Thursday, July 12, 2007

He also claimed that Wild Oats Reblochon was pasteurised

If you believed that your organic fruit and veg and grass-fed meat was coming with kid-glove corporate ethics at Whole Foods, think again. Today's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) reports that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted frequently on a Yahoo bulletin board under the pseudonym Rahodeb1 -- using the forum to praise Whole Foods and trash rival Wild Oats. The fact that Whole Foods is now trying to take over the latter, and that he talked up the Whole Foods stock price, puts him in dodgy legal territory.

And then there's the Internet bubble style predictions like --

13 years from now Whole Foods will be a $800+ stock before splits

Maybe 13 years is far enough away that there's not much meat to that "prediction."

The main crisis though may not be at the board of Whole Foods, but at the keyboard of the National Review's Jonah Goldberg, with his book Liberal Fascism: From Hegel to Whole Foods, coming out in December. The issue: how to fit Internet sock-puppetry into the narrative, which the publisher would surely love to have a nice topical hook.

1 Rahodeb being the lamest of lame pseudonyms -- his wife's name spelled backwards (and two letters switched).

UPDATE: Here's the New York Times story.

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