Copyright The New Yorker
Costco, in one sense, is simple enough to define. It’s a chain retailer that operates on a club model, offering members who pay sixty-five dollars a year the chance to buy bulk goods at prices close to wholesale. Costco sells fresh and packaged foods, household and pharmacy staples, electronics, furniture, and clothing, from both name brands and Kirkland Signature, the company’s private label, which appears on everything from golf clubs to gasoline. Employees, who receive excellent wages and benefits, often work there for years. The stores are called warehouses, and this captures their look: merchandise stacked on pallets across industrial shelves rising toward high ceilings. During my childhood in San Jose, California, Costco was a source of many cherished treats—the six-pouch box of Ghirardelli triple-chocolate brownie mix comes to mind. Yet this fails to explain the atavistic loyalty I have to its warehouses. I know exactly how Costco smells—like clean concrete and the static of plastic wrap—and would recognize that smell anywhere. The parts of California where going someplace requires getting on a highway and driving for thirty minutes feel like both Costco’s native habitat and my own. The Costco where my family got its paper towels, frozen French-bread pizzas, and ibuprofen—Warehouse No. 148, on Senter Road—opened the week I was born. “I will be cremated in a Kirkland flame lol,” my brother texted me when he heard that I was writing about the company. My late father, our family’s designated Costco shopper, wore Kirkland Signature pants. Recently, I called my dad’s best friend, Scott Willis. He and my dad, then colleagues at the San Jose Mercury News, spent my childhood riffing on their respective Costcos. “We were both on journalism salaries in Silicon Valley,” Scott told me—it was fun to get a deal. These days, he said, he likes to go early to Senter for gas and to the Coleman Avenue Costco—“a great Costco”—for the kind of San Pellegrino that his wife prefers. Get Costco shoppers talking and they all have personal strategies and rules. “If I can’t find parking in under eight minutes, I drive away,” the comedian Sheng Wang says in his 2022 standup special. Shopping there almost inevitably involves a degree of hassle: not only parking but searching, schlepping, and waiting in line. It is the opposite of frictionless, a term usually valorized in modern commerce. But friction is where stories begin, and people love telling stories about Costco—which relies on word of mouth rather than advertising. Costco might have no more dedicated evangelists than David and Susan Schwartz, the authors of the 2023 book “The Joy of Costco,” a self-published compilation of company trivia and history. It abounds in raw numbers (“In 2022, Costco members bought over $300,000 worth of whole cashews every week”) and feats of operational savvy (using square rather than round containers “saved over 400 truckloads of shipping expenses in just the first year”). The New York-based Schwartzes visit Costcos all over the world; a few years ago, they flew to New Zealand, in part to see the Auckland warehouse, and Susan brought hard-boiled Costco quail eggs for the flight. These got her fined four hundred dollars at customs. “They were eight ninety-nine plus four hundred,” Susan told me. “So it wasn’t such a good deal.” Last year, A. J. Befumo, a former independent pro wrestler, and his preteen son Eric found fame on TikTok by proclaiming themselves “Costco guys,” in a video that now has more than sixty-five million views. Since then, they have reviewed snacks on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and promoted a novelty single called “We Bring The BOOM!” In January of 2020, TMZ published a photo of Mark Zuckerberg browsing electronics at the Mountain View warehouse. “This man can have anybody buy his flat-screen TV,” Christensen told me. “But he was, like, No, I’m going to Costco.” A warehouse’s selection often reflects its surrounding community: shoppers at the Brooklyn Costco can find whole halal lamb, kosher chickens, and cases of swallow-nest soup. The company’s term of art for its shopping experience is the “treasure hunt,” a nod to the pursuit of the limited-quantity luxuries that wash up on its shelves—Louis Vuitton Speedy handbags, say, for just under seventeen hundred dollars each, about three hundred less than the market price. My brother, who has shopped Costcos in San Diego, Denver, and Tukwila, Washington, said that he found the term misleading; the whole point is that you don’t really know what you’re looking for. We were talking while wandering through the Manhattan Costco, where, in the meat department, 16.62 pounds of boneless rib eye caught his attention. It was $15.99 a pound—$265.75. “Well priced,” he said, appreciative even if he wasn’t looking to buy steak for thirty-three. There is an easy comedy of bigness to Costco. It’s a vein of humor that Barack Obama tapped in 2014, when he praised the company’s employment practices in an address at a Maryland warehouse. “Before I grab a ten-pound barrel of pretzels and five hundred golf balls,” Obama