Costco Quotes

Republicans go to Sam's Club, Democrats go to Costco.

The place went on forever-like Costco or a chemistry lecture.

Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries.

Come on. Indulge my domestic fantasies, darling. I want to share a Costco card with you.

but now our bedrooms are so filled with stuff that you can’t even determine where the beds are let alone sleep in them; we don’t sleep in the bedrooms anymore. Trifold mats were purchased from Costco for us to sleep on in the living room.

They’ll cry when you leave and buy you a Costco cake with your name on it and then forget about you ten minutes later when they replace you with someone younger and fresher and cheaper.

Protect and preserve your core customers," he [Jim Sinegal, cofounder and CEO of Costco] told our marketing team when I invited him to speak to us. "The cost of losing your core customers and trying to get them back during a down economy will be much greater than the cost of investing in them and trying to keep them.

Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco.

It is from Costco. I have learned about bulk shopping in my four weeks as a Mississippi River resident. Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco. But everyone buys bulk

I have no idea what to believe I’ll find in here anymore. You could park a Costco in one of these rooms and I’d just nod along once I found it, like, Uh-huh. Okay, sure. Of course.

Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco. But everyone buys bulk because—unlike Manhattanites—they all have space to store twenty-four jars of sweet pickles.

A.J. decides to call Lambiase. He suggests frozen shrimp from Costco, which A.J. now recognizes as Lambiase's default party-throwing suggestion.

there are so many steaks and hamburgers, it would probably have been cheaper to slaughter a cow. Fortunately, Costco provided an alternative.

You get food from Costco. Those big muffins, maybe? My sister says they’ve got a thousand calories a piece.

I could use some lunch.” “Do you have any money?” “No,” Lula said. “Do you?” “No.” “There’s only one thing to do then. Senior buffet.” Ten minutes later, I pulled into the Costco parking lot.

Munger contends that by selling quality merchandise very close to cost, the stores built such a loyal customer base that it qualifies as a franchise. "If you get hooked on going to Costco with your family, you'll go for the rest of your life," he said.22

I have learned about bulk shopping in my four weeks as a Mississippi River resident. Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco. But everyone buys bulk because—unlike Manhattanites—they all have space to store twenty-four jars of sweet pickles.

Costco is well positioned to buck the ugly trends in retail for a number of reasons, including 11 billion of them sitting in its bank account. Honeywell’s $15 billion will likely carry it into a post-corona land of milk and honey. Johnson & Johnson has nearly $20 billion—it’s not going anywhere. Every one of these companies will have their pick of the assets and customers left behind when their weaker competitors shut down. In every category, there will be more concentration of power in the two or three companies with the strongest balance sheets.

power comes when you decide once for yourself. Here’s a surprise: every item you own is a fixed decision. When you buy a shirt, a new set of pens, or a gallon of olive oil from Costco, your choice to buy it is also a choice to use, store, and take care of it. Every item you own is a fixed decision.

We’re too weak as a nation. If we were hardened, like Afghanis or Kurds―or even our grandparents who made it through the Great Depression―a failure of the stock market wouldn’t be such a game changer. We would go back to growing food in our yards and raising goats in city parks. But we’re the weakest society the world has ever seen. If the system fails, people will go ape shit. Any cop will tell you: there is a fine line between civility and savagery. When Costco closes in the middle of the day, that’ll be our cue that the credit card machines aren’t running and we’re screwed.” “I hope you’re wrong.” Jason shook his head.

The rug says: All Are Friends Who Enter Here. It is from Costco. I have learned about bulk shopping in my four weeks as a Mississippi River resident. Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco. But everyone buys bulk because—unlike Manhattanites—they all have space to store twenty-four jars of sweet pickles.

How do you know when you should do it?” “How do you know you’re thirsty? How do you know you’re hungry? How do you know you’re alive? You just know, man.” He pokes me in the chest. “You just know.” A ring on a spinning display platform glistens underneath the glass. It’s a beautiful ring. It really is. But… “I can’t ask her with a Costco diamond,” I tell him. “Fuck no, you can’t.

Find Your Triggers If you’re unfamiliar, triggers are basically anything that causes, provokes, or progresses a feeling, in my case anxiety and depression. I’ve always likened it to having an allergy. For example, if I were allergic to nuts and I went balls-deep into a vat of Costco lightly salted fancy mixed nuts, I could be assured that my throat would swell up and I would go into anaphylactic shock.

Physical deprivation and hunger are one thing; the poverty of the mind and psyche is quite another. Crashing Costco to find bulk beans and rice is not the same as flash-mobbing for Air Jordans and iPhones. How odd that our cultural elite and our dependent poor are somewhat alike, in a symbiotic relationship in which the latter guilt-trip the former for entitlements, with the assurance that the top of the pyramid is safe and free to fritter about far from those they worry about. No wonder those in between who lack the romance of the poor and the privileges and power of the elite are shrinking. We are entering the age of the bread-and-circuses Coliseum: luxury box seats for the fleshy senatorial class, free food and tickets for the rest—and the shrinking middle out in the sand of the arena providing the entertainment.

