Competition makes you stronger. If our top competitor didn’t exist, we would have to make them up.
Just about the time you teach a horse to eat hay, the horse dies.
You have to schedule it. You have to plan the opportunity to think about your business and plan what you're going to do. Otherwise you're just a hamster running on a treadmill; you're never going to get anywhere. You've got to schedule it. Strategic planning is an important part of running any business and the more so for businesses that operating in multiple states and countries.
We're not kamikaze pilots. We want to do things in a sensible fashion. If we can speed up our growth, without outdistancing our management team, and provide a quality product, then we will do so. Aside from the quality issues and wanting to grow the business in a sensible fashion, we don't have any grand scheme that says, for example, that we have to be in Latin America by the year 2015 or have 1000 Costco's in ten years.
A good example of that is that ninety percent of our book sales are unplanned. A customer walks by the book table, sees a book, picks it up, looks at the jacket, says "hey this looks kind of interesting," and buys it.
If a customer’s calling and they have a gripe, don’t you think they kind of enjoy the fact that I picked up the phone and talked to them.
If warehouse managers know that their own regional bosses have open door policies and will talk to any employees about their issues, then they are going to be a little faster to talk to the troubled employees themselves. They don’t want the problems to come back to them through their bosses.
We have said from the very beginning. We’re going to be a company that’s on a first-name basis with everyone.
Imagine that you have 120,000 loyal ambassadors out there who are constantly saying good things about Costco. It has to be a significant advantage for you.
Our business was founded so that small businesses could come in and buy essentially everything they needed for their business under one roof. Café owners could purchase all of their food and drink, cigarettes and candy, cleaning supplies, pots and pans, toilet paper and towels, pads and pencils, and so on.
Technology has made us much more productive. With computers, fax machines, and cell phones we have more productive time during the course of the whole day and can react to situations more immediately.
Sometimes we have so much information it’s more than we can deal with. Our web site and our e-commerce business are also profitable on a fully allocated basis, and that is somewhat of a milestone.
Technology helps us become more efficient and productive but our business still has a lot of art as opposed to strictly science.
The reason that the dot-com companies didn't succeed is that they were very good at the science end but they didn't understand anything about the art of buying and selling merchandise. They thought that was the easy part but it turned out to be the most difficult.
If you don't have the right merchandise in the right place at the right time you can forget about everything else. All the satellites in the world aren't going to help you.
People are still going to want to go out and have that social exchange.
We only have one bullet in our gun, the right product at the right price.
One time [customers] may come in and see that we have some Coach handbags and they come in the next time and the Coach handbags aren’t there, but perhaps there are some Fila jackets. The attitude is that if you see it, you have got to buy it because it may not be there next time.
One hallmark of our business is that we have developed such a high-end clientele with a high-end product selection and assortment.
We’re low-cost operators, and it would be a little phony if we tried to pretend that we’re not and had all the trappings.
The one constant is value. Value is appreciated no matter where you go.
Our attitude has always been that if you hire good people and provide good wages and good jobs and more than that – if you provide careers – that good things will happen to your company. I don’t see what’s wrong with an employee earning enough to be able to buy a house or have a health plan for the family.
We have guys who started pushing shopping carts out on the parking lot for us who are now vice presidents of our company.
Wall Street is in the business of making money between now and next Tuesday. We're in the business of building an organization, an institution that we hope will be here 50 years from now. And paying good wages and keeping your people working with you is very good business.
I think the biggest single thing that causes difficulty in the business world is the short-term view. We become obsessed with it. But it forces bad decisions.
We expect to open about 18 or 19 stores this year and next, then grow to about 25 or 30 a year worldwide after that.
My test scores were good, but my grades weren't that good, because I needed focus.
It was at San Diego Junior College (now City College) where I regained that focus, and paid attention, because deep down I knew education was important.
It wasn’t that great a job. I was getting a buck and a quarter an hour. But it was exciting.
I’ve never been told I’m a most distinguished anything.
This is almost like show business. I mean, every day you're opening up and it's show time.
We take great pride in the fact that people join us and they stay with us.
We pay much better than Wal-Mart. That's not altruism. It's good business.
If you’re a big-picture guy, you’re not in the picture. Retail is detail.
It makes no sense to do inexpensively what we shouldn’t be doing at all.
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