said, “let me just leave you with something I heard from Costco’s founder Jim Sinegal, who’s been a great friend of mine.” The line Obama went on to quote—“We did not build our company in a vacuum. We built it in the greatest country on earth”—came from a speech that Sinegal, who served as Costco’s C.E.O. for nearly thirty years, had given at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. In such rhetoric, Costco could represent a culmination of twentieth-century American liberal ideals: it promised bounty, equitably and efficiently distributed—the good life, albeit one trailing all the detritus of twentieth-century American consumption. The jokes about gallon jars of mayonnaise perhaps obscure the company’s true power. When Costco began sourcing most of its farmed salmon (six hundred thousand pounds per week) from Norway rather than Chile, it caused upheaval in the global fishing industry. Growing up involves learning that certain things are specific to your family, and certain things are more like general conditions; Costco clearly falls into the latter category. Still, being a child of California in the eighties and nineties offered a front-row seat to the rise of a retail juggernaut. Costco opened its first location in Seattle in 1983; five years later, it had some fifty stores, concentrated on the West Coast; today, there are more than nine hundred Costco warehouses around the world. (Seventy-one per cent of the population of Iceland are members, according to one survey.) Worldwide, in terms of revenue, only Amazon and Walmart are larger retailers. The Kirkland label, introduced in 1995, now generates more revenue than Nike. But what exactly makes Costco Costco? This is a question that interests Maggie Perkins, a corporate trainer at the company who travels the country to instruct employees in its ways. Perkins posts about her job on TikTok, and she has noticed something in people’s replies: “They say ‘my Costco.’ ” The loyalty of Costco’s following—at latest count, it had a hundred and forty-five million members globally—is an existential matter for the company. “The most important item we sell is the membership card,” Ron Vachris, the current C.E.O., has said. The company’s low prices are possible because membership fees account for much of the profits. “For Costco, culture is a business strategy,” Perkins told me. Its success requires being a place where people want to belong—and, for all Costco’s hard-nosed pursuit of low prices and high quality, such a desire has rested on an elusive sense of the company as a force for good in the world. But that world and its values seem more fragile than they used to. “As the global landscape changes,” Perkins said, “as retailers change, as the way that people do business changes, if Costco’s culture changes in a way that consumers do not appreciate, then Costco could lose who it is.” Costco as we know it would not exist without Sol Price, the prickly, brilliant lawyer turned businessman behind the pioneering retail chains FedMart and Price Club. FedMart, founded in 1954, helped to establish discount shopping as a pillar of American retail, and in 1976 Price Club invented the warehouse wholesale club. Walmart’s co-founder Sam Walton has written, “I guess I’ve stolen—I actually prefer the word ‘borrowed’—as many ideas from Sol Price as from anybody else in the business.” Price, who died in 2009, was once asked how it felt to be the father of an industry. He replied that he should have worn a condom. Sinegal, Costco’s co-founder, tells this story in his foreword to “Sol Price: Retail Revolutionary and Social Innovator,” a 2012 biography written by Price’s eldest son, Robert. Price was born in 1916 to labor-socialist Russian Jewish immigrants in the Bronx. After his father received a diagnosis of tuberculosis, the family ended up in San Diego. When Price arrived there, in 1929, he was a thirteen-year-old tenth grader (he’d skipped two grades) who had decided to become a lawyer after following the Scopes trial. He attended law school at the University of Southern California and started practicing in San Diego. Then, in the early fifties, one of his clients told him about an interesting new store in Los Angeles called Fedco. A nonprofit, it was open only to federal employees, who paid a small fee to become members—an arrangement that circumvented laws at the time which allowed manufacturers to set minimum retail prices for their goods. Drawn by the low prices, some five thousand people from San Diego, the client had heard, were making the more than two-hundred-mile round trip to L.A. to shop. Price and a few associates thought that San Diego could use a Fedco of its own. The Second World War had transformed the city from a quiet coastal town into a major military hub; the population was booming with federal employees. Fedco declined to participate, so Price’s group proceeded on its own, under the name FedMart. Its first store, situated in an industrial building near San Diego’s tuna canneries, opened in November of 1954 and sold, among other things, appliances, clothing, and liquor. Any military or government employee could pay two