Whole Foods is big now, one of the nation’s fastest growing mass retailers, with sales last year exceeding $5 billion and a gross profit of more than $1.6 billion — not a bad return in the grocery business.
It didn’t start that way. Coming out of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Mackey, a vegetarian, a former long-haired and bearded commune resident, a student of ecology, yoga and eastern philosophy, writes that he idealistically opened a small, food store in 1978 with his girlfriend, with a total capital outlay of $45,000. The store lost $23,000 in its first year.
