The U.S. Supreme Court did end up ruling for the baker’s right to not bake the gay cake (after CO totally screwed him all the way). But then a trans lawyer immediately embroiled him in another lawsuit over a trans cake. I think that eventually resulted in the baker’s favor but sheesh 10+ years of litigation over 2 cakes is pretty insane huh.
It was designed by the activist side of the LGB movement. Most gay people didn't want to make an issue out of it since they had just gotten the "win" that they wanted and fought for. Most gay people would have been happy with the wording.....Civil union, but the activists wanted "marriage".
DEI is affirmative action on steroids for conditions beyond race religion sex and national origin. Those I’ve listed are the only ones with any basis in law. And SCOTUS has made it clear a deliberate effort to advantage any race is illegal. So the administration is fully possesses the authority to withhold funds.
This is in fact one distinction that membership clubs (eg, Costco) have, which stores that generally serve the public are not commonly held to do so. There are a litany of exceptions to this - people are banned from certain stores because they have written bad checks or have restraining orders; casinos regularly exclude people from their premises and the like, and of course a great number of establishments (usually based on vending alcohol or other restricted products) have age restrictions. But you needn't premise Jim Crow laws to do so - Costco isn't an apartheid state (despite being predominantly white and Asian, that's just what their demographic breaks down as).
Great piece but you missed a fairly significant component - Costco enforces very strict QC controls on their white label suppliers in a way WalMart can't or won't. So beyond just convenience and cleanliness, people tend to have brand loyalty to the Kirkland products themselves. Have you ever seen an Instagram channel dedicated to the latest bag of Great Value frozen veggies? Me neither. But Costco adherents wear their Kirkland swag proudly and unironically
You’re at least mostly correct - Walmart has a couple that people are pretty loyal about, like Ol’ Roy dog food (it’s the best selling one in the world if I recall), the EV1 clothes (with Ellen Degenres), and Ozark Trail seems to have carved out a budget-brand camping / outdoorsman niche with generally accepted quality. And I guess Sam’s Choice is actually somewhat well regarded as far as food quality goes - this surprises me but eh, there’s always a relative upmarket brand I guess. But things like Hyper Tough… well, that one is mostly a misnomer.
Still can’t beat that $4.99 rotisserie chicken. The secret to being single or a couple and shopping at Costco, is a freezer. Which I’m sure you can buy at Costco.
There are real sommeliers who take time on YouTube to review Costco wines. They aren’t amazing, but the $20 Costco Bordeaux tastes like (inferior) Bordeaux.
In general, the Kirkland wines taste like what they are supposed to taste like, just not the best version of that thing. The Kirkland Prosecco and Champagne are both pretty bad, in my opinion, but there is a lot of low-end sparkling wine produced and some is fairly drinkable. My wife and I sometimes have dinner parties where we serve several bottles of wine blind, and sometimes I’ll throw in a Kirkland selection just for amusement. I remember being shocked at the Gigondas, and if you see their Oregon Pinot Noir, buy it, because it’s usually quite good. The word is out because that one sells out fast.
You know what? I’ve tried that, blinded. Two Buck Chuck never wins in my house. It’s surprisingly good for its price point; it’s much better than Yellow Tail or Barefoot or 19 Crimes Against Winemaking. But no, it doesn’t beat Chateau Montelena Estate Cabernet. At least not to me.
The guy who manages the wine at my Costco is a retired restaurant owner. He is very knowledgeable about all things wine. I shop only from the wine bins featuring — promoting? — curated, (often, not always) smaller vineyards. The selections are always excellent.
Another "subsidy" that Costco makes for itself is low employee turnover. Turnover is very expensive and paying employees more lowers turnover. Costco employees (in the USA) seem to care about customers and are in pretty good spirits. Walmart employees are mostly miserable because they are paid barely enough to survive. This makes Costco a much more enjoyable place to shop at.
For a while Costco wasn't unionized - which led to some departments having much higher turnover than others, somewhat counter-intuitively. (It is... unevenly unionized today.) But in particular, workers would join the meat department, get excellent training as butchers, then go elsewhere to take a union job. This is the only counterpoint that I remember from my personal network - as a rule I think the consensus agreed with you (except that promotion out of the warehouse to corporate was hard)
Costco is pretty selective with respect to employees. That means that they won't touch a lot of the folks that Walmart would hire. If you work at Costco, you get to interact with a better grade of employees as coworkers AND a less dysfunctional customer base than Walmart employees.