dollars for a lifetime membership. FedMart was an immediate hit, and Price became the company’s president. Soon, the store began offering gas, prescription drugs, and groceries, starting with Planters peanuts. Under Price’s leadership, FedMart implemented three central strategies that would eventually shape Costco. First, the company embraced unprepossessing real estate. Shopping at the time tended to be a dress-up affair pursued in downtown department stores; FedMart bet that people would sacrifice ambience and geographical convenience for a good deal. Discount retailing was in its infancy, but Price’s success spurred competitors such as Kmart, Target, and Walmart, all of which opened in 1962. FedMart nonetheless stood out, partly as a result of Price’s second strategy: “the intelligent loss of sales.” This involved limiting the variety of items in stock. Instead of trying to meet every possible customer desire, you could trust that most shoppers would buy the product in front of them—the No. 1 toothpaste brand rather than No. 3, for example. And big packages offered better value. Here were the seeds of an enduring Costco paradox: what looks at first like appetite run amok (gallon jars of mayonnaise) is in fact a sign of restraint (selling mayonnaise jars in only one size). In this way, the retailer became more efficient across its supply chain—it took fewer workers to deal with fewer items of different kinds. The company could therefore manage labor costs while offering jobs that paid well. This was the third pillar of Price’s approach: he believed that being a good employer was good business, a tenet that would define Costco. In his biography, Robert connects Price’s outlook to the politics he absorbed from his parents and the privations he witnessed during the Great Depression. “You must feel confident that you are working for a fine and honest company,” Price wrote, in a 1965 memo to FedMart employees. “You will be permitted, encouraged, and sometimes even coerced into growing with the company to the limit of your ability.” Jim Sinegal, who came from blue-collar Pittsburgh, was eighteen and on winter break at San Diego City College when he accepted a one-day gig at FedMart. He stayed for more than twenty years. A few days in, Price saw him carrying a sofa and hollered at him to put it down before he broke his back or, worse, the merchandise. (“That’s just Sol,” a colleague reassured the startled teen.) “He was a tough boss, as tough as shoe leather,” Sinegal told me, when we met this summer at his family office in Kirkland, Washington. “But he was a marshmallow inside.” (The Seattle suburb of Kirkland was once home to Costco’s headquarters, hence the in-house brand’s name; the company relocated to Issaquah in the mid-nineties.) Sinegal, who stepped down as the C.E.O. at the end of 2011, wore white Kirkland sneakers and drank a bottle of Kirkland sparkling water. At eighty-nine, he still goes to Issaquah about once a week and maintains the look—mustache, open collar—that became his trademark as C.E.O. “My sense is that my father saw in Jim an energy and an intelligence and a commitment to the business that impressed him a lot,” Robert Price told me. “But Jim impressed everybody. . . . He was really, really competent.” Robert, who joined the company in 1965, remembered being acutely conscious of his status as the boss’s son. He started to recount his first meeting with Sinegal—it involved executives bungling a travel plan and Sinegal calling them the Keystone Cops—but then petered out. “Jim tells the story a lot better than I do,” Robert said. By the seventies, FedMart had expanded throughout the Southwest, with its own stores and a number of franchises. Sinegal ran the distribution-warehouse system, which operated almost as a separate business and had become a profit center for the company. In 1975, the German businessman Hugo Mann invested in FedMart. Price hoped that this would be a chance to expand, but to Mann, it became clear, the deal was a takeover. “Those of us who knew Sol figured he would last between one day and six months,” Sinegal told me. “He almost lasted six months.” As the family weighed its next move, Robert had an idea. What if they made Sinegal’s distribution system the crux of a new endeavor, setting up a warehouse that stocked wholesale goods for small businesses? The first Price Club warehouse opened in 1976, in a former airplane hangar on San Diego’s northern outskirts. Price Club charged its small-business clientele twenty-five dollars a year for membership, cash flow that could be factored into the company’s gross margins. And wholesaling introduced a new level of efficiency—goods sold from the pallets on which they were delivered required little handling. Within a few years, Price Club began welcoming ordinary shoppers, and it soon had more than two hundred thousand members across locations in California and Arizona. The company went public, in 1979, almost by accident: there was no I.P.O., but, following stock splits, its number of shareholders had exceeded the S.E.C. maximum for a private company. The company’s début got Wall Street’s