous. As Brian Beutler noted the next day at TPM DC, Whole Food’s “Web site has been fielding angry comments all afternoon, and has had to set up an online forum where customers can vent their frustrations, and, oh, call for a boycott!”

“Here’s a thought,” added Beutler. “If you own a major supermarket chain that caters to a great deal of liberal-minded people with money, don’t rail against the evils of health care reform in The Wall Street Journal.”

At Daily Kos, blogger DarkSyde wondered if Mackey had lost sight of his demographic — “Mr. Mackey, I’m not sure if you understand who it is that shops at your organic grocery chain” — and, in case that had happened, reminded him:

A lot of progressives, vegetarians, professional and amateur athletes, and others who care so much about the environment and what they eat that they’re still willing to shell out three bucks for an organic orange, even in the midst of the worst recession in sixty years. I was proud [Whole Foods] was based in my hometown of Austin, and defended it against most of the conservatives I knew growing up there, many of whom still hold your entire business in utter contempt. Some of them ridiculed me for shopping at Whole Foods, with all the “tree huggers and granola eaters and hippies” who, incidentally, made you a millionaire.

At the Huffington Post, Ben Wyskida said “the bottom line for me, reading Mackey’s op-ed, is that by shopping at Whole Foods I’m giving money to a Republican and I am supporting by proxy a donation to the RNC and to health scare front groups like Patients First. I don’t give money to Republicans, so I will have to cross Whole Foods off my list.”

Not everyone was ready to join a boycott. Jill Richardson, who briefly worked in at Whole Foods in 2007, explained her reluctance to a boycott in a post at La Vida Locavore:

First things first about Whole Foods: The CEO, John Mackey, is a nut. He’s a Libertarian, he’s anti-union, and he stupidly went on financial blogs — anonymously — to praise WFM (and he got caught doing it). . . .

So is it a shock he just came out with an idiotic and harmful statement about health care? No. Is it an outrage? Yeah. Does it necessitate a boycott of WFM? I don’t know. . . .

I probably won’t end up boycotting Whole Foods, to be honest. I don’t have a whole lot of money so it’s not like I spend a lot there now anyway. I get most of my stuff from the farmers market and most of the rest of it from the co-op. If I was to pick a chain to boycott for political reasons, I’d probably start with Home Depot.

Waylon Lewis is another non-boycotter: Writing at the Huffington Post, he explains the reasons why, including the fact that “Whole Foods, thanks to [Mackey's] leadership, has shown the way for thousands of green-minded companies. He and WFM have shown Wall Street that green can make green. For that, I am grateful — there is a reservoir of gratitude that will not be easily overcome by his anti-union views.

These dissenting views notwithstanding, it seems clear that Mackey’s op-ed has cost him at least some shoppers on the left. The Boycott Whole Foods group on Facebook has now passed 11,000 members. However, Mackey has been picking up some new shoppers from elsewhere on the political spectrum.

“I plan to do a lot more shopping at Whole Foods in the coming weeks,” wrote Radney Balko at his blog, The Agitator. “Mostly in response to the moronic boycott of the store now gaining momentum on the left.

Let me see if I have the logic correct here: Whole Foods is consistently ranked among the most employee-friendly places to work in the service industry. In fact, Whole Foods treats employees a hell of a lot better than most liberal activist groups do. The company has strict environmental and humane animal treatment standards about how its food is grown and raised. The company buys local. The store near me is hosting a local tasting event for its regional vendors. Last I saw, the company’s lowest wage earners make $13.15 per hour. They also get to vote on what type of health insurance they want. And they all get health insurance. The company is also constantly raising money for various philanthropic causes. When I was there today, they were taking donations for a school lunch program. In short, Whole Foods is everything leftists talk about when they talk about “corporate responsibility.”

At his blog, Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher wrote, “I can understand why somebody would disagree with Mackey, but to take such a maximalist point of view on this issue, and to turn your back on a store that presumably has been a good friend to you and to the agricultural and environmental causes you care about? Good grief.”

I’m not sure where I come down on the health care reform debate, but I welcome people like Mackey — CEOs who run businesses that provide health care — offering their creative thinking to the discussion. This is yet another depressing example of how difficult it is for people in this country to go off the reservation and think creatively about politics, economics and culture without having their tribe come down on them like a ton of bricks. Do you really think this is the way to spur creative thinking and innovation?

At Think Progress, Matt Yglesias thinks there may be some value in “a world in which C.E.O.’s were reluctant to play the role of freelance political pundit out of fear of alienating their customer base.”

Corporate executives have a lot of social and political power in the United States, in a way that goes above and beyond the social and political power that stems directly from their wealth. The opinions of businessmen on political issues are taken very seriously by the press and by politicians on both sides of the aisle. Once upon a time perhaps union leaders exercised the same kind of sway, but these days all Republicans, most of the media, and some Democrats feel comfortable writing labor off as just an “interest group” while Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and Jack Welch are treated as all-purpose sages. One could easily imagine a world in which CEOs were reluctant to play the role of freelance political pundit out of fear of alienating their customer base. And it seems to me that that might very well be a nice world to live in.

At The Washington Post, Ezra Klein says the ideas in Mackey’s op-ed “aren’t new” and “won’t solve anybody’s health care problems.” But, he says, there are “some interesting insights on health care reform” that “come from the stores.”

Food is more like health care than it is like cable television. We worry if people don’t have enough food to eat. We worry quite a lot, in fact. So we have a variety of programs meant to ensure that people have sufficient food. If you don’t have much money, you rely on these programs. As of September 2008, about 11 percent of the population was on food stamps. It’s probably somewhat higher now. Millions more rely on the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, and reduced-price school lunches.

The insight that people need food has not led us to simply deregulate the agricultural sector (though that might be a good idea for other reasons) or change the tax treatment of food purchases or make it easier for rich people to donate to food banks, which is what Mackey recommends for health care. It’s led us to solve, or try and solve, the problem directly by giving people money to buy food. And that works. These programs, as every Whole Foods shopper knows, haven’t grown to encompass the whole population or set prices in grocery stores. If you have more money, you shop for food on your own. And if you have a lot of money, you shop at Mackey’s stores. That’s pretty much the model we’re looking at in this iteration of health care reform. We’re also laying down some rules so grocery stores — excuse me, health insurers — can’t simply refuse to sell you their product, or take it away after it’s already been purchased.

Mackey, playing to type, has offered a Whole Foods solution for health care: It makes the system even better for the rich and the young and the educated — the sort of people who shop at Whole Foods, in other words — and doesn’t do a lot for those who really need help. But the existence of a vibrant institution like Whole Foods within a broader system that considers it unacceptable — at least in theory — for the poor to go hungry, and so subsidizes their purchase of food, does have lessons for heath-care reform.