I have attempted for years to make fun of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a dangerous game. It’s similar to poking fun at the largest, scariest bully at your school and assuming you won’t get beat up.

I realized at that moment that depression and I will always be linked, tugging back and forth, like the drunken uncle who still gets invited to the family reunion even though everyone knows he’s going to make a messy scene.

Not everyone will share your liberal views, so you might want to keep comments of a sexual nature to a minimum." Layla laughed. "If you think doing it in the shower is liberal, I'll definitely never tell you what I got up to when I found a three-foot-high can of whipped cream at Costco and asked the New York Dolphins men's water polo team to help me carry it home." "I didn't want to know that." Sam's jaw tightened. "And I suspect Faroz didn't, either." "I'm joking, Sam. Lighten up. My apartment wasn't big enough to hold all of them at once.

But I only went because it was Kennedy’s idea. Kennedy’s mom spends half her life at Costco, so they have these huge bags of candy bars and drums of licorice at home. Plus, they have a giant TV with every cable channel, which means I spent a lot of time at Kennedy’s house eating candy and watching Friends. But then one day Kennedy started thinking she was fat and wanted to go on a diet, and she was, like, “Bee, you can’t eat licorice because I don’t want to get fat.” Kennedy is totally crazy like that, and we always have the craziest conversations. So she made this huge declaration that we weren’t allowed to go to her house anymore because it makes her fat and instead we had to go to Youth Group. She called it her “Youth Group diet.

Well, the maple syrup is fantastic." Breakfast. She was glad Margo had brought the biscuits and gravy, she was definitely in the mood for that. "And the sous vide eggs that you put in the microwave for a minute and then top it with hot sauce and..." She rolled her eyes. "Bliss. Pancake mix, a hundred pounds of Dubliner cultured butter, fresh orange juice, I mean, the place is just amazing.

If you are writing for an educated audience and, to take an example, you use the phrase mutatis mutandis, you are not showing off—you are communicating. You are using words to do what words are supposed to do. It reminds me of the time that someone complained to William F. Buckley about all the unusual words that he would employ. His reply was that the words were not unusual to him. Words are there for a reason, and foreign phrases can often do the trick that more homey phrases cannot. But if you are blogging about your adventures as a shopping mom, and you write about your purchase of a 48-pack of corn dogs at Costco, and you describe them as de provenance étrangère, it had better be a joke. Unusual words or phrases (foreign and domestic) are a barrier to understanding, unless the point is to communicate to the reader that you know something they don't. Then they understand what you are doing quite well.

Buffett was asked why he hadn't bought more Costco shares, considering that Munger owns shares and is on the board of directors. "Yeah, you hit on a good one here," Buffett replied. "We should've owned more Costco, and probably if Charlie had been sitting in Omaha, we would've owned more Costco. Charlie was constantly telling me about this terrific method of distribution, and after 10 years or so I started catching on to what he was saying, and we bought a little of Costco at Berkshire. "We actually negotiated to buy more. I made the most common mistake that I make . . . We started buying it, and the price went up, and instead of following it up and continuing to buy more. . . . If Costco had stayed at $15 a share or so, where we were buying it, we would've bought a lot more. But instead it went to 15⅛ and who could pay 15⅛ when they'd been paying $15—it wasn't quite that bad. But I have made that mistake a lot of times, and it's very irritating."23

For being so early in the season, the tables on either side of the street were heavily laden with produce. I could see English peas, asparagus, arugula, several varieties of chard, kale, rhubarb, radishes... My mouth tingled as I walked slowly from booth to booth, drinking in the knowledge that the food I was checking out had not been trucked over the Jersey Turnpike or from a far-flung spot upstate, but from somewhere nearby, where people still felt dirt in their hands and not just in their nostrils after a day of walking in the city. I paused at the end of a block, and my gaze zeroed in on a mountain of gorgeous strawberries a few stands down. Cutting in and out of the throng, I reached the stand and stood under a banner that read FORSYTHIA FARMS. I crouched to be eye level with the berries, narrowing my eyes at their color, shape, and size. The red was deep, but still bright. Shape: irregular, as they should be, and still shooting delightful stems that poked out the tops like tiny berets. The berries weren't too small, and best of all, not too large. No Costco mutants, I was pleased to note.

The first thing I want to say about Boyfriend is that he’s an extraordinarily decent human being. He’s kind and generous, funny and smart, and when he’s not making you laugh, he’ll drive to the drugstore at two a.m. to get you that antibiotic you just can’t wait until morning for. If he happens to be at Costco, he’ll text to ask if you need anything, and when you reply that you just need some laundry detergent, he’ll bring home your favorite meatballs and twenty jugs of maple syrup for the waffles he makes you from scratch. He’ll carry those twenty jugs from the garage to your kitchen, pack nineteen of them neatly into the tall cabinet you can’t reach, and place one on the counter, accessible for the morning. He’ll also leave love notes on your desk, hold your hand and open doors, and never complain about being dragged to family events because he genuinely enjoys hanging out with your relatives, even the nosy or elderly ones. For no reason at all, he’ll send you Amazon packages full of books (books being the equivalent of flowers to you), and at night you’ll both curl up and read passages from them aloud to each other, pausing only to make out. While you’re binge-watching Netflix, he’ll rub that spot on your back where you have mild scoliosis, and when he stops, and you nudge him, he’ll continue rubbing for exactly sixty more delicious seconds before he tries to weasel out without your noticing (you’ll pretend not to notice). He’ll let you finish his sandwiches and sentences and sunscreen and listen so attentively to the details of your day that, like your personal biographer, he’ll remember more about your life than you will. If this portrait sounds skewed, it is.