attention. Suddenly, Sinegal told me,“everybody found out how successful they were. Nobody dreamed it.” The next two years saw the opening of imitators such as Pace, BJ’s, and Sam’s Club. Price, now in his sixties, had managed a remarkable second act. (FedMart, meanwhile, was liquidated seven years after his departure.) In 1982, Sinegal, who had been working as an independent broker for consumer brands, was contacted by a Seattle retail heir named Jeffrey Brotman. His family had approached Price Club about opening a store in Seattle, but the Prices weren’t interested. Now Brotman suggested that he and Sinegal launch their own wholesale-club store there. The pitch that they made to investors, Sinegal told me, was simple: “Let’s duplicate what Price Club is doing.” They wanted a simple name for the new venture, and, he added, “we couldn’t come up with anything clever.” “Costco Wholesale Club Comes to SEATTLE,” a flyer for Costco’s first warehouse opening, in 1983, read, faintly implying that it already existed elsewhere. Costco, though, was a shrewd recombination of what had come before rather than a straight copy. It took up Price Club’s wholesale model of bulk efficiency and substantial membership fees, then, as time passed, added such FedMart staples as private-label goods, gas, and groceries. Staff, too, carried over: Sinegal recruited FedMart veterans. Costco’s success was swift—two more warehouses opened before the end of its first year. By the early nineties, Sinegal and Brotman (who had become the chairman) were gaining momentum, as was Sam’s Club—Walmart’s warehouse-club chain. Price Club, meanwhile, was flagging. Sol Price had relinquished his official leadership role, and Robert’s fifteen-year-old son had recently died of cancer, devastating the family. In 1992, the Prices decided to seek a buyer; Costco was the natural choice. The new company now had the scale to compete with Sam’s Club—but the enduring partnership that Price had hoped for did not materialize. “My dad had this idea that we could take these two companies that were so similar in terms of philosophy,” Robert told me, “and I would be chairman and Jim would be the C.E.O. It never worked.” Within a year of the 1993 merger, Robert left. If Price’s image had been that of a stern paterfamilias, Sinegal played the role of boss as a man of the people: in official photos, he wore a huge smile and a Costco nametag. (He also took a salary lower than that of his peers at other top companies.) He, too, emphasized worker satisfaction, drawing exasperation from Wall Street. “At Costco,” a Deutsche Bank analyst lamented in 2004, “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.” Sinegal instituted a policy that Costco could mark up merchandise by no more than fourteen per cent—fifteen in the case of Kirkland goods—and received a report on anything that reached more than thirteen per cent. Pat Turpin, a Costco executive in the nineties, told me, “You didn’t want to be on that list.” Pennie Clark Ianniciello spent decades as Costco’s book buyer, building the company into a major publishing-industry player by the mid-aughts. She told me that Costco under Sinegal “had the same values I grew up with.” Steven Seguin, who is thirty-five and lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children, has worked in four different Costcos around the country in the course of sixteen years. He remembered Sinegal, on a warehouse visit, thanking each employee by name. Several years in, Seguin showed a flair for handling baking equipment; he was subsequently enlisted to train fellow-workers on such machinery as the “pie gun,” which dispatched vats of pumpkin-pie filling during the week of Thanksgiving. (“You’re just blasting pie goo,” he told me.) Seguin had previously worked at Walmart and was struck by the contrast with his old job. “It was so supportive,” he recalled. “They wanted to groom you for success.” In “The High Cost of Low Wages,” a Harvard Business Review article from 2006, Wayne F. Cascio compared Costco’s workforce with that of Sam’s Club. “In return for its generous wages and benefits, Costco gets one of the most loyal and productive workforces in all of retailing,” Cascio wrote, noting that the company generated far higher profits per hourly employee than its chief competitor. Even as Wall Street analysts complained that Costco ought to be more attentive to shareholders, its strategy appeared to be working. Costco is one of the companies that Zeynep Ton, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, has studied at length. Ton is the author of “The Case for Good Jobs,” which advances the idea that providing frontline workers with living wages, ample benefits, and paths to advancement can improve a company’s productivity and therefore its bottom line. Almost every year for the past decade, Sinegal, whom Ton calls her “business hero,” has taken her M.B.A. students on a tour of a local warehouse, where he inspects merchandise and obliges selfie requests. A student once told her that visiting the Waltham, Massachusetts, Costco with Sinegal was, after her wedding day, the best day of her life. Masters-of-business