Whole Foods CEO Strikes Again

Greetings from Austin, Texas!

This is Pamela Riemenschneider, The Packer's Austin-based staff writer here.

I'm an avid blog reader, but have never posted other than in comments, so this first post is a doozy. It reminds all of us in the blogosphere to always think about who's reading what we're writing.

Here's a story from the front page of today's Austin American-Statesman about the bloggings of John Mackey, fellow Austinite and chief executive officer of Whole Foods.

Whole Foods CEO revealed as anonymous poster on message boards

It seems that Mr. Mackey, who frequently, and very candidly, blogs on the Whole Foods corporate site, has been lurking on the boards of Yahoo finance under the handle "rahodeb" (his wife's name backwards -- that one's real clever, eh?).

His posts included, according to the Statesman:

• "Why would anyone want to buy OATS?" from January 2005. (OATS is Wild Oats' stock ticker) He later stated that Whole Foods wouldn't want it because its shares were overpriced.
• In March 2005, he dissed Wild Oats again, saying the company had "no intellectual capital, bad real estate, significant future writeoffs, negative brand equity."
• In Nov. 2005, he kept on dogging Oats, saying it was "steadily running out of cash and continues to borrow money to stay afloat."

And who wouldn't want a chance to defend themselves against criticsm? Mackey reportedly said of himself:

• "John Mackey is a fellow Texan that I know and like and I deeply resent the bashing he frequently undergoes on this board!"

While most analysts have said that what Mackey said wasn't illegal, it seems very ill-advised to me. Mackey reportedly stopped blogging on the site last fall, well before the merger was announced.

But who knows? This guy, so far, has built a small "hippie-fied" natural foods co-op into a multinational force to be reckoned with, a model for many retailers out there where people blindly fork over their "Whole Paycheck."

He might be crazy for posting stuff like this, or maybe crazy like a fox.