John Mackey's Online Double Life
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 07.15.07
Is Mackey too wacky to be CEO of Whole Foods?—that's the question the media is trotting out in the wake of the Wall Street Journal's recent disclosure that John P. Mackey has couched behind an online alter ego for the past seven years.
Using the handle "Rahodeb," an anagram of his wife Deborah's name, the vegan, organic-food-loving co-founder of the largest natural-foods chain typed out a voluminous 1,100-plus entries on Yahoo Finance's bulletin board, playing cheerleader to his own company, while occasionally skewering its rival, Wild Oats Markets, which Whole Foods is currently in the process of acquiring.
Was Mackey simply employing standard Machiavellian business practices or is he just plain quackers?
Salon dug up one post dated May 23, 2003:
I'm still around observing the chatter. My long-term investment position is intact as is Whole Foods fundamental story. Fluctuations from quarter to quarter are irrelevant to a long-term investor such as myself. Mr. Market's manic/depressive behavior on Whole Foods recently has been interesting to watch but doesn't really matter over the long-term. It was inevitable that Whole Foods same store sales would regress back to their long-term average of 8%. Since the company will be comparing against 10%+ same store sales for the next 3 quarters I don't expect either the comparisons to be very strong (Whole Foods management has guided this way as well) or the stock price to gain very much (unless the stock market itself carries it up with a Bull Market which it might).What is the most interesting thing to me is that Whole Foods is building up its real estate pipeline at a rapid clip. 12 new store leases announced in the last 2 quarters and over 1.2 million sq. ft. of real estate in development. Growth will be accelerating again beginning next year. If the stores in development are good ones (and new leases keep being added at the same rate) then Whole Foods is going to be increasing both its top and bottom lines at a 15% to 20% for the next 5 years. If so, then the stock price will likely double in 4 to 5 years. Good enough for me!
It remains to be seen if Mackey will be written up for any legal shenanigans, though you'd think that the CEO of a publicly traded company would know to be more discreet with what could be construed as insider information, even if he thought he was safe behind the cloak of relative—till now, that is—anonymity.
Of Wild Oats, Rahodeb responded to a posting on March 28, 2006 with the following:
OATS has lost their way and no longer has a sense of mission or even a well-thought-out theory of the business. They lack a viable business model that they can replicate. They are floundering around hoping to find a viable strategy that may stop their erosion. Problem is that they lack the time and the capital now.”
Mackey's alias came to light in a footnote in a 40-page court document filed on June 6 by lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission, which is impeding his company's potentially $6.8 billion-per-year merger with Wild Oats on the ground that it would "create a monopoly in the operation of premium natural and organic supermarkets." ::The New York Times and :: Salon
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Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Don't Underestimate Whole Foods
- The Best Chocolate in the World on the Shelves at Whole Foods
- Rub Elbows at Opportunity Green!
- Obama’s Economic Stimulus Plan: Cleaning Up Washington, or Greenwashing?
what a shmuck.
Why is this surprising? As far as I know it is common practice in a large number of firms to hire PR people to anonymously post, filter, skew, or whatever you want to call it, info in public media that can affect important sectors of public opinion. It wouldn't surprise me if a significant (but small) percentage of all the comment posts in most blogs and online forums are made by people that are either paid directly to attempt to sway public opinion or are people who have an economic interest in swaying public opinion. What is suprising is that this guy got caught red-handed.
It's hard to believe a big company would do this. You expect this from penny-stock jobbers and promoters, companies which really have nothing to lose. This not only distorts the market, it hurts Whole Foods shareholders, because if company officials are allowed to do anonymous pumping, they can time it to their allowed personal stock liquidations, leaving the remaining stockholders at a higher risk for stock deflation. We pay these CEO dudes tens of millions of dollars instead, because they're specifically NOT allowed to do this.
This is interesting. I often wonder whether celebrities / CEOs post online using supposed anonymous identities.
Nothing is truly anonymous online of course. A determined person investigating an online identity can almost always find the true identity if he/she posts with any regularly, no matter how much precaution they take.
I've had a Treehugger editor recently leave a comment on my blog anonymously (which I had to take down because of its vitriolic content) in response to my comment on a Treehugger post.
Treehugger exposed?
I also found out recently there are a bunch of Treehugger writers who regularly DIGG Treehugger posts irrespective of their content once someone submits it to Digg.com. For example see the following posts
Post 1 24 Diggs
Post 2 20 Diggs
Post 3 29 Diggs
Post 4 25 Diggs
What's common in all the posts above is that they were all made on Treehugger and were dugg by the same 20-odd contributors (apart from a few others) who routinely write on Treehugger. The names include: THMike, SamiGrover, PetzTH and so on.
If a story gets on Digg.com main page, it promises a heavy windfall in traffic so I'm not surprised Treehuggers are so eager to Digg their own stories.
But whether it is ethical is another question. I certainly did not expect these standards from Treehugger.
I find it surprising because Whole Foods positions itself as a different kind of company. From the Whole Foods Web site:
"Among the reasons Whole Foods Market was again named to the [Fortune magazine] 'Best Companies to Work For' list in 2007 are the company's long-standing executive salary cap and the recent announcement that company CEO John Mackey has reduced his annual salary to $1 and will forgo personal compensation from future stock options. ..."
Maybe Mackey had good intentions, with thoughts of a "greater good" in mind. But if he's been posting anonymously about Whole Foods, it makes me question how much all of the other positive things said about Whole Foods are true. And that would definitely affect whether or not I choose to shop there in the future.
mmm, well I have a question, is organic food good enough? I mean is organic food that beneficial to us and the environment, anybody know about this?
thanks
mx
Organic food in the stock market?