and finance types can grow rapturous on the subject of Costco. “I don’t think I have ever been more in love with a company,” Ben Gilbert declared in a 2023 episode of “Acquired,” the business podcast he co-hosts. A friend of a friend with a background in startups described the company as “capitalism in its best and highest form.” This enthusiasm seems to stem partly from admiration for the can-do ingenuity of Costco’s business model. But Costco also gives idealistic M.B.A.s a way to feel good about business—and a promise that it is possible to be, like Jim Sinegal, both successful and beloved for your success. At a 2018 luncheon, W. Craig Jelinek, who took over as C.E.O. in 2012, told a story about a stalwart Costco food-court deal: the dollar-fifty hot-dog-and-soda combo. Concerned about its economics, he’d approached Sinegal, who was then his boss. “We are losing our rear ends,” Jelinek recalled telling him. “And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ ” This story became Costco lore. “It’s unbelievable how that’s taken on a life of its own,” Jelinek told me. His intent had been to explain how they figured it out—by building a hot-dog plant in L.A.—but what resonated was the idea of a C.E.O. as a hot-dog-loving folk hero. Sinegal himself had laid the groundwork a few years before, when a reporter asked him what it would mean if the hot-dog price went up. “That I’m dead,” he replied. Sinegal’s personal offices in Kirkland have become a Valhalla for former Costco executives. Jelinek, who served as the C.E.O. until 2023, has a desk there, and so does Richard Galanti, who stepped down in 2024, after nearly forty years as the C.F.O. (“We get to sit around and tell old stories,” Jelinek told me.) When I visited, I saw, on a shelf near several unopened Kirkland liquor bottles, a bronze pair of sneakers similar to the ones Sinegal wore during our meeting. They were mounted with a plaque that read: Jim. These are some. Big Shoes to Fill. Non-Foods Almost a decade and a half into retirement, Sinegal remains the most prominent public face of Costco. The question of what the company becomes without him is inevitable. In 2011, he sat for an interview with the Seattle Times business reporter Melissa Allison, who asked him whether his ability to maintain generous employee benefits was “a founder’s luxury.” Sinegal said that he thought Jelinek, his immediate successor, would be fine: “It’s the third and fourth generation of management that probably will have more difficulty with that.” Ron Vachris became Costco’s third C.E.O. in January of 2024, and some feel that Sinegal’s prediction is being borne out. Only a small percentage of Costco’s workforce is unionized, but the company has seen new stirrings of union activity in recent years. In 2024, a group of Costco drivers in Washington became the company’s first truckers to unionize, joining Teamsters Local 174. I spoke to two of the union’s shop stewards at a Starbucks near their depot, east of Tacoma. Through the windows, we could see semis passing by Route 167: some Costco trailers were pulled by Costco trucks, some by outside carriers, a practice to which the union has objected. Robert Campus has been driving for Costco for twelve years and remembers when he got the call with the job offer. “I thought I won the lotto,” he told me. “The first thing they said was ‘Welcome to the family.’ ” A few years later, his wife got a job in a Costco warehouse; besides the pay and benefits, they appreciated such gestures as staff cookouts and free company apparel. But these perks have become rare. Costco’s standards for drivers had also changed, union members said. Paul Lowrie, who’d come to Costco in 2021 with twenty-three years of experience, told me that the number of drivers at his depot had nearly doubled since his arrival, and the minimum required experience had decreased from five years to two. When a Norfolk, Virginia, warehouse voted to unionize, in 2023, it was the first to do so in more than two decades. At the time, Jelinek and Vachris sent a joint letter to the entire company. “To be honest, we’re disappointed by the result in Norfolk,” they wrote. “We’re not disappointed in our employees, we’re disappointed in ourselves as managers and leaders.” Lowrie told me that he had taken the letter as a positive sign. “They looked inward,” he said. But he hasn’t seen that happening with the latest unionization effort. “There’s no internal What was the problem here? What did we do wrong as a company?” Last fall, the Local 174 secretary-treasurer, Rick Hicks, declared in a letter to members that “this is not Jim Sinegal’s Costco anymore.” Even during Sinegal’s tenure, though, the company’s equitable practices generally weren’t a matter of bottom-up organizing. Perhaps the company was a family, but families are not, after all, democracies. In 2009, when Congress was considering the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize, Costco joined Starbucks and Whole Foods in proposing what Sinegal then called “a compromise position,” which essentially gutted the bill. A few years later, Costco faced a class-action sex-discrimination