John Mackey

And they said, but we're showing it to all your investors anyway.

And I said, listen, Mackie, here's what's going to happen.

First, first thing I'm going to do is take over your board.

And once we do that, we're going to fire you.

And then we're going to fire every one of your executives that doesn't do exactly what we tell them to do.

And then we're going to just put you up for sale to the highest bidder.

And there's not an effing thing you can do about it.

And then they walked out of the room.

And so it was like, okay, that did not go very well.

And then it was like, we had like three or four alternatives we could do.

One would be to fight them.

That was probably what we thought was going to happen, which meant we'd have a struggle with them over the board first.

And then if they got control of the board, we'd have a struggle with them over the shareholders.

And so we could fight them all the way.

The challenge of that strategy was,

We needed to lower our prices.

Whole Foods, the whole paycheck thing had really stuck.

And there's another even more backstory I'm not going to go into that is more complicated.

But we had the government harassing us in certain cities and it was hurting our brand and we were getting a lot of negative publicity.

But I'm not going to go into that right now.