Will Whole Foods CEO John Mackey please, please, please talk to me about his sex life?
Nick Paumgarten’s new New Yorker profile of Mackey includes this sentence: “‘I am not going to talk about my sex life,’ (Mackey) told me, without my having asked him to.”
Later in the piece, there’s this:
Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he put it, “no scientific consensus exists” regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow “hysteria about global warming” to cause us “to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.” One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, “Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.”
Paumgarten writes that Whole Foods is a place where “the customer is still always mostly right.”
This (occasional) customer would find it a lot easier to remain a customer if Mackey would keep his views to himself. The next time he feels compelled to hold forth on climate change or write a WSJ op-ed trashing the “socialism” of health-care reform, he should just fill the awkward silence with talk of his sex life. Spare no details. Really. I’ll listen. No interruptions. No disapproving looks. No prudery. I promise.
