Is the Whole Foods Boycott Fair?
Friday, August 21, 2009 at 08:41AM Rule number one in business: Don’t insult your customers. (Spoiler alert: More vulgar version of this rule below.)
When Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that American citizens do not have “any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter . . . . [t]his "right" has never existed in America,” he succeeded in violating that prime rule. Thousands of Whole Foods customers have reacted with a boycott effort, including an online petition with 20,000 signatures so far.
This raises a question: Does Whole Foods deserve this kind of attack? After all, Mackey is a U.S. citizen and entitled to his political opinions. Nor is he the only CEO in the U.S. who is against health care reform. Perhaps it is unfair that Whole Foods is somehow being singled out. Moreover, a consumer boycott is more likely to hurt hourly employees than the CEO himself. Layoffs from tumbling sales could result in more people without insurance rather than less.
From a practical standpoint, Whole Foods’ problem is that it caters to a liberal progressive clientele. It advertises on its website that it “sells the highest quality natural and organic foods available” and is “caring about our communities and our environment.” It further claims that “our success helps us bring about change in the marketplace, which we hope will lead to good things for you and us and the planet.” A company like that is angling for upper class liberals, coincidentally one of the core groups pushing for health care reform. Mackey should have taken the hint when the Journal agreed to run his piece in the first place. Any article conservative enough to get past the editorial staff at the WSJ is bound to anger an upper class liberal.
On one hand, I sympathize with Whole Foods. It’s just an opinion, after all. Whole Foods isn’t in charge of U.S. health care, and certainly its CEO has as much right to express his opinion as anyone else. The problem, however, is that there is a good time and a bad time to express obstructionist views. Health care reform is becoming a more and more urgent matter, and obstructing its passage looks less and less like loyal opposition and more and more like a high stakes game of organic chicken. This year, health care costs are north of 17% of GDP, and by 2015 will exceed 20% of GDP. To do nothing is to court economic catastrophe. And to argue for a conservative free market approach at this late date is nothing short of hypocritical.
Republicans ruled Washington from 1994 to 2008, and did nothing over that span to reform health care. After the Republicans shot down the Clinton plan in 1994 and won the House and the Senate, they had every opportunity to put their own ideas into action. Bill Clinton was always a centrist president, and probably would have gone along with any reasonable proposal. None was offered.
America is at the point now where the condition of our health system has passed the point of urgency, and is headed towards emergency. Expenses are rising at 7.5% a year. Did you get a 7.5% raise last year? If so, can you expect to get a 7.5% raise next year, and every year until you retire and can apply for Medicare? If your answer is no, you will eventually lose your private insurance plan. Premiums will outstrip your income until you can no longer afford it. That is a certainty.
That's why it is way too late in the game for us to go back to the free market drawing board. Conservatives had their chance, a long, lingering chance, and they chose to sit on stacks of corporate profits instead. Mackey, a self-described libertarian, wants to let free markets work. Even if free markets do work, how long will it take? The only thing the current free market system has done is drive prices relentlessly upward. Mackey blathers about future deficits, but we have a deficit right now, and I fail to see how private insurance is going to pay it off. Since the rapid growth of Medicare costs doom us to deficits for the next few years anyway, why not quickly institute a public option, get control of costs from the bottom up, and reform the entire system all at once? That seems like the sensible path to a balanced budget. But expecting Blue Cross, United Healthcare, and Cigna to save us is a fool’s hope. These companies are motivated by profit. They couldn’t care less how large the federal deficit is.
We are in the eleventh hour, which is why, reluctantly, I favor the Whole Foods boycott. Heath care has dominated the news for about a month. It has taken a herculean effort just to get the fight to this point, which in my estimation still only offers a 50-50 chance of workable reform. We have reached take-no-prisoners time. We are at the point in the hockey game when the team that is behind pulls its goalie out so it can charge the opponent’s goal with every available player. If we lose here, it could be years before the chance comes around again, and by then, the carnage will only have mounted.
If Whole Foods has to be made an example of, so be it. For decades, corporations have been steering health care debate in a direction favorable to them. Billionaires always seem to have bigger megaphones than thousandaires. The only way corporate America will go along with reform is if it learns the lesson Whole Foods is about to learn today: Don’t piss your customers off.
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