suit brought by women who said that they’d struggled to receive promotion into leadership roles, in part because such jobs weren’t posted or publicized. The company’s tight-knit internal relationships could look, from a different angle, like an old boys’ club. At the time, Sinegal was dismissive of the women’s concerns—a reminder of the pitfalls of turning one person’s ethos into an organization’s moral compass. (Costco agreed to settle the case in 2013, for eight million dollars.) Sinegal has long been a major Democratic Party donor, hosting Presidential fund-raisers at his home in the Seattle suburbs. His successors seem not to share his appetite for the political fray. “My dad used to build airplanes,” Jelinek told a reporter just before he became the C.E.O. “The B-1 bomber, the B-70 bomber. It always depended on the Democrats or the Republicans, because one wanted defense. He said, ‘Son, do not get into the aircraft business.’ I was working part time with FedMart, and he said, ‘You know what? People will always have to eat.’ I never forgot that.” And, where Sinegal was a reliable presence in the media, Jelinek and Vachris have been markedly circumspect with the press. (Costco declined to make current executives available for interviews.) Costco has approached political controversy by casting its choices as a neutral response to the marketplace—a stance that in a polarized moment has become challenging to maintain. Early this year, it received widespread attention for shutting down efforts to undermine its D.E.I. policies. After a conservative group brought a proposal asking the company to evaluate the “risks” of its D.E.I. policies, Costco’s board of directors unanimously recommended that shareholders vote it down. “As our membership diversifies, we believe that serving it with a diverse group of employees enhances satisfaction,” the board wrote in its response. Shareholders heeded the board’s recommendation. (A wave of coverage—favorably contrasting Costco with Target, which had backpedalled on D.E.I.—was published seemingly without comment from the company.) But Costco also demonstrates the limitations of fighting political battles through a store. After the Dobbs ruling, the New York City comptroller Brad Lander wrote to retailers in which the city’s pension system owned stock, including Costco, urging them to carry the abortion drug mifepristone; previously, Costco pharmacies had not. Anti-abortion groups took up the opposite cause. In August, Costco decided not to begin selling the drug, citing “lack of demand,” and the anti-abortion groups claimed victory. (Costco will, however, now stock Ozempic and Wegovy.) During his tenure, Jelinek oversaw the company’s expansion from a hundred and sixty-one thousand employees to more than three hundred and sixteen thousand, and amid a pandemic boom in warehouse-club retail Costco added upward of six million members. This year, the company reported annual net sales of $270 billion and net income of $8.1 billion. Lately, its stock price has hovered around a thousand dollars a share. Wall Street has come around on Costco: Simeon Gutman, a retail analyst at Morgan Stanley, said that it has won credibility by succeeding in the face of such challenges as the pandemic, the growth of e-commerce, and the rise of Amazon. Jeff Bezos’s company, another Washington-based retail behemoth, has come to serve as a kind of foil for Costco. Headlines about Amazon employees might focus on drivers without bathroom breaks, but, for investors, Prime and Costco are both proof that customers will pay to shop. Trump’s tariff agenda has created uncertainty for all retailers; still, because Costco sources its stock widely and in large quantities (and sells lots of groceries, which tend to be domestic), its position is “unquestionably better than most,” Gutman told me. Growth, of course, brings change. “It gets more complicated when you get bigger,” Jelinek said. This can be delicate at a company beloved for reliability. Switching, say, Kirkland’s diaper manufacturer—as Costco did early this year—risks inspiring revolt. (The registry site Babylist reported that sixty per cent of reviews for the new diapers were negative.) But Costco’s most important form of continuity has to do with the workers themselves. Employees wear nametags listing their hire dates, and it’s not uncommon to get rung up by someone who’s been with the company for twenty-five years. When, in 2017, a particularly beloved door greeter at the Seattle warehouse left his post, the Seattle Times published an article assuring worried readers that he was in good health and had simply moved to Arizona. Jelinek and Vachris both began as hourly employees, at FedMart and Price Club, respectively. The rare Costco executives who didn’t start on a warehouse floor—such as Galanti, the former C.F.O.