Customers of Whole Foods Market recently lost their trust in the company just last week. The incident follows a New York City government investigation exposed that the grocery store had been "systematically overcharging customers for packaged foods at least 2010," as reported by the Huffington Post.
Representatives for Whole Foods Market denied the allegations at first, but now the company's executives admitted guilty to the allegations.
Co-CEOs for Whole Foods John Mackey and Walter Robb recently posted a video on YouTube to apologized for the overcharging accusations. They claimed that the allegations were "certain pricing issues in [the] New York City stores."
Robb said, "Straight up, we made some mistakes. We wanna own that and tell you what we're doing about it."
"These mistakes have to do with the things that we do in the store with mostly our fresh product. Whether we're making sandwiches, or we're squeezing fresh juices, or having cut fruit, in these areas there's a very, very small percentage that they're mis-weighing errors," explained Mackey.
Walter Robb added, "And we know they're unintentional because the mistakes are both in the customer's favor and sometimes not in the customer's favor."
He continued, "It's understandable sometimes that mistakes are made. They're inadvertent, but they do happen, because it's a hands-on approach to bringing you the fresh food."
The two CEOs go on to explain that they are "committed" to resolve these issues and to prevent them from happening again.
Mackey explains, "We're doing a number of things. Most importantly, we're going to increase our training in our New York stores and around the country because we wanna be perfect in this error, we don't want there to ever be any mistakes."
John Mackey also notes that the company will be hiring a "third-party auditor" to keep track of the training's progress. He also cited that if customers "think there's any mistake in any of our products, ask the cashier to check on it."
"If there's a mistake that's not in your favor, we promise to give you that item for free," Mackey added.
It's still unknown if this recent statement will help Whole Foods Market rise from its bad reputation of overpricing. But the measures they are taking are definitely a start.
Watch the full video below.