Summary: Wheat Belly Detox Supplements Look for the supplements we use in the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox in health food stores. Because of regional variation in brands, the reputable brands that are available to you may differ from the ones I list below. Where national brands are widely distributed, I will specify a few quality representative ones. High-potency probiotic supplement: 30 billion to 50 billion CFUs per day for 6 to 8 weeks. My favorite brands include Garden of Life, Renew Life, and VSL#3, all of which contain a long list of preferred bacterial species, as well as high CFU counts. Vitamin D: 4,000 to 8,000 IUs per day to start for adults, as gelcaps or drops; long-term dose adjusted to achieve a 25-hydroxy vitamin D blood level of 60 to 70 ng/mL. Excellent vitamin D preparations are widely available in many brands and surprisingly low in cost. Look for oil-based gelcaps (that look like little fish oil capsules) or liquid drops, but not tablets. Even the big-box stores like Costco and Sam’s Club have excellent preparations. Magnesium: Preferably magnesium malate, 1,200 mg two or three times per day, or magnesium glycinate, 400 mg two or three times per day; or magnesium citrate, 400 mg two or three times per day. (If elemental magnesium—i.e., magnesium without the weight of malate, glycinate, or citrate—is specified on your supplement, aim for around 400 mg magnesium per day.) Source Naturals, NOW, and KAL are excellent brands. Fish oil: 3,000 to 3,600 mg per day of EPA and DHA, divided into two doses. Among my preferred brands are Nordic Naturals, Ascenta Nutra-Sea, and Carlson. Iodine: 500 to 1,000 mcg per day as potassium iodide drops or kelp tablets. Like vitamin D, there are many excellent preparations available at low cost. Iron: Look for supplements in the ferrous form and take only if low ferritin levels or iron deficiency anemia is identified; the dose depends on the severity of anemia and the form chosen. Sundown Naturals, Feosol, and Pure Encapsulations are among preferred brands. Zinc: 10 to 15 mg per day of (elemental) zinc as gluconate, sulfate, or acetate. Twinlab, Thorne, and NOW provide great choices.

I don’t want to spend the next twenty-five years growing my ass and decorating my cubicle with photos of places I’ll never get to visit and/or counting down the days to my one week of paid vacation wherein I will take an all-you-can-eat cruise down to Mexico and end up with norovirus so I can spend the entire trip puking and shitting my guts out in a cabin the size of walk-in closet while the poor maid sneaks around me dressed in a full hazmat suit to leave clean towels and Mexican Pepto-Bismol. I cannot see myself doing the same mind-numbing job day in and day out, hoping that the company doesn’t go under, thereby ruining my chances of a decent retirement, during which I can join a real book club where we giggle about mommy porn and cross-stitch naughty sayings while we pass around plastic plates of Triscuits topped with canned cheese product and pimientos for color as the party host fills our glasses with Costco boxed wine and I sip surreptitiously from my flask that reads “Vodka never disappoints.” It may be okay for these women, but I can’t do it. I want more. (Although I do want that flask, so keep your eyes peeled in your travels, yeah?) Does that make me a jerk?

Perhaps you think that it is important to your child’s personal growth to bake goods in your house. More power to you, my sister. I will defend your right to bake your brownies, I will march for your right to home-bake whatever you damn well want to home-bake. But I will take off my earrings and ask someone to hold my purse for the verbal beat-down we will need to engage in if you try to tell me that I must define my motherhood in the same terms as yours. There’s room enough for everybody here. This is a big, big maternity tent. If I want to buy my brownies from Costco and drop them off in a wrinkled brown paper bag still wrapped in the plastic and foil container with the orange price sticker still attached, guess what? That’s how it’s gonna go down. Suck it, judgies. I am not telling you to do it that way. You go bake your ass off. But we all have to acknowledge that our way is not the way.

In the retail sector, using a higher level of efficiency to fund lower prices had long been Wal-Mart’s strategy. Costco

Manufacturers must seek to widen their distribution and proactively embrace new customers and distribution channels, be it hard discounters such as Aldi, club stores such as Costco, Dollar or Pound chains, and even less traditional outlets like vending machines. Such new opportunities can be substantial; in 2010, Dollar stores opened up more new retail space in the United States than did Wal-Mart.7 These actions reduce the CSS for brands, which gives manufacturers more leverage.

