Costco, every mention
609 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Costco
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 359David Rosenthal 222Charlie Munger 19Howard Schultz 9Michael Lewis 5Andrew Marks 3Doug DeMuro 1David Senra 1Daniel Ek 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Costco comes up
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:15:22 David Rosenthal The IKEA hot dogs today are priced at one dollar, which is cheaper than the buck 50 at Costco.
- ▶ 1:15:32 David Rosenthal I think, though, you can only get the buck 50 combo at Costco.
- ▶ 1:15:50 David Rosenthal We talked about all this on the episode, like part of how they do this is including the drink.
- ▶ 1:15:55 David Rosenthal Anyway, I refuse to believe that the ability to buy just a hot dog at Ikea is not a nod to the Costco deal because Ikea also has the hot dog and drink combo for one 50.
- ▶ 1:16:09 Ben Gilbert And it's right after checkout, just like Costco's is, and it entered the store about a decade after Costco started selling the hot dog.
- ▶ 1:18:18 David Rosenthal Which brings us to the other, I think, really uniquely Ikea piece of this hot dog policy that even Costco doesn't really have.
- ▶ 1:23:50 Ben Gilbert Just like Costco, they're sort of opposed to loss leaders.
- ▶ 1:24:01 David Rosenthal I think Costco was about not insulting your customers.
- ▶ 1:57:29 Ben Gilbert And actually, I happen to know, the founders of Costco made a special trip up to one of the Canadian Ikeas, even before the founding of Costco, because they had so much respect for IKEA as a brand they admired.
- ▶ 2:43:19 Ben Gilbert I decided I wanted to do a sales per foot analysis the same way that we did in our Costco episode.
- ▶ 2:44:38 Ben Gilbert Now let's compare it to the companies we mentioned on our Costco episode.
- ▶ 2:44:42 Ben Gilbert Costco is 1800 dollars a foot.
- ▶ 2:46:52 David Rosenthal With the exception of Costco, which is its own thing, none of those other businesses
- ▶ 2:48:18 David Rosenthal Two, Ikea and a whole set of other retail companies, Costco probably being foremost among them, have also shown that becoming a scale global player in a consumer market is a good position to be in.
- ▶ 2:54:06 Ben Gilbert Everything about this is the same scale economies as Costco.
- ▶ 2:56:09 Ben Gilbert I always thought about it as like, oh, it's kind of Costco-esque, because they're in locations kind of like Costco, and in some ways their business model and their obsession with thin margins and serving many people in high volume is…
- ▶ 2:59:53 Ben Gilbert Costco managed to make it work, even though they raised a bunch of money.
- ▶ 2:59:56 David Rosenthal Yup, but they're not structured like this.
- ▶ 2:59:59 Ben Gilbert But they can make a lot of the same sort of long-term thinking decisions, and in fact, Costco even runs on thinner margins.
- ▶ 3:00:05 Ben Gilbert Ikea's gross margins are, like, mid-thirty percent, and Costco's are 13%.
- ▶ 3:01:08 Ben Gilbert Why is it that Costco can have 13% gross margins, but Ikea marks their goods up more?
- ▶ 3:01:29 David Rosenthal Costco, let's put Kirkland aside, Costco is selling other companies' products.
- ▶ 3:01:36 David Rosenthal So, therefore, at least with the non-Kirkland products, Costco can take a lower margin because they're reselling those products.
- ▶ 3:02:00 David Rosenthal Whereas, like, in Costco, there's actually, again, Kirkland aside, third-party products in Costco, there are two margins happening.
- ▶ 3:02:10 David Rosenthal There's Costco's gross margin, but then there's also the supplier's gross margin.
- ▶ 3:02:17 Ben Gilbert We're looking at the sum of two margins when we're comparing… Ikea and Costco.
- ▶ 3:09:00 David Rosenthal So you would think tautologically, almost like Costco, the stores are the warehouses.
- ▶ 3:13:54 Ben Gilbert And I will tell you, like, for some reason, I'm just, like, not as fired up about it as compared to a Costco or an Hermes.
- ▶ 3:20:19 Ben Gilbert We want to give three special thank yous to Jim Senegal, the co-founder and former CEO of Costco, for his
- ▶ 3:21:15 Ben Gilbert Anyway, if you like this episode, go check out our episodes on Costco, on Walmart, or on Amazon.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 5:56:50 unnamed speaker Costco.
Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:07:40 David Rosenthal So, you know, we've studied, um, lots of amazing companies on this show who have lots and lots of different business models, but one thing that just kept striking us as we were preparing for Starbucks are the similarities to your neighbor…
- ▶ 1:07:56 Howard Schultz Costco, right.
- ▶ 1:08:17 Ben Gilbert You know, you just basically have extra money lying around, is what, what, uh, Costco discovered.
- ▶ 1:08:21 Ben Gilbert There's so much about Starbucks, to David's point, that's similar to Costco.
- ▶ 1:09:02 Howard Schultz There were many moments of me sitting with Jeff and Jim, including the huge decision to put Starbucks coffee in Costco, which there was a revolt inside the halls of Starbucks saying, no effing way.
- ▶ 1:09:39 Howard Schultz In fact, putting Starbucks in Costco, we were able to measure directly
- ▶ 1:09:46 Howard Schultz The increase in volume in the stores on the east side as a result of the proximity to the Costco store.
- ▶ 1:09:58 Ben Gilbert In Costco.
- ▶ 1:10:06 Howard Schultz Because we introduced thousands of beverage customers to Costco through the beans.
- ▶ 1:10:22 Howard Schultz Then we went nationwide with Costco.
- ▶ 1:10:48 Ben Gilbert And so you can do things like become the official coffee of United Airlines, or, you know, be in, ah, Costco's all over the US.
- ▶ 1:11:09 Howard Schultz Yeah, if you thought the Costco revolt was high, you can imagine when I said,
- ▶ 1:13:03 David Rosenthal We have a fun, uh, piece of trivia that you may know, uh, related to Costco.
- ▶ 1:13:14 Howard Schultz Sounds like in a Costco.
- ▶ 1:13:16 David Rosenthal Not in a Costco, in the Starbucks, in the Barnes and Noble, in Bellevue.
- ▶ 1:25:48 Howard Schultz And, uh, again, just like the Costco story and the United Airlines story, the flywheel of the awareness
- ▶ 1:26:08 Ben Gilbert I mean, I'm just thinking about between the cups, but then United Airlines, and Costco, and the CPG products, there's gotta have been like, fifty billion Starbucks logos printed.
- ▶ 2:51:42 David Rosenthal I think, I think the other piece that you didn't just list off there, uh, that we've covered in depth is, is, you know, the Costco-like investment in your employees.
- ▶ 2:51:52 David Rosenthal And, you know, in, in Costco's case, I think it's probably much more so the reduction of turnover.
- ▶ 2:52:07 David Rosenthal Like, I don't know the employees at my Costco store.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:04 David Rosenthal Costco.
Renaissance Technologies (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:59:43 David Rosenthal And I was inspired by Costco here, because we were talking to folks in the research, and everybody said, you know, Rentech, it just has these puzzle pieces that fit together.
- ▶ 2:00:24 David Rosenthal Like Citadel can say the exact same things, just the same as like Walmart and Amazon can say, we too have large-scale supplier relationships that we leverage to provide low prices to customers, just like Costco.
Hermès (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:06:49 Ben Gilbert It's much like Costco.
- ▶ 3:37:45 David Rosenthal There's like a Costco treasure hunt element to it.
- ▶ 3:41:11 David Rosenthal This is like Costco level employment retention.
- ▶ 3:41:15 Ben Gilbert So Costco is seven percent a year, but Costco cheats a little bit in that the stat is after the first year, whereas Hermes' attrition of six percent includes the first year.
Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:22 Ben Gilbert We're just gonna do a lot of LVMH, NFL, uh, Visa, Costco, Nike, and the, you know, mixed in there.
- ▶ 14:07 David Rosenthal Is that those stories and studying the LVMHs, the Costcos, the Nikes of the world, if anything, that's like even more important than studying the great technology companies for building a great technology company.
- ▶ 14:54 Ben Gilbert But with LVMH, with Costco, maybe with Porsche, certainly with Nike,
- ▶ 15:30 David Rosenthal My favorite was a friend of mine who's a VC at Lightspeed texted me about two weeks after the Costco episode came out and said, dude, I have gotten three pitches this week from startups where at some point in the deck, they talk about how…
- ▶ 16:14 David Rosenthal Nintendo, Lockheed, Porsche, Nike, Costco, Nvidia part three, and then Visa.