—have often spent decades with the company. In contrast, Galanti’s replacement, Gary Millerchip, previously served as the C.F.O. of Kroger. A 2022 paper from the nonprofit Economic Roundtable described dire conditions among workers at Kroger-owned stores, with the company profiting even as some employees relied on government assistance or experienced homelessness. On his first earnings call, Millerchip reassured the public that the dollar-fifty hot dog was “safe.” Seguin, the pie-gun master, said that he mourned the small practices that used to distinguish Costco—communal tables for break-room lunch, intensive buddy-system training. He told me that, after Sinegal stepped down, warehouse walk-throughs by executives began to feel less motivational than “disciplinary.” On a subreddit where warehouse employees compare notes, recent threads include “Overall downturn of the company?!” and “Has anyone else given up recently?” But higher-ups, too, have noticed a difference. William Oliver is the co-founder of an investor research service called In Practise, which produces reports for investors based on interviews with executives. The Costco veterans with whom he has spoken describe a clear shift in recent years: growing success but also growing susceptibility to pressures from Wall Street. “It’s a deterioration from the perspective of Jim’s old guard,” Oliver told me. “To them, it’s moved from ‘working for Dad’ toward a greater emphasis on shareholder return.” Seguin gave his notice at Costco this past summer. “It is a great company to work for, on paper,” he said. Still, he was startled by the corporate impersonality of his departure: no managerial farewell and no handshake, just a perfunctory online exit interview in a back room. Maggie Perkins, the corporate trainer, taught middle and high school before she came to Costco in 2022, starting in a Georgia warehouse. When people hear about her career change, they often express dismay that educators are so poorly treated that she’d prefer to work in retail. But she told me that she’d found a sense of stability and community at Costco, and observed that others have, too. “I’ve learned that people have associated their identity and their moral values with Costco,” she told me. Earlier this year, in an essay for the Catholic magazine The Lamp, Matthew Walther proposed Costco as a model for reimagining the shape and role of a parish in contemporary American life, which he describes as “transient, convenient, uprooted,” and fundamentally suburban. “Costco did not grow,” Walther writes. “Instead, it rose up in a barren place and people came to it.” I thought of Walther’s essay during a visit I paid to Richland, Washington, in the high desert on the east side of the Cascade Range. Richland is a barren place. In 1943, the area just to its north was selected as the location of the Manhattan Project’s first large-scale plutonium-production reactor, which made the plutonium in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This summer, Richland became home to the nine hundred and thirteenth Costco. The night before a new Costco opens, employees gather at the warehouse with their families for a party. Many of the guests at the new Richland warehouse wore green, the color of the local high school’s sports teams—which continue, improbably, to be called the Bombers. Some wandered the warehouse; others clustered at the registers, leaning on conveyor belts to chat and eat. The food court had a spread of pizza, hot dogs, and squares of sheet cake, a plastic fork planted neatly atop each. Near the golf carts and electronics, I overheard a man with a 1997 nametag reminiscing about the days when they served prime rib at these parties. Ron Vachris, shaking hands and greeting babies, had the mild civic familiarity of a small-town mayor. He held a manila envelope in which he was collecting dollar bills: following company tradition, employees were writing down their guesses for the first day’s take on a bill; the closest one would keep the pot. A loose line for an audience with Vachris had formed and persisted even as a man in a green polo shirt began wiping down the registers. It had been a long week of opening Costcos—Vachris had also inaugurated warehouses in Florida, Guadalajara, and Quebec. Outside, the sky had grown dark, and the wind had picked up force. A handful of shoppers were setting up camp to be first into the warehouse on opening day—an occasion Costco marks by stocking an assortment of limited-quantity items, from Hoka sneakers to W. L. Weller bourbon. Seated at the head of the line were two men: Greg, who had a gray beard and glasses, and his nephew Craig, who had small blue gauges in his ears and the sun-raw look of a snowboarder. They had brought a cooler, a cribbage set, and sleeping bags. “We both like bourbon,” Greg explained. “But it’s become an event.” When I returned the next morning, Greg was the first person I saw. He estimated that he and Craig had gotten only an hour and a half of sleep, but had enjoyed talking with their overnight companions. “It was an awesome community,” Greg said. The line now stretched around the corner of the warehouse and beyond. It was 7:30 A.M. At the door, prospective customers outside and employees inside held their phones aloft and documented one another. The warehouse’s general manager, a compact man in a blue floral dress shirt, cut a red ribbon. “Without further ado, let’s sell some stuff,” he said. ♦
