• Austin American-Statesman, Monday, December 21, 2009 10:48 AM

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey tells Brian Gaar that last year was the worst he's experienced since he got into business in the Seventies, making it tough on a company like his, where the business model is based on continuous growth. In the face of first-time-ever declining sales, it weathered the storm by unleashing "the collective intelligence or the creativity" of its employees to cut costs -- going against the grain of the corporate culture.

Now that things have turned around a bit, Mackey admits he's perplexed: "Are we going back to kind of a growth culture, or are we going to stay in this more of expense-control culture? And we don't really know."

For many years, except in its home market of Austin, Whole Foods was able to operate under the radar, Mackey says. But dating back to the opening of its store off Columbus Circle in Manhattan about five years ago, it has become a headline grabber. Mackey points to an article in the Wall Street Journal last week that said that the Republican Party would have to appeal to what it called Whole Foods Republicans -- people who live a progressive lifestyle but don't have progressive politics. "The point is, is that for good or bad, we've become sort of a brand," he says.

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