- ▶ 16:46 Ben Gilbert I think the most interesting businesses, or businesses that sort of tickle me, are Costco and Visa because there's a purity to them.
- ▶ 16:58 Ben Gilbert Costco's is the purity of the way that the puzzle pieces fit together in a way that is just artful.
- ▶ 17:41 Ben Gilbert You look at Costco.
- ▶ 22:38 David Rosenthal I think our best episodes this year were LVMH, Costco, and Visa.
- ▶ 30:47 Ben Gilbert As did Costco.
- ▶ 30:48 David Rosenthal As did Costco.
- ▶ 31:13 David Rosenthal Which for me were LVMH, Costco, and Visa.
- ▶ 35:36 Ben Gilbert Whereas when we make a Costco episode, that's an end of one product.
- ▶ 50:48 Ben Gilbert It was once we started digging into Costco, Andrew suggested, hey,
- ▶ 1:55:52 David Senra So really the reason I picked this is one, it's a perfect crossover for your guys' excellent Costco episode, but this goes back to finding people that you admire, not just for their business success, but their success in life.
- ▶ 2:18:00 Ben Gilbert You sent me that picture of her eating a Costco hot dog.
Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:42:26 Ben Gilbert And this actually continued until 1991 for many of their merchants and for Costco,
- ▶ 1:42:33 Ben Gilbert Went all the way to 2016, where they had the exclusive agreement with, ah, Amex, and if you were gonna use a credit card at Costco, it had to be Amex.
- ▶ 2:37:59 David Rosenthal There's the Costco card.
Charlie Munger (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:33 Ben Gilbert We talked with Charlie, of course, about Costco, his history investing in retailers over the last 50 years,
- ▶ 8:26 Ben Gilbert I had the good fortune of speaking with someone you know well, Richard Galanti, at Costco, and spending a few hours.
- ▶ 8:39 Ben Gilbert I'm curious, how did you first come across Costco, or Price Club at the time?
- ▶ 9:19 Ben Gilbert And did you get to invest in Price Club before it merged with Costco?
- ▶ 9:34 Charlie Munger Well, San Diego asked Warren to become a director of Costco.
- ▶ 9:55 Ben Gilbert And did Berkshire ever try to become a shareholder or acquire Costco?
- ▶ 12:11 David Rosenthal So in our Costco episode, we started with the joke at one of the Berkshire meetings, probably 10 years ago.
- ▶ 12:32 David Rosenthal We were hoping, could you give us your speech on the virtues of Costco?
- ▶ 13:05 Ben Gilbert What was it about Costco that made you realize this is one of those few moments in a lifetime?
- ▶ 13:10 Charlie Munger Well, they really did sell cheaper than anybody else in America, and they did it in big efficient stores, and all the parking spaces were 10 feet wide instead of eight feet nine or whatever they normally are.
- ▶ 13:26 Charlie Munger They, you know, they did a lot of rides.
- ▶ 13:30 Charlie Munger And they had a lot of parking spaces.
- ▶ 13:32 Charlie Munger They kept out of their stores, all these people didn't do big volumes, you see, and they gave special benefits to the people who did come to the stores in the way of reward points.
- ▶ 14:05 Ben Gilbert They've got 900 warehouses around the world full of high quality merchandise, none of which they have sitting on their books.
- ▶ 14:36 Charlie Munger You don't want, you got an enterprise as big as Costco.
- ▶ 14:52 Ben Gilbert Have you ever seen another business that takes advantage of the virtue of the low skew count the way that Costco does?
- ▶ 19:13 Charlie Munger Now, in Costco's case, they had Jeff Brotman, who's very smart, but not a retailer, and Jim Senegal, and they divided it up, and they had originally agreed that Brotman would be the chairman and CEO, because he was his idea.
- ▶ 26:29 Charlie Munger I would argue one of the easiest ones was when they decided a little group around Home Depot, they would copy the Costco metal and home improvements.
- ▶ 26:50 Charlie Munger There was a direct copy of Costco.
- ▶ 26:53 Ben Gilbert Do you think there are more opportunities to copy Costco?
- ▶ 26:56 Charlie Munger There was another one at Costco.
- ▶ 26:59 Charlie Munger Floor and Decor is the current imitator, and it's just, it's in vinyl, wood imitating vinyl flooring, they're, they're running a Costco model.
- ▶ 27:31 David Rosenthal Like, part of the appeal of Costco was, it was horizontal.