This is all right on, but, as @ringleader mentioned, Colorado lost at SCOTUS, and lost again, and now the cake baker is free to not custom-design a cake for a gay marriage. He always was happy to sell anyone a cake that was already made.
You'll be amused to know that Costco is opening up a store in West San Jose, and the complaints from neighbors are off the charts. The traffic, mainly. Naturally, the neighbors lost and the store is going forward.
No, Merlin & Liz, Progress was advanced by the Founding Fathers, who defined "rights" as something inherent in us (they used God as the endower, but I needn't invoke Him), not something that a small group of enthusiasts discover for themselves and litigate for.
Been a Costco member since the 1980’s. It was also Charlie Munger’s favorite business. If you want all the details on Costco, listen to the Acquired podcast episode on it
Very few cover artists have managed to make the song their own sufficiently that people remember it as "theirs" rather than the original. The only one I can recollect is Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" which was originally a Dolly Parton song (and ... dang, it's rare that someone mogs Dolly Parton... I thought only Jolene did that). But yes, Tears for Fears in my book; the younger generation seems to know the Demi Lovato version (perhaps because Spotify likes to serve that up to them).
To what extent is the shoplifting problem actually due to the lucrative resale market for shoplifted goods that was created by Amazon Marketplace? And to what extent are all these "the law must go after shoplifters" pieces actually downstream of a corporate PR push to misplace the blame from the large corporations profiting as fences?
Before Amazon Marketplace standardized it, there was eBay and Craigslist (both of which still do a bang up business) and Facebook Marketplace is also enormous for the local "secondary market" - and before that the gray market was "swap meets" and the like - but yes, there's a phenomenal business in the black/gray market, and it's not just cars-stolen-for-order for export. Perhaps I should do an article on that, people always seem to find the dubious side of the economy fascinating.
Regarding your final point, which I look forward to reading later, my experience is that insurers and businesses will passively accept whatever the tort system dishes out and pass the costs onto their zillions of consumers. I think Mark Cuban ran a mini-experiment and pointed out health insurers don't really do much bargaining either.
Health insurance companies don't have a lot of incentive to do so; their model is basically cost plus percentage and so reducing the cost top line reduces what they can make too. If that sounds dysfunctional and counterproductive to you from the perspective of producing an efficient health care system, you're on target but you're not the first to observe that.
Team Costco all day every day. They pay their employees well, keep a very clean store, and greet people with a smile upon entering and leaving. More importantly, I get the most bang for my buck by shopping in bulk there for my family.
Right?! Enforce my freaking borders and let's get started with the exiles and executions. Otherwise abolish the State and its taxes and debt I didn't agree to incur and I'll just rent from Jeff Bezos.
I LOVE Costco and have been a customer since they came into existence in my area. I do see shoplifting in the stores. I see people open boxes of snacks, turn them on the side and put them on the middle shelf and then "shop" around that aisle while reaching in and grabbing a few to throw into their big pocketbook. I have also seen people "try on" clothing and then put their coat/jacket over top and then check out and walk out. But one time, that checker at the door caught an overcharge for me......I was accidentally charged for 2 cases of diapers instead of 1 and it was taken care of immediately.
The door checkers at Costco - the guys who scan through your receipt -are trained not to look for shoplifters but to make sure you aren't missing anything you bought (because it's a hassle to leave it at the cash register and have to drive back to Costco) - so at primarily what they're trying to do is make sure that if you bought something that the stock runner had to get from the cage (iPhone, hearing aids, cigarettes, gift cards, whatever) that you got it before you left the cash register / before you left the store. There is also an incidental anti shoplifting function, but they don't apparently do a lot of enforcement there at the exit.
Costco is much more than a membership that deters shrinkage. For a great in depth understanding of their business model, history and built in competitive advantages, I recommend the Acquired episode on Costco. It even explains why they frustratingly relocate items all the time - it’s on purpose!
The U.S. Supreme Court did end up ruling for the baker’s right to not bake the gay cake (after CO totally screwed him all the way). But then a trans lawyer immediately embroiled him in another lawsuit over a trans cake. I think that eventually resulted in the baker’s favor but sheesh 10+ years of litigation over 2 cakes is pretty insane huh.
Lawfare can really ruin ya
The cake ordeal was about pushing an agenda, and an attempt to force compliance. Gay marriage cakes were never the issue.
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” – Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) circa 1960s
And I would imagine they're not done yet. The intent is not to make him bake the cake. It's to litigate him out of business.
It was designed by the activist side of the LGB movement. Most gay people didn't want to make an issue out of it since they had just gotten the "win" that they wanted and fought for. Most gay people would have been happy with the wording.....Civil union, but the activists wanted "marriage".
