YouSaid · the spoken record

John Mackey

lines on the record: 163
first: 2024-10-29
most recent: 2024-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My girlfriend was working that night and she swam out of the store because it happened kind of in late afternoon, early evening, and it was Memorial Day weekend. It was a Sunday night with Memorial Day the next day. So that had some good things to it. But you're asking about the banker that the thing I didn't know about stakeholders and I didn't have language for, but I experienced people that love your business because the day after the flood, we had, I don't know, dozens of people come in and help clean up the store that didn't work there. They were neighbors. They were customers. They didn't want us to die. They loved us. We had the suppliers gave us new inventory. Our employees worked for free while we, because we couldn't make a payroll. We didn't have any money. They worked for free until we could get back open again, which there was no assurance that we would. But the most remarkable.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to be eight feet of water. The shoal crease can overflow its banks. Water is going to come down in the Lamar. It's going to fill up your store. And I said, really? You're kidding, right? And he says, no, no, no. It's in the 100-year flood zone. And I said, well, when was the last time that happened? He says, well, I'm not rightly sure. It happened over 70 years ago before I was born. But that's what happened. And I was thinking, all right, well, what are the chances we're going to have a hundred-year flood anytime soon? And so I thought, well, I'm going to still take the risk. And he said, well, that's to be a little bit of margin error. Let's build a slab that's two feet high. So our store was two foot concrete slabs. He had to step up to get there, which made it a little hard for grocery carts to get down in the front, but we built a ramp for them to get down. Anyhow, we had the hundred year flood in the first year. We were hoping, and Renee.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah Nine months after we opened up that really successful store, the whole first Whole Foods market in nineteen eighty, when we were building it, the owner of the building, Texas good old boy named Ben Powell, he let me know that we were building it in the 100-year flood zone. And I said, well, what? What does that mean exactly, a hundred-year flood zone? He says, well, John, what it means, partner, is that about once every 100 years Austin's going to experience a hundred-year flood.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And I also think there's a tendency for all of us, including myself, to project our own failings out onto other people and criticizing them then. It's like you're not doing what I think you should do. Of course, I'm not doing anything. So it's easy to be a critic. It's actually hard to be an entrepreneur. It's hard to actually create anything. It's really hard, particularly anything that's going to be successful and meet the test of time. But it's very easy to find fault with what other people are doing. And, you know, I've learned the hard way. For example, I just don't read comments anymore. When this podcast is, if you allow comments on your podcast, I'm not going to read them because I'm going to get all those hates going to come my way. They hate whole foods. It's gone down since Amazon bought it. I hate John Mackey. He's a hypocrite. Blah, blah, blah, blah. The comments just allow people to vent all this negativity.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as long as we're into cliches, I'll give you a third one, which is the perfect is the enemy of the good. If you just want to have your ideals, you can have them, but you may not have a business. So you have to engage with the market. You can try to influence the market. You can try to educate the market. But at the end of the day, they vote every day with their pocketbooks, exactly what they want. If you're not prepared to serve them, what they want, then they're going to go find it somewhere else and your business may end up failing because you So there is that tension between your ideals, but then you have to mediate between them. I always like to say we're always pushing our ideals, but always listening to our customers. It's like a dialogue you're having or a dance. And if you don't dance with your partner, your partner is going to dance away from you. So you have to meet them where you find them.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always say, you know, you've heard this cliche. It's easy to be a saint on the mountaintop. It's easy for critics to judge and say you're selling out, you're betraying your ideals as I'm plant-based. I hear it all the time from vegans. You're a hypocrite. You say you're an ethical vegan, and yet Whole Foods sold meat, so you're just a hypocrite and a liar, or you're not even ethical vegan. I don't believe it, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, what exactly have you done if you think a vegan store will work? Do it. Don't just criticize other people if you think you can make out a viable business. The problem in that instance is that about half of 1% of Americans are vegan and 2% are vegetarian. So you just don't have a big, for that big of a market. And another cliche, which is true, is you kind of have to meet the market where you find it, not where you'd like it to be. So the tension between your ideals”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was, in fact, within six months it became the highest volume natural food store in the entire United States, based on everything I know about the world back then.