Chapter 51 In Atlanta, the day had gone mostly as Elliott had expected. The stock market crash had rattled everyone. It was a cloud that hung over the euphoria of Black Friday. The most difficult part of his plan had been convincing the other five families to pool their money with his for the purchases, which together added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had begun by renting two twenty-six-foot U-Haul trucks. They drove them to Costco and filled them with survival necessities. It was mostly food; Elliott planned to be near a freshwater source if worst came to worst. Next, they purchased two high-end RVs. The price was exorbitant, but they carried a thirty-day money-back guarantee, and they only had to make a down payment—the remainder was financed. Elliott had assured his neighbors that within thirty days, they would either be incredibly glad to have the two homes on wheels—or they’d have their money back. Now he sat in his study, watching the news, waiting for the event he believed would come. He hoped he was wrong. DAY 7 900,000,000 Infected 180,000 Dead

Sinegal explained the Costco model to Bezos: it was all about customer loyalty.

Los analistas de Wall Street criticaron durante años la estrategia de Costco de gastar tanto en su gente, en lugar de recortar gastos para aumentar los márgenes y contribuir a incrementar el valor de sus acciones.98 Wall Street preferiría que la empresa se centrara en lo QUE hace a expensas de POR QUÉ lo hace. Un analista del Deutsche Bank le dijo a la revista FORTUNE: «Costco sigue siendo una empresa a la que se le da mejor servir a un miembro del club y a un empleado que a un accionista».

I used to make the mistake of looking at a price tag and thinking that if an item was listed at fifty dollars, it cost me fifty dollars. Well, yes, in today’s dollars. But if you consider the potential value of that same fifty dollars after it has been invested for twenty years, the cost (what you lose by spending that money rather than using it to grow) is four or five times greater! In other words, every time you look at an item that costs fifty dollars you have to ask, “Is this item worth $250?” If it’s worth $250 to you today, then it’s worth buying. Keep that in mind next time you go to a place like Costco, with all sorts of amazing things that you didn’t know you had to have.

once my kids are older I’ll trade in my minivan for something more fun—judging by the parking lot at Costco, I think the Jeep Wrangler is the female midlife crisis equivalent of the sports car.

When Jia Jiang graduated with an MBA from Duke, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Like so many of us, however, his fear of hearing no was holding him back. To face this fear head-on, he started a video blog called 100 Days of Rejection Therapy. His endearing, perplexing, and absurd videos document what happened as he approached complete strangers, day after day, with off-the-wall requests: to speak over Costco’s intercom, to become a live mannequin at Abercrombie and Fitch, or to borrow a dog from the Humane Society. I love his rejections so much that I challenge my students to replicate them. Jia’s tolerance for rejection and vulnerability reveal the delight and playfulness that can emerge out of the most awkward situations.

I knew Valhalla was big, but each time I went exploring, I was newly amazed. The place went on forever—like Costco or a chemistry lecture.

My standbys include the extra-virgin oils from Seka Hills, Katz, and California Olive Ranch. Another good everyday oil is the Kirkland Signature Organic Extra Virgin Oil from Costco,

Jarrow Life Extension NOW Foods Advanced Orthomolecular Research (AOR) Costco’s brand “Kirkland

In her analysis, she learned that the CFO had answered phishing emails telling him he’d just won a $500 gift card from Costco. The man made $13 million a year before bonuses. A senior chemical engineer had accepted fifty-four invitations on social media from people she didn’t know. The head of patents had been sexting with someone he met online, clicked on what was promised to be a dick pick, and unleashed a virus. All of this had been done on company computers and the corporate server. Data breaches galore. Proprietary information insecure. Financial records out there for all the world to see.

I felt so powerful that I wanted to go to Costco and wheel out a freezer on a dolly while waving around an old Safeway receipt, just because I knew I could. It’s easy. I’m supposed to be so harmless and weak and afraid that no one pays attention. But those weeks of dye stripping and returning to my natural state created a phenomenon in which the world had literally become mine for the taking.

Aristotle actually anticipated this tension, and resolved it by explaining that happiness is different from pleasure (the kind associated with hedonism), because people have brains and the ability to reason. That means the kind of capital-H Happiness he’s talking about has to involve rational thought and virtues of character, and not just, to give one example off the top of my head, the NBA Finals and a Costco bucket of peanut butter cookies.

Extreme success is likely to be caused by some combination of the following factors: A) Extreme maximization or minimization of one or two variables. Example,Costco or our furniture and appliance store. B) Adding success factors so that a bigger combination drives success, often in nonlinear fashion, as one is reminded by the concept of breakpoint and the concept of critical mass in physics. Often results are not linear.

Oh, my god, is this what I think it is?” She checked. It was. Two hotdogs from Costco. “Oh, my god,” said Zoey. “I’m gonna cry.

By the way, Zachy, I hope you’re not dead set on a virgin for a bride, because I popped a few cherries last night.” Oliver ignored me, scratching the side of his ass. “Okay, fine. A whole bag of cherries. Those industrial ones you get at Costco.

I suppose every human, holding the belief, erroneous or not, that they are under some sort of strange elemental peril that threatens their very being, comes to that same conclusion. It’s why Costco exists. A five-gallon barrel of tartar sauce gives you the illusion that your own mortality is in your control.

Poppy: "I DO need something. I need to know where you find the king-sized audacity." Sanford: "He buys it in bulk at Costco.

