Is the Whole Foods boycott a good idea?
Turns out, Whole Foods isn't the reliably liberal grocery chain many of its reliably liberal customers thought.
Whole Foods fans are furious over an opinion that CEO John Mackey published in The Wall Street Journal recently. Mackey, a libertarian, opposes President Obama's proposed health-care reforms and argued for greater consumer choice and health-care-savings accounts. Mackey pointed to his company's health-care plan as a model.
Calls to boycott the chain erupted almost immediately. Whole Foods' public-relations office issued an apology for Mackey's opinion, distancing the company from its chairman's point of view. But that's hardly the end of the story. Some conservatives are actually going out of their way to shop at Whole Foods as a result of the controversy.
Is it really fair to boycott Whole Foods because the chief executive expressed an unpopular opinion? Or is it right for people to put their money where their mouth is and back their principles with their dollars? Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, weigh in.
BEN BOYCHUK:
"Progressives," so-called, should boycott Whole Foods. Americans vote with their wallets all the time, for all sorts of reasons, some great and some petty. If people find John Mackey's opinion so appalling, then they should feel free to buy their organic flax cereal, Belgian endive and patchouli-scented bath soaps elsewhere.
Never mind that Whole Foods has earned a reputation as one of the most employee-friendly, environmentally aware and generally do-good -- i.e. "progressive" -- companies in the United States.
And never mind that political boycotts rarely work. The United Farm Workers' campaign against table grapes is the exception that proves the rule. Abortion-rights advocates in the 1980s urged people to boycott Domino's Pizza because of then-CEO Tom Monaghan's support for anti-abortion causes. Monaghan doesn't own Domino's anymore, but he still gives money to anti-abortion causes. And Domino's, of course, remains one of the biggest pizza chains in America.
Conservatives tried to boycott Disney throughout the 1990s because of the corporation's pro-gay-rights policies. For good or ill, the Mouse is thriving.
And lastly, never mind that there is no small measure of irony and illiberalism in the calls for this particular boycott. After all, the same people who would use market forces to punish Whole Foods seek to curtail the role of the market in health care.
If "progressives" eventually have their way and get a single-payer health-care plan from the government, whom will they boycott when the government does something they don't like?
JOEL MATHIS:
John Mackey isn't a very smart businessman.
Whole Foods, after all, sells more than groceries. It sells ideas -- of food as status symbols, and as an expression of environmental values. For whatever reason, those ideas have had more appeal on the left than on the right: Whole Foods customers have long seemed to embody the "latte-sipping, arugula-eating" stereotype of the left that conservative denizens of so-called "real America" like to mock.
So when Mackey wrote his op-ed, rebuking the idea of a "right" to health care in America -- well, that was bound to rile his passionate customers. You can't blame them for wanting to take their business elsewhere. But that doesn't mean a boycott is a good idea.
One of Democrats' biggest complaints about the health-care town halls -- aside from the frequent "Obama is a Nazi" references -- has been the tenor of these meetings. All the yelling, screaming and name-calling might be democracy in action, but it's also tiresome and ugly.
Mackey comes along and offers a thoughtful, respectful -- but, yes, probably wrongheaded -- opinion, and liberals going to punish him for that?
Hey, folks: If you drive thoughtful conservatives and libertarians from the debate, that doesn't mean you win. Instead -- if you're successful -- you leave the opposition composed almost entirely of loudmouthed wingnuts.
Is that really what you want? And if that's the case, how can we have a functioning democracy if opponents are constantly trying to undermine each other's very livelihoods?
Save the boycotts for the folks who poison the discourse, not people who merely disagree with you. Join the effort to pull advertising from Fox News' Glenn Beck, who has called President Obama a "racist" and likened him to a Nazi. Beck deserves it; Whole Foods doesn't.
(Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis blog at http://www.infinitemonkeysblog.com and http://politics.pwblogs.com/.)
REDBLUEAMERICA
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