Slightly off topic, but we do compare Whole Foods to Walmart on occasion:

The Hand That Controls the Sock Puppet Could Get Slapped

On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog — or the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company.

Or so thought John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, who used a fictional identity on the Yahoo message boards for nearly eight years to assail competition and promote his supermarket chain’s stock, according to documents released last week by the Federal Trade Commission.

I realize this has been going on for some time, but as the PR efforts of Edelman to promote Walmart illustrated, being deceitful is never a good idea.

I’m pretty sure Mackey will lose his job over this since he can be seen as having engaged in insider behavior by promoting his company’s stock.

This will also have implications for the seemingly doomed attempts to take over Wild Oats. Eventually this will all be to Walmart’s benefit. They will have weaker competitors and will be able to push their “organic lite” version of products on to the public. Once the have established a norm of mediocrity it will be harder for others to sell, what is already a fairly intangible difference, in their products.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 1531 by Robert Feinman and is filed under Competitors, Organics, Walmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.