What Makes Costco Costco?
“Welcome to Costco, I love you.” Will the American institution, known for its bulk deals and generous employment practices, remain a force for good in a rapidly changing retail landscape? Plus:
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Hannah Jocelyn Newsletter editor People who shop at Costco are devoted to, and even proprietary about, their location: they say “my Costco.” Growing up, the staff writer Molly Fischer’s Costco was one in San Jose, California. Now that she has a two-and-a-half-year-old in New York City, she buys her bulk blueberries at the store in Industry City, in Brooklyn. With more than nine hundred warehouses around the world, the mega-retailer has cultivated a deep and abiding feeling of loyalty and community among its shoppers and its employees—a rare quality for a “cathedral of consumption” in this end-stage-capitalism era. For a piece in this week’s Money Issue, Fischer set out to uncover the secrets of how Costco does it, and whether the institution will be able to keep it up. I recently spoke with Fischer to remedy my Costco cluelessness. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. Full disclosure: I’ve never been to a Costco. I can’t believe that. When we were talking about your story around the office, everybody had a Costco tidbit they were excited to share. So, what am I missing? It’s very possible to grow up without Costco. There’s no shame in that. But it’s one of those things that, if you did grow up within it, it just feels like the water you’re swimming in. It’s just where we shopped. In fact, reporting on this piece, I discovered that our Costco opened the same week I was born. Meant to be! Yes! In our household, Costco was a constant subject of conversation, debate, riffs. To me, it felt like an extremely Californian establishment—part of the landscape of sprawl, parking lots, onerous commutes. It felt particular to my family, and I came to realize only later that it was something many, many, many families felt a strong affinity with. On my flight to San Diego, for example, I ended up seated near a friend of a friend; we were making small talk, and I asked where he was from and he said, “Costco.” So, what is it about Costco that gets everyone so fired up? Costco can be chaos, but it can also be, for many people, a place of peace. There can be a kind of Zen sense of everything you might need being within reach, a sense of control that you can check the items off your list at a price that you know is good. It’s sort of the opposite of shopping on Amazon, where you’re mucking around in this chaotic soup of products that may or may not be legitimate or of good quality as opposed to some weird counterfeit—where you’re adrift in a sea of stuff. At Costco, everything is very carefully selected. They only sell something like a tenth of the options that a typical Walmart might sell. There’s a sense that you have a purveyor you can trust, quality products you can trust. That sense of trust is a big theme of your piece. There’s a real feeling of trust in the way the operation is run, over all. Pretty much everyone I spoke with in my reporting, even disillusioned ex-employees, held Costco in high regard—to a surprising degree. Employees are paid very well. They have really strong benefits. They like how James Sinegal, Costco’s co-founder and longtime C.E.O.—he stepped down at the end of 2011—would visit the warehouses, and stay connected with the people working there. And many Costco employees stick around for years and years. It’s not uncommon for the person ringing you up to have been working there for twenty-five years, and you know that instantly because their name tag lists the date they were hired—and so many of the dates are from so far back. That loyalty is nice for the employees, of course, but I spoke with business professors who argue that it’s also good for the business as a whole. A workforce that is experienced, that is not turning over and having to be retrained, that is not short-staffed—that is good for productivity and for the bottom line. And it’s good for customers, too. Interacting with employees who don’t seem frazzled, and beaten down, and sapped of their will to live—people respond positively to that. It’s nice to engage with another human being who is in a position to enjoy their work and do it well. I guess I have to go to Costco. Do you remember that movie “Idiocracy,” from 2006? Costco plays a pivotal role—it embodies this dystopian future in which people are sort of brain-dead, gluttonous consumers. You can see how Costco fits into that narrative, because it’s huge and sells huge quantities of things, and is a sort of cathedral of consumption. But that image of grotesque consumption feels so at odds with what you hear when you start actually talking to people about Costco. The degree to which they think about and relate to and feel invested in the company is much more human and earnest and idealistic than a consumer dystopia. It almost feels utopian, in a weird way. In the movie, as in real life, there’s a door greeter. And when the heroes arrive, the greeter is robotically, repetitively saying, “Welcome to Costco. I love you. Welcome to Costco. I love you.” Over and over. And the line has sort of been embraced by the Costco faithful now; on the Reddit fan page, where people compare notes on what they’re buying and the new items coming to stock, the description reads, “Welcome to Costco, we love you.”
Houses often ignite because wildland blazes throw off embers, which are carried by winds to ignite dwellings miles away. Tips for retrofitting a home to make it more safe from fires include closing eaves, installing double-paned glass, and sealing around garage doors. In fact, it’s possible to make houses nearly fireproof—but it’s arduous, and homeowners can’t do it alone. Read the story »
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The East Wing of the White House is being demolished to make room for the construction of President Trump’s proposed ballroom. How normal is this sort of White House renovation? “The White House wants you to believe this is totally normal, citing all the renovations, big and small, made by past Presidents. They are right that changes were made. But they are dead wrong about how this is being done. With the exception of F.D.R. secretly building a bunker under the East Wing during the Second World War, past renovations of this size were debated, funded by Congress, and done only after the need was manifest. None were rushed and done at the whim of a President.” — George E. Condon, Jr., the White House correspondent for National Journal and a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association
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Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Place to sweat at the gym without moving a muscle—five letters. Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons. Name Drop: Guess the identity of a notable person in six clues.
P.S. Grace Wales Bonner has been named creative director of Hermès menswear. How might her interpretation of the African diaspora, and her hallmark emotional openness, fit into the brand?🧣