The process is the punishment.
DEI is affirmative action on steroids for conditions beyond race religion sex and national origin. Those I’ve listed are the only ones with any basis in law. And SCOTUS has made it clear a deliberate effort to advantage any race is illegal. So the administration is fully possesses the authority to withhold funds.
This is in fact one distinction that membership clubs (eg, Costco) have, which stores that generally serve the public are not commonly held to do so. There are a litany of exceptions to this - people are banned from certain stores because they have written bad checks or have restraining orders; casinos regularly exclude people from their premises and the like, and of course a great number of establishments (usually based on vending alcohol or other restricted products) have age restrictions. But you needn't premise Jim Crow laws to do so - Costco isn't an apartheid state (despite being predominantly white and Asian, that's just what their demographic breaks down as).
God forbid people exercise their own agency!
Goldwater was right.
Assuming they are not receiving any government funds. You forfeit control legally when you take the cash.
Yes, so long as the other way around is also allowed. But DEI’s cornerstone is that kind of equality under the law can never be allowed again.
So as long as that is the functional template, non-DEI Americans must fight against it on whatever ground available.
Great piece but you missed a fairly significant component - Costco enforces very strict QC controls on their white label suppliers in a way WalMart can't or won't. So beyond just convenience and cleanliness, people tend to have brand loyalty to the Kirkland products themselves. Have you ever seen an Instagram channel dedicated to the latest bag of Great Value frozen veggies? Me neither. But Costco adherents wear their Kirkland swag proudly and unironically
You’re at least mostly correct - Walmart has a couple that people are pretty loyal about, like Ol’ Roy dog food (it’s the best selling one in the world if I recall), the EV1 clothes (with Ellen Degenres), and Ozark Trail seems to have carved out a budget-brand camping / outdoorsman niche with generally accepted quality. And I guess Sam’s Choice is actually somewhat well regarded as far as food quality goes - this surprises me but eh, there’s always a relative upmarket brand I guess. But things like Hyper Tough… well, that one is mostly a misnomer.
Still can’t beat that $4.99 rotisserie chicken. The secret to being single or a couple and shopping at Costco, is a freezer. Which I’m sure you can buy at Costco.
There are real sommeliers who take time on YouTube to review Costco wines. They aren’t amazing, but the $20 Costco Bordeaux tastes like (inferior) Bordeaux.
I confess I haven't done my homework there. Thanks for the tip.
In general, the Kirkland wines taste like what they are supposed to taste like, just not the best version of that thing. The Kirkland Prosecco and Champagne are both pretty bad, in my opinion, but there is a lot of low-end sparkling wine produced and some is fairly drinkable. My wife and I sometimes have dinner parties where we serve several bottles of wine blind, and sometimes I’ll throw in a Kirkland selection just for amusement. I remember being shocked at the Gigondas, and if you see their Oregon Pinot Noir, buy it, because it’s usually quite good. The word is out because that one sells out fast.
You know what? I’ve tried that, blinded. Two Buck Chuck never wins in my house. It’s surprisingly good for its price point; it’s much better than Yellow Tail or Barefoot or 19 Crimes Against Winemaking. But no, it doesn’t beat Chateau Montelena Estate Cabernet. At least not to me.
The guy who manages the wine at my Costco is a retired restaurant owner. He is very knowledgeable about all things wine. I shop only from the wine bins featuring — promoting? — curated, (often, not always) smaller vineyards. The selections are always excellent.
Another "subsidy" that Costco makes for itself is low employee turnover. Turnover is very expensive and paying employees more lowers turnover. Costco employees (in the USA) seem to care about customers and are in pretty good spirits. Walmart employees are mostly miserable because they are paid barely enough to survive. This makes Costco a much more enjoyable place to shop at.
For a while Costco wasn't unionized - which led to some departments having much higher turnover than others, somewhat counter-intuitively. (It is... unevenly unionized today.) But in particular, workers would join the meat department, get excellent training as butchers, then go elsewhere to take a union job. This is the only counterpoint that I remember from my personal network - as a rule I think the consensus agreed with you (except that promotion out of the warehouse to corporate was hard)
Costco is pretty selective with respect to employees. That means that they won't touch a lot of the folks that Walmart would hire. If you work at Costco, you get to interact with a better grade of employees as coworkers AND a less dysfunctional customer base than Walmart employees.
This is all right on, but, as @ringleader mentioned, Colorado lost at SCOTUS, and lost again, and now the cake baker is free to not custom-design a cake for a gay marriage. He always was happy to sell anyone a cake that was already made.