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, a more grocery store that more people could identify with, particularly our generation, which was a kind of a counterculture, long hair, hippie generation that was looking to reinvent the world, starting with one of the first places to reinvent it was food. And so that store was immensely successful.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as luck or fate would have it, I found another location and had a lot of trouble persuading the investors to relocate and they would only do it if I found another big investor, which I did, buddy I play basketball with, pick up basketball with, and he inherited a lot of money from his parents who died. And he put in like $100,000, $50,000. And then we got more money from the shareholders and we relocated and changed the name to Whole Foods Market. And that was the first natural food supermarket in Texas. I'd been inspired by bread and circus in Boston and Mrs. Gooch's in LA and Fraser Farms in San Diego and thought this is an idea whose time could be coming. And that became immensely successful and we sold meat. We sold alcohol. We sold coffee. And we were still featuring natural organic foods, but we were also.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk to my girlfriend at the co op, Renee, and at this time I'm probably just about 23, and Renee's nineteen. And I said, Renee. What do you think we open up our own natural food store? And to change my life, Renee looked at me, grabbed my hands, looked me in the eyes, and said, she was a hippie. And she said, Oh, Mac Oman, that'd be so cool. Let's do it. And so we did. And if she'd said, that's a stupid idea, my life might, I wouldn't be here with you today. My life might have taken a completely different trajectory. But she said, she's excited about it. We did it together. And it was called Safer Way. It was a vegetarian store. And it was very pure. We didn't sell. We didn't sell meat. We didn't sell white sugar. We didn't sell alcohol. We didn't even sell coffee. And I would like to say we did very little business. We were not meeting the market where we found it, so to speak. It was our own ideals. And we did that for a couple of years, and we managed to lose about half the capital we'd raise, which of $45,000. But we began to figure out the business.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With super healthy food, if you do that, you feel better, your immune system be stronger, and we'll get sick as frequently, and you'll live longer, and you'll just probably over and all have a better life. I kind of got that when I moved into that co-op. I sort of had some older, wiser people in the co-op, and I learned how to cook. I became the food buyer for the co-op and I got deep into it. It was like, wow, this natural and organic foodstuff is pretty interesting. Then I went to work for a small natural food store in Austin, Texas at that time called the Good Food Company. And I became the assistant manager there, and I loved it. I never worked retail before. I loved, I became friends with customers, friends with the employees that I was working with. And then I remember coming back to the co-op one day, no, before I came home that night, I was looking around, I was closing up the store, and I thought, I love this. I could do this. This is within my realm of life competence. I could run a store. And I came back and I told.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my book, The whole story I actually talk about, I had the psychedelic experience where I experienced ego death, ego dissolving when I was 22. And pretty soon after that, that's why I started the book there. And I'll start the answer to your question there. And then that really just changed my, I got off the path my parents really wanted me to be on. And I just moved into this vegetarian co-op, a housing co-op, sort of like a commune. And I wasn't vegetarian at that time and I really didn't even know much about food. I'd just been a typical American kind of junk food eater. And I had my food awakening. My consciousness awoke there. I had already thought my body is kind of like, but you eat food to get fuel like a car needs to get gasoline. And that mechanistic model doesn't do credit to the fact that you actually need to nourish trillions of cells in your body.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's easy to be a critic. It's actually hard to be an entrepreneur. For years, I was told that this was never going to work. My mother was begging me on her deathbed to give up this stupid grocery dream. I remember feeling that many times. You're wrong. Whole foods is going to grow. We're going to change the world. If you're not willing to seize that opportunity, somebody else will. We really did all feel like we were part of this movement that was going to change the way America ate. Life is shorter than you think it is. It's too short to not be doing something that you really are passionate about, that you're drawn to”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT