All quiet on the Whole Foods front

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey – aka “Rahodeb” – has stopped posting to his company blog and has disabled user comments. The last post to the blog reads:

Dear Stakeholders,

A Special Committee of our Board of Directors’ is conducting an independent internal investigation into online financial message board postings related to Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats Markets. In light of this, it is in the best interest of the company to temporarily hold off on posting on my Company blog. The ability to post comments to this blog will be disabled during this time as well. I look forward to resuming our conversations and plan on being in touch with you again soon.

Best regards,
John

While it certainly makes sense to tape his mouth shut lest another foot get jammed inside, shutting down Mackey’s blog isn’t the only example of Whole Foods silencing itself online. Wikipedia user BradyWFM, Whole Foods’ Director of Publications, has suddenly stopped editing the company’s Wikipedia entry. Has Whole Foods put the kibosh on their online activities?

Internet-savvy and image-conscious

That Other Paper Associate Editor Chad Hanna’s article about his contested termination from Whole Foods’ flagship store has generated more reader feedback than any story we’ve ever published. Some of you agree with Chad’s conclusion that Whole Foods, despite its much touted philosophy of “conscious capitalism,” still behaves like any other corporation: profit-driven, beholden to stakeholders, and reliant on low-skilled workers and high turnover to cut costs through low wages and poor benefits. Others side with Whole Foods’ middle management: Chad was late, mishandled cash, violated company policy, and was therefore fired. Period.

In March 2007, about a month after Chad’s story was published, I posted this paragraph to Whole Foods’ Wikipedia entry in the “Labor relations” section:

Recently, Whole Foods was further criticized by a former employee for its rigid adherence to policy without regard to the circumstances surrounding a relatively minor infraction. This seems to contradict CEO John Mackey’s professed belief that Whole Foods, unlike many multi-billion-dollar corporations, should “empower” its employees as part of its ethos of “conscious capitalism”: “At Whole Foods, we consciously reject the command and control management style. This top-down, ‘Do It My Way’ approach is the opposite of team member empowerment…”

Granted, I had mixed motivations for adding this to Wikipedia. I wanted to contribute relevant and contextual information about Whole Foods’ labor relations. But we were also very proud of Chad’s article and wanted to raise awareness.

Within 17 hours my addition was removed by user BradyWFM. (Here’s the revision history with a before-and-after view.) I immediately looked up BradyWFM’s Wikipedia profile, which reads:

Total transparency, folks, I’m the Director of Publications for Whole Foods Market. I’ve been asked to work with Wiki editors to update the Whole Foods Market article. I’ve explained to leadership that we cannot make edits on our page without working with the Wiki community. I feel like we can provide some general factual info to keep our entry up to date and, at times, offer perspective when it seems like not all viewpoints are presented. I completely respect the Wiki process and look forward to working with you to ensure that our Wiki article is written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly, proportionately and without bias.

Wow, I thought. That’s smart! Putting someone in charge of your image on Wikipedia – how many companies are Internet-savvy enough to think of that?

Then I looked up the talk page for the Whole Foods entry. BradyWFM had left me a note:

Toddross: Just wanted to let you know why I removed your addition to the Labor Relations section. While I fully support your right as a publisher to print this in your own online publication, this personal account doesn’t meet the guidelines for Wikipedia for unbiased material. Given your own editorial note on your site reading: “…we realize that this is the opinion of but one former employee,” I think you already understand that this is a personal personnel issue. Thanks, BradyWFM 22:16, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

He was right, and I didn’t fight it. I couldn’t justify adding a single employee’s experience to the world’s repository of all human knowledge. So I dropped it.

A strange silence in the wake of Rahodeb

Fast forward to mid-July 2007. John Mackey – the architect of “conscious capitalism” – is outed on Yahoo’s stock forum by the Federal Trade Commission. Posting as “Rahodeb” (an anagram of his wife Deborah’s name), Mackey touted Whole Foods’ stock and denigrated competitor Wild Oats – which, not coincidentally, Whole Foods was (and is) trying to purchase to secure their dominance in the organic and healthy foods market.

While it’s not clear if Mackey broke the law, it is a huge embarrassment to discover a widely respected company’s CEO secretly hunching over his computer late at night posting such goofy commentary as: “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!” (Yes, he posted that.)

By shutting down his blog, Mackey joins the ranks of every high-schooler who has deleted a LiveJournal, Xanga, or MySpace account after realizing what an ass he was in the seventh grade. I can completely understand why Mackey is hesitant to reappear online. But BradyWFM, the once-fastidious maintainer of Whole Foods’ image on Wikipedia, has not made a single edit to Whole Foods’ Wikipedia entry since Rahodeb. So what happened to this once-vigilant Director of Publications?

Several anonymous edits have been made to the Whole Foods entry since BradyWFM vanished. While this is normal for any Wikipedia page – not everyone logs in before making an edit, and not everyone has a Wikipedia account – it’s possible that BradyWFM is still monitoring the page and making updates anonymously. Unfortunately, my request to compare BradyWFM’s access logs to those of anonymous editors was declined by Wikipedia admin jpgordon.

Honestly, I don’t think BradyWFM has made any anonymous edits to Whole Foods’ Wikipedia entry. (I’m sure he has many more and worse PR fires to put out at the moment.) But if he is making anonymous edits in an effort to maintain a low Internet profile for Whole Foods, I’m worried they will eschew “total transparency” for quiet anonymity. Personally, I’d much rather know a company is openly managing its own online identity and spin than worry they’re manipulating opinion while masquerading as John Q. Public.

After all, isn’t that what got them into this mess?