Don't buy new ink cartridges, take old ones to Costco and get them filled for only $10!

The behavior of businesses that I have already talked about — as well as well-publicized customer service fiascos (like Costco’s transition to only accept Visa credit cards, which led to more than 1.5 million customer service calls and scathing online complaints19) — shows that customers feel let down again and again by the companies they depend on, whether by overreaching marketing claims, pushy sales tactics, terrible customer support, or poor quality. Combine that with the ever-growing range of customer choices in many product and service categories and their power via online reviews and we may be at a “change or die” inflection point in many industries. Lovable products, services, and companies are disrupting entire industries. They are changing the world. Back to People Here is another secret that should not be secret at all: Companies are not brands, buildings, or technology. They are people. A corporation does not do anything; its people and customers do. We need to get back to the human aspect of business. It all starts with people and human interactions.

That’s it,” Rachel whispered, a horrified look on her beautiful face. “This is where I die. In a furniture store the size of freakin’ Costco!” She shuffled off after the saleswoman and I quickly caught up to her side. When I got there, her psychotic-Barbie look was back. “Did you know the leather couches we’re about to look at have a warranty for ten years? No cracks!” “Oh, well in that case, I have to buy these. Right?” “Of course.” She got oddly silent as we followed along and out of nowhere started dancing all crazy and lip-syncing to the song playing throughout the store. I stopped, my eyes going wide as I watched her. As soon as the chorus ended she stopped, and just in time, since our saleswoman had turned to see why we weren’t with her. “Y’all coming?” “Yes, ma’am!” Rachel answered since I was still looking at her with my jaw dropped. Her serene expression began cracking and she bit down on her bottom lip to keep from laughing. Glancing over at me, she gave me a soft nudge and winked before walking over to the next living room set, leaving me staring after her before I burst out laughing. Damn, I’m pretty sure I just fell in love with Rachel Masters.   R

The morning after Jim’s death, as I dried off after my shower, I wondered to what extent, if at all, Jim was…around. Could he be with us, unseen or unsensed by us, but able to observe? Most importantly at this moment, could he possibly see me naked?

For me, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is like a good friend. A necessary girlfriend, but with chronic PMS. A temperamental – and even volatile – friend who does not play well with others and whom I dearly love. It’s a strange relationship.

I have become conscious of my own “cry face.” My face puckers like the business end of a hot dog except for my mouth, which stretches in a grimace so wide as to accommodate said hotdog horizontally within it. It’s not pretty.

We will remember what it was like to lose you, our pain the black background of our electric blue joy. We will remember that there are few answers to our questions; the questions that seem to float into an endless expanse of sky.

Up top, we saw a party on the verge of a breakout. The three respectful men were, in fact, security guards. On the far edge of the plot, four scraggly dudes were fiddling around with a PA. A guitar and a drum set lay in the grass behind them. A stand-up bass had been propped up against a gravestone. Surrounding a folding table stocked with handles of Costco booze were six or seven men with fuck-you-Dad piercings—septa, cheeks, foreheads—and tribal facial tattoos. I counted seven, maybe fifteen dogs running around, yapping at one another, and at least twenty or so old hippies, each one dressed in his or her referential, Harold and Maude best, smiling and drinking out of red plastic cups.

Consider James D. Sinegal, co-founder and CEO of Costco, a warehouse retailer. His salary in 2003 was $350,000, which is just about ten times what is earned by his top hourly employees and roughly double that of a typical Costco store manager. Costco also pays 92.5% of employee health-care costs. Sinegal could take a lot more goodies for himself, but has refused a bonus in profitable years because “we didn’t meet the standards that we had set for ourselves,” and he has sold only a modest percentage of his stock over the years. Even Costco’s compensation committee acknowledges that he is underpaid. Sinegal believes that by taking care of his people and staying close to them, they will provide better customer service, Costco will be more profitable, and everyone (including shareholders like himself) will win. Sinegal takes other steps to reduce the “power distance” between himself and other employees. He visits hundreds of Costco stores a year, constantly mixing with the employees as they work and asking questions about how he can make things better for them and Costco customers. Despite continuing skepticism from analysts about wasting money on labor costs, Costco’s earnings, profits, and stock price continue to rise. Treating employees fairly also helps the bottom line in other ways, as Costco’s “shrinkage rate” (theft by employees and customers) is only two-tenths of 1%; other retail chains suffer ten to fifteen times the amount. Sinegal just sees all this as good business because, when you are a CEO, “everybody is watching you every minute anyway. If they think the message you’re sending is phony, they are going to say, ‘Who does he think he is?

The whole bringing sexy back...you know that song? By that cute boy?” “Yeah, I know it,” Faith said grimly. “Who is he again?” “Justin Timberlake.” “Right. “Bring Sexy Back” or something. Well, I didn’t know sexy was gone. Now Carl wants me to be all creative. You know what he brought back from Costco last week? Eight cans of whipped cream, Faith. Eight.” “That’s a lot,” Faith said. Time to swear off dairy. “And it’s having the opposite effect. Right? Like, the storm of love I used to have has dried to a mist, because all of a sudden, plain old marital brevity isn’t good enough. Oh, and the other day, Abby walked in on us, and she’s not speaking to me at the moment. Last week, Faith, I had a mammogram, you know?” Faith looked up sharply. “Is everything okay?” “Sure! But I was looking forward to it! Like, that was my special alone time, just me and the boob squisher. I didn’t have to talk dirty to Carl or wear Vulcan ears—” “Oh, boy.

