Costco, every mention
69 scenes (2024) · ← back to Costco
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2024 anyone Ben Gilbert 337David Rosenthal 211Charlie Munger 19Howard Schultz 9Michael Lewis 5Andrew Marks 3Doug DeMuro 1David Senra 1Daniel Ek 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Costco comes up
Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:24 Ben Gilbert And their corporate strategy over the years is just as clever as companies like LVMH, Walmart, and Costco.
- ▶ 1:42:59 Ben Gilbert I mean, