Annoying Hippie Capitalist Steps Down as Whole Foods Chairman
We won! Sorta! After we complained about the annoyingness of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and the media trend of finding it surprising that he is right-wing (he is a CEO), Mackey stepped down as Chairman of Whole Foods.
What is fun is that we won and unions won! The shareholder activists of ctW Investment Group, who manage union pension funds, have been agitating for Mackey to step down as chairman for months, because apparently it is bad to be both chairman and CEO. And Mackey's recent publicity blitz has not been very good for his company, because he keeps blowing everyone's mind by both being a vegetarian and namechecking Hayek. (Well, the ill will was fueled mostly his full-throated support for a market-based approach to ensuring that no one gets any health care unless they are directly employed by him.)
Of course as founder and still-CEO Mackey will still probably get all the space he could ever want in the op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal, as his company's stock plummets because the people who can still afford to pay too much for fancy fancy arugula don't like him anymore.