How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche
By Ben Ryder Howe
Few companies have greater influence over what we eat (or wear, or fuel our cars with, or use for personal hygiene). Costco dominates multiple categories of the food supply — beef, poultry, organic produce, even fine wine from Bordeaux, which it sells more of than any retailer in the world. It is the arbiter of survival for millions of producers, including more than 1 million cashew farmers in Africa alone. (Costco sells half the world’s cashews.) Its private label, Kirkland, generates more revenue than towering brands like Nike and Coca-Cola...
Whether Costco is a cult or not, its founder was a Bronx-born lawyer with utopian ideals and strict morals.
Sol Price, born in 1916, was the son of garment workers from Minsk, Poland, and belonged to the generation of displaced Jews and other Europeans who thrived in New York’s small businesses — the delis, candy shops and pawnshops of the Depression and postwar years. In the 1920s, the family moved to San Diego, where he went to high school.
After law school at the University of Southern California, Price started his career representing grocers and other merchants. With the temperament of a shopkeeper who obsesses over his customers and fusses over the smallest of details, in the 1950s Price began converting empty San Diego warehouses into members-only bazaars where for a small fee, shoppers could get everything from hosiery to cigarettes at wholesale prices. The key to the business, called FedMart, was simple: keep members renewing year after year.
In 2003, Price described his philosophy to Fortune magazine as “How do we sell stuff at the lowest markup?” The overriding goal, he said, was “to look at everything from the standpoint of, is it really being honest with the customer?”
Price had a gift for connecting with shoppers at a time of exploding prosperity and social change, but paradoxically, one of his rules was not making too much money. “He grew up in a family of socialists."
For the whole article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/dining/costco.html
https://news.yahoo.com/news/costco-hacked-american-shopping-psyche-114154798.html