At a recent industry conference, Whole Foods Co-CEO John Mackey was talking about the challenges of retail competition when he made an intriguing point. Amazon.com is positioned, he said, to subsidize its partner pricing indefinitely, thereby harming competitors by forcing them to sell at lower-than-sustainable prices.

To be fair, his broader point was that when venture capitalists subsidize pricing of the companies they invest in, they don’t have deep enough pockets to do it long enough to hurt a company like Whole Foods, which reported $15.4 billion in its most recent annual report.

“If you’ve got competitors that are being held up by venture capital money that are subsidizing their pricing in order to give sales like Thrive Market is doing or Plated and Blue Apron are doing eventually, it can’t do that definitely. Well, Amazon can, but no one else can,” Mackey said, during a panel at the Oppenheimer 16th Annual Consumer Conference on June 22.

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