Last week Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he
strongly opposed any government effort to provide universal health care. ("Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and
shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial
market exchanges.") This has led to calls for a boycott of the supermarket chain.
Radley Balko thinks the boycott threat is juvenile:
You’re saying, “These opinions are so horrifyingly offensive, they
outweigh all the good your company does, and therefore, I’m going to
punish you, your employees, and all of your suppliers.” See, I find that offensive...
[Mackey's] mistake was assuming you all were open-minded enough consider these ideas without taking offense—that
you wouldn’t throw a tantrum merely because he suggested some reforms
that didn’t fall in direct line with those endorsed by your exalted
Democratic leaders in Washington. In retrospect? Yeah, it was a bad
move. Turns out that many of you weren’t nearly mature enough to handle
it.
I agree that Whole Foods employees shouldn't suffer for their boss's political views. Of course, they could also lose their jobs at any time if their boss makes a dumb marketing decision, or opens too many stores too fast and then has to close some of them, or sells off assets to buy another company. And plenty of people must have lost their jobs when Whole Foods took over competitor markets or ran them out of business. It doesn't seem fair to say that consumers have a responsibility to preserve Whole Foods jobs when Whole Foods itself doesn't have that responsibility.
And, of course, no one is proposing a hunger strike here. Every dollar spent at Whole Foods is a dollar not spent at Trader Joe's, Safeway, Stop & Shop, etc. So a boycott of Whole Foods merely transfers spending to those other chains and makes them stronger. I don't see how a boycott is going to mean a net loss in wages for supermarket employees.
Meanwhile, Matthew Ygelsias sees some merit in a backlash against Mackey:
...there’s asking a CEO to pander to your prejudices, and there’s
pressuring a CEO not to go out of his way to offend your prejudices.
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.
I agree, and I would add that Balko lists 13 reasons why a boycott makes no rational sense, but he doesn't address how it makes irrational sense. And the health care reform debate passed into irrationality long ago. Remember the success of health care reform proponents in disrupting town meetings and Sarah Palin's supposed victory against Obama's nonexistent "death panels." If Whole Foods loses business in the wake of Mackey's editorial, the media will report a rare political success for health care reform. It's not the most high-minded kind of victory, but it will get the attention of the cable news networks, thanks to its camera-ready qualities.
That is, if the organizers against Whole Foods remember to come up with entertaining signs.