The membership fee is a onetime pain, but it’s reinforced every time customers walk in and see forty-seven-inch televisions that are two hundred dollars less than anyplace else,” Sinegal said. “It reinforces the value of the concept. Customers know they will find really cheap stuff at Costco.

...he walked into the WinCo, a brightly lit twenty-four-hour warehouse supermarket that looked like the bastard child of a one-night stand between a horny Costco and a drunken 99 Cents Only Store.

The Glendale Bear, affectionately known as Meatball for his successful raids of area homes in search of Costco meatballs, became famous for his neighborhood break-ins, and for the image a live news helicopter captured of the bear startling an unsuspecting resident while he texted on his phone. Meatball also had his own Twitter account and conversed there regularly with P-22 about the challenges of urban living. Ultimately, because of his affinity for human food and relaxing in backyard hot tubs, this smarter-than-average black bear had to be captured in 2012 and sent to the animal sanctuary Lions, Tigers, and Bears in San Diego County, where he now resides. The story, however, has a happy ending, as the residents of Glendale, aware their habits of leaving out trash and pet food might have made them culpable in his fate, promised to mend their ways and even raised funds for a bigger enclosure for Meatball. For the 2014 Rose Bowl Parade, Glendale created a float themed “Let’s Be Neighbors,”featuring Meatball in his famous trash-can pose. As Patricia Betancourt from the City of Glendale office said, “Glendale citizens, because of Meatball’s influence, are now dedicated to being good neighbors to wildlife.

Well excuse me, it’s not like I can just get another nova helmet at Costco! - Nova / Sam Alexander

Carry individual items as opposed to whole lines. We wouldn’t try to carry a whole line of spices, or bag candy, or vitamins. Each SKU (a single size of a single flavor of a single item) had to justify itself, as opposed to riding piggyback into the stores just so we had a “complete” line. Depth of assortment now was of no interest. As soon as Fair Trade ended in 1978, we began to get rid of the hundred brands of Scotch, seventy brands of bourbon, and fifty brands of gin. And slowly (it was like pulling teeth) we dismantled the broad assortment of California boutique wines. No fixtures. By 1982, the store would have most of its merchandise displayed in stacks with very little shelving. This implied a lower SKU count: a high-SKU store needs lots of shelves. The average supermarket carries about 27,000 SKUs in 30,000 square feet of sales area, or roughly one SKU per square foot. Trader Joe’s, by 1988, carried one SKU per five square feet! Price-Costco, one of my heroes, carried about one SKU per twenty square feet. As much as possible I wanted products to be displayed in the same cartons in which they were shipped by the manufacturers. This was already a key element in our wine merchandising. Each SKU would stand on its own two feet as a profit center. We would earn a gross profit on each SKU that was justified by the cost of handling that item. There would be no “loss leaders.” Above all we would not carry any item unless we could be outstanding in terms of price (and make a profit at that price per #7) or uniqueness. By the end of 1977, we increased the size of the buying staff, adding one very key person, Doug Rauch, whom we hired out of the wholesale health food trade. Leroy, Frank Kono, Bob Berning, and Doug rolled out Five Year Plan ’77, which for purposes of this history I call Mac the Knife. Back in those days we had no idea how sharp that knife would become! We just wanted to survive deregulation. Everything now depended on buying. So here we go into the next chapter, Intensive Buying.

Amazon compite con actores importantes y consolidados como Target, Costco, Kroger y, por supuesto, Walmart, una compañía el doble de grande que Amazon.

Faut avoir un minimum de conscience politique pour comprendre qu'un Costco en feu, c'est moins violent qu'un Costco en opération.

The Most Important Strategic Decision Was to Become a Genuine Retailer The fundamental job of a retailer is to buy goods whole, cut them into pieces, and sell the pieces to the ultimate consumers. This is the most important mental construct I can impart to those of you who want to enter retailing. Most “retailers” have no idea of the formal meaning of the word. Time and again I had to remind myself just what my role in society was supposed to be. Many of the policy decisions for a retailer boil down to this: How closely should we stick to the fundamental retailing job? “Retail” comes from a medieval French verb, retailer, which means “to cut into pieces.” “Tailor” comes from the same verb. The fact is that most so-called retailers don’t want to face up to their basic job. In Pronto Markets we did everything we could to avoid retailing. We tried to shift the burden to suppliers, buying prepackaged goods, hopefully pre-price-marked (potato chips, bread, cupcakes, magazines, paperback books) so we had no role in the pricing decision. The goods were ordered, displayed, and returned by outside salespeople. To this day, supermarkets fight with the retail clerks’ union to expand their right to let core store work be done by outsiders. Whole Earth Harry’s moves into wine and health foods had taken us quite a distance into genuine retailing. In our cheese departments we were literally taking whole wheels and cutting them into pieces. I took this as an analogy for what we should do with everything we sold. Getting rid of all outside salespeople was corollary to the programs that would unfold during the next five years. In Mac the Knife, no outsiders of any sort were permitted in the store. All the work was done by employees. The closest thing to it that I see these days is Costco, which shares many features with Trader Joe’s.

