WASHINGTON — Whole Foods aficionados who assumed the company’s management was as crunchy as the brand are feeling betrayed.
They have stormed Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere to vent their rage at chief executive John Mackey. In an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal last week, he argued for health-care savings accounts and declared that health care is not an intrinsic right — ideas with a conservative bent that made Whole Foods’ liberal customer base go ballistic.
“A lot of people have been paying a premium for the Whole Foods brand for years,” said Mark Rosenthal, a Massachusetts playwright who founded Boycott Whole Foods a few days ago. It has more than 14,000 members. “A lot of people are sad to look at this corporation and see that it is just like any other, if not worse.”
Whole Foods spokeswoman Libba Letton said Mackey was expressing personal opinions in the op-ed and that the company has no official position on the issue.
Whole Foods has sent letters to customers apologizing for any offense and created a forum on its website to discuss the issue. It has garnered more than 10,000 posts.
Mackey is not the first corporate executive to wade into the health-care debate, but other brands do not inspire the fanaticism that Whole Foods does. Safeway chief Steve Burd wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in June that also called for market-based reforms in health care with nary a social-media ripple.
Mackey was unavailable for an interview, but on his blog, he blamed the column’s headline, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,” for sparking some of the furor. He noted that his piece did not mention the president. He did say, though, that the company provides high-deductible insurance for most of its employees.
