Granola crunching liberals have risen up in anger at Whole Foods CEO John Mackey after he said that health care is not an intrinsic right in an op-ed that appeared in The Wall Street Journal last week.

From the Washington Post

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 John Mackey, the chief executive. 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, which made Whole Foods’ liberal customer base go ballistic.

They are even talking about a boycott. And who knows? Maybe some will have to rethink shopping at Wal-Mart. Unions once attacked the retailer’s labor and benefits policies, but Wal-Mart has become the nation’s largest purveyor of organic products and recently espoused a position on health-care reform that is widely considered progressive.

What’s wrong with this picture?

“A lot of people have been paying a premium for the Whole Foods brand for years,” said Mark Rosenthal, a playwright living in Massachusetts who founded the Boycott Whole Foods group a few days ago. It has nearly 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 that 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 Web site to discuss the issue. There are more than 10,000 posts, compared with 77 posts on the raw foods forum.

Mackey is not the first corporate executive to wade into the contentious health-care debate, but other brands do not inspire the level of fanaticism that Whole Foods does. Safeway chief executive 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.

Safeway’s Burd got away unscathed because his company is seen as more of a mainstream grocery store while Whole Foods has always conjured up an image as a haven for liberal ideaology. 

Whole Foods may lose a few customers as a result of the op-ed but the fact is that the company has been remaking itself as the recession has taken a big bite out of sales and profits of its pricey organic foods and any liberal boycott will not impact the company much at all in the long run. 

 

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