(Upon arrival, Taylor broke into his best Bruce Springsteen impression, serenading me with the Boss’s classic anthem of the same name. The only thing funnier was the time he played the theme from Cheers on a piano in the middle of a crowded Costco.)

rotisserie chicken at Costco.

she should have known that her family would just chug it down, oblivious to not only the authenticity of its taste but the amount of work that went into it. She might as well have bought a gallon of the most Americanized crap available at Costco and poured it into the bowl.

So single serving, “fun sized,” etc. samples are great lead magnets. It’s how Costco sells more food than other stores–they give out samples!

Picture a countryside with one hundred million chickens roaming the land. It is challenging to imagine anything of that magnitude. It happens to be the number of cooked rotisserie chickens Costco sells annually. The Chief Financial Officer shared that the retailer loses upwards of US$40 million a year selling the chicken. This is not altruism. People are lured by the five-dollar item but leave with a cart overflowing with bulk underwear, photocopier paper, and lawn ornaments. This practice of selling rotisserie chicken has spread to most grocery chains in North America.

Only this doesn’t feel like we’re boyfriend and girlfriend. It feels like we’re married, Costco card in hand, and signing a thirty-year mortgage.

Ooh, did you bake?” My grandpa has never baked a day in his life. “Hell no. Costco.

Costco cofounder and CEO James Sinegal recalls—and lives by—Sol Price’s principles. “Many retailers look at an item and say, ‘I’m selling this for ten bucks. How can I sell it for eleven?’ We look at it and say, ‘How can we get it to nine bucks?’ And then, ‘How can we get it to eight?’ It’s contrary to the thinking of a retailer, which is to see how much more profit you can get out of it. But once you start doing that, it’s like heroin.” There was another element, too. “You had to be a member of the club. People paid us to shop there.

Sinegal wanted to have more than his working capital cake, however. He wanted to eat it too. Costco’s working capital model let it get away with razor-thin overall profit margins, since earning an attractive return on investment when your investment is near zero (thanks to negative working capital) can be accomplished with very modest profits (recall the ROI formula at the outset of this chapter). So Sinegal passed on to his customers the benefit—in lower prices—of the lower margins he could afford. He was underselling his competition, all the while growing the business on its customers’ cash.

Astute readers may have noticed that Dow Jones’s working capital model was implemented, in reality, by asking subscribers to pay up front. That’s a revenue model issue, too, isn’t it? Right you are. Costco’s working capital model was driven largely by membership fees paid up front—a revenue model issue—that in turn enabled it to adopt a gross margin model with low, low prices and razor-thin gross margins. So why do we see these cases as working capital stories? We’ve placed the Dow Jones and Costco cases in the working capital chapter because their working capital models lie at the heart of their long-running success. In their essence, working capital models are about the timing with which cash flows into and out of the business. In most industries, that means the timing with which customers pay, the timing with which suppliers are paid, and the timing or speed with which inventory (or piles of other current assets) can be turned over and over again.

But because the timing issues are inherently linked to revenue model and operating issues, it’s worth your while, as you think about analogs, antilogs, and leaps of faith in those arenas, to add timing to your questioning early in your dashboarding process. Changing the timing of cash flows can shake up an industry, as the Costco story indicates. And, as the Dow Jones story indicates, getting subscription money up front is another good way to go. Could your business offer subscriptions for what you or your competitors now sell in another

But getting low prices from vendors didn’t mean that Costco would fatten its margins. On the contrary. Sinegal insisted that no item could be marked up to a gross margin over 14 percent (contrast that with supermarkets and department stores, which carried 20 to 50 percent gross margins across their various categories of merchandise, maintaining average gross margins between 20 and 25 percent).21 Discount stores like Kmart and Target had even greater average gross margins across their product mix, ranging from 25 to 30 percent. These were the antilogs Sinegal wanted to beat.

Do you now see why using operating margin to filter businesses may not be the best approach? Margins do not tell us what we had to invest to get those margins. The advantage of measuring ROCE is that it accounts for the quality of P&L (in the numerator) as well as the balance sheet (in the denominator). Let’s return to Costco and Tiffany.

I was newly amazed. The place went on forever—like Costco or a chemistry lecture.

Do yourself a favor and run down the list of businesses started during depressions or economic crises. Fortune magazine (ninety days after the market crash of 1929) FedEx (oil crisis of 1973) UPS (Panic of 1907) Walt Disney Company (After eleven months of smooth operation, the twelfth was the market crash of 1929.) Hewlett-Packard (Great Depression, 1935) Charles Schwab (market crash of 1974–75) Standard Oil (Rockefeller bought out his partners in what became Standard Oil and took over in February 1865, the final year of the Civil War.) Coors (Depression of 1873) Costco (recession in the late 1970s) Revlon (Great Depression, 1932) General Motors (Panic of 1907) Procter & Gamble (Panic of 1837) United Airlines (1929) Microsoft (recession in 1973–75) LinkedIn (2002, post–dot-com bubble) For the most part, these businesses had little awareness they were in some historically significant depression. Why? Because the founders were too busy existing in the present—actually dealing with the situation at hand.