You'll be amused to know that Costco is opening up a store in West San Jose, and the complaints from neighbors are off the charts. The traffic, mainly. Naturally, the neighbors lost and the store is going forward.
Also very annoying when they manufacture "rights" out of nothing but their narcissistic entitlement.
No, Merlin & Liz, Progress was advanced by the Founding Fathers, who defined "rights" as something inherent in us (they used God as the endower, but I needn't invoke Him), not something that a small group of enthusiasts discover for themselves and litigate for.
Oops. You used the 'r' word ("racism"). End of debate. Buh bye.
Just a heads up. Voting is a right. Shopping at Costco is a privilege.
Probably also true of cakes. Sometimes the courts agree.
So is owning a gun, but in Illinois I need a special license to do that, or to even buy ammo or shoot at a range.
That song is ALL Tears For Fears!
That's my recollection but I'll put up with the version the kids like too
Been a Costco member since the 1980’s. It was also Charlie Munger’s favorite business. If you want all the details on Costco, listen to the Acquired podcast episode on it
tears for fears. their song. lavato is just anothet cover artist.
Very few cover artists have managed to make the song their own sufficiently that people remember it as "theirs" rather than the original. The only one I can recollect is Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" which was originally a Dolly Parton song (and ... dang, it's rare that someone mogs Dolly Parton... I thought only Jolene did that). But yes, Tears for Fears in my book; the younger generation seems to know the Demi Lovato version (perhaps because Spotify likes to serve that up to them).
To what extent is the shoplifting problem actually due to the lucrative resale market for shoplifted goods that was created by Amazon Marketplace? And to what extent are all these "the law must go after shoplifters" pieces actually downstream of a corporate PR push to misplace the blame from the large corporations profiting as fences?
Before Amazon Marketplace standardized it, there was eBay and Craigslist (both of which still do a bang up business) and Facebook Marketplace is also enormous for the local "secondary market" - and before that the gray market was "swap meets" and the like - but yes, there's a phenomenal business in the black/gray market, and it's not just cars-stolen-for-order for export. Perhaps I should do an article on that, people always seem to find the dubious side of the economy fascinating.
Regarding your final point, which I look forward to reading later, my experience is that insurers and businesses will passively accept whatever the tort system dishes out and pass the costs onto their zillions of consumers. I think Mark Cuban ran a mini-experiment and pointed out health insurers don't really do much bargaining either.
Health insurance companies don't have a lot of incentive to do so; their model is basically cost plus percentage and so reducing the cost top line reduces what they can make too. If that sounds dysfunctional and counterproductive to you from the perspective of producing an efficient health care system, you're on target but you're not the first to observe that.
Team Costco all day every day. They pay their employees well, keep a very clean store, and greet people with a smile upon entering and leaving. More importantly, I get the most bang for my buck by shopping in bulk there for my family.
Riff raff control is key . It’s about the only point of government.
Right?! Enforce my freaking borders and let's get started with the exiles and executions. Otherwise abolish the State and its taxes and debt I didn't agree to incur and I'll just rent from Jeff Bezos.
I LOVE Costco and have been a customer since they came into existence in my area. I do see shoplifting in the stores. I see people open boxes of snacks, turn them on the side and put them on the middle shelf and then "shop" around that aisle while reaching in and grabbing a few to throw into their big pocketbook. I have also seen people "try on" clothing and then put their coat/jacket over top and then check out and walk out. But one time, that checker at the door caught an overcharge for me......I was accidentally charged for 2 cases of diapers instead of 1 and it was taken care of immediately.
The door checkers at Costco - the guys who scan through your receipt -are trained not to look for shoplifters but to make sure you aren't missing anything you bought (because it's a hassle to leave it at the cash register and have to drive back to Costco) - so at primarily what they're trying to do is make sure that if you bought something that the stock runner had to get from the cage (iPhone, hearing aids, cigarettes, gift cards, whatever) that you got it before you left the cash register / before you left the store. There is also an incidental anti shoplifting function, but they don't apparently do a lot of enforcement there at the exit.
Evergreen. I like your writing style. Very brisk.
Costco is much more than a membership that deters shrinkage. For a great in depth understanding of their business model, history and built in competitive advantages, I recommend the Acquired episode on Costco. It even explains why they frustratingly relocate items all the time - it’s on purpose!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6S1zMv2hltsyg2i8lJrz73?si=5TbRr8pLTDKHeUJt2HdXaw
Sorry, but it’s a Tears for Fears song FIRST!