Yogurt is good for you. And it’s just one spoon,” Sharpcot had replied, but this stack summoned a billion voices, all of them saying in a chorus, “Just one spoon.” From kids’ lunches and store shelves and desk drawers and airline meal packs, in every country of the world: Canada and the United States and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Argentina and Ireland and Burkina Faso and Russia and Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and very probably the Antarctic. Where wasn’t there disposable cutlery? Plastic spoons in endless demand, in endless supply, from factory floors where they are manufactured and packaged in boxes of 10 or 20 or 100 or 1000 or individually in clear wrap, boxed on skids and trucked to trains freighting them to port cities and onto giant container ships plying the seas to international ports to intercity transport trucks to retail delivery docks for grocery stores and retail chains, supplying restaurants and homes, consumers moving them from shelf to cart to bag to car to house, where they are stuck in the lunches of the children of polluting parents, or used once each at a birthday party to serve ice cream to four-year-olds where only some are used but who knows which? So used and unused go together in the trash, or every day one crammed into a hipster’s backpack to eat instant pudding at his software job in an open-concept walkup in a gentrified neighbourhood, or handed out from food trucks by the harbour, or set in a paper cup at a Costco table for customers to sample just one bite of this exotic new flavour, and so they go into trash bins and dumpsters and garbage trucks and finally vast landfill sites or maybe just tossed from the window of a moving car or thrown over the rail of a cruise ship to sink in the ocean deep.

I feel like a fish out of water. No, not out of water. I feel like a fish in a three-piece suit standing in line at a fucking Costco.

«Costco sigue siendo una empresa a la que se le da mejor servir a un miembro del club y a un empleado que a un accionista».

The only places I can think to go are home, a shelter, or Costco but I’m better off going home. - H Booker

A long, leisurely wander through Costco with no list?

I dump the box in the foyer and walk over to the kitchen to fix myself a nutritious meal consisting of six slices of pizza and shove them into the microwave. While I wait for them to heat, I gulp down an entire carton of orange juice. It's crazy how quickly things change. When I moved here less than two weeks ago, everything in the fridge was so small and cute and mini. Small cottage cheese. Tiny boutique personal bottles of juices. Individual cheese strings. Then I arrived. Melody got her Costco card two days later when she realized I'd eat the fucking counter if no one stopped me. Now everything here come in bulk. There's enough meat in the freezer to reassemble an entire farm. I lean a hip against the counter and hoover the pizza slices. That's my afternoon snack sorted. I wonder what Melody has in store for dinner.

Huge boxes of detergent stood next to dozens of paint cans, several cases of Molson Canadian beer, and enormous plastic-wrapped bales of toilet paper that could have serviced a battalion. Clearly, my aunt was a Costco member.

But when you get older, you learn the shittiest, most ironic life lesson: “perfection” is not a guarantee for happiness. This was never clearer to me than back when I read the shocking news that Sandra Bullock’s husband cheated on her. What?! How? Sandy is America’s sweetheart. She’s gorgeous, down to earth, legitimately funny, and genuinely talented. Her husband looked like some guy you’d see at the hot dog stand outside of Costco. And yet HE cheated on HER??

One of the things I really like about Costco is they have ignored the lies from a COVID-19 infected President Trump.

Unfortunately, wacky ideas have dominated the public dialogue in tech to the point that important conversations about social issues have been drowned out or dismissed for years. Some of the ideas that come out of Silicon Valley include buying islands in New Zealand to prep for doomsday; seasteading, or building islands out of discarded shipping containers to create a new paradise without government or taxes; freezing cadavers so that the deceased's consciousness can be uploaded into a future robot body; creating oversized dirigibles; inventing a meal-replacement powder named after dystopian sci-fi movie Soylent Green; or making cars that fly. These ideas are certainly creative, and it's important to make space in life for dreamers–but it's equally important not to take insane ideas seriously. We should be cautious. Just because someone has made a mathematical breakthrough or made a lot of money, that doesn't mean we should listen to them when they suggest aliens are real or suggest that in the future it will be possible to reanimate people, so we should keep smart people's brains in large freezers like the ones used for frozen vegetables at Costco.

I wanted to stock up on faith and confidence, on joy and peace, and I wanted that stockpile to last me for a while. I wanted to shop for God’s provisions at Costco, not a food truck.

Tractatus de Fascinatione warned against lounging in bed too late in the morning wearing nightcaps (yes, nightcaps), or breaking a religious fast on green peas (yes, green peas). How to prevent and cure? In many cases, the remedy seems almost worse than the disease: the skin of a hyena’s forehead, dust in which a mule had rolled, and a broth stewed from the ashes of a hangman’s rope. Not exactly goods you could pick up on an afternoon Costco run. In the absence of hyena forehead skin, it seems one could also lick the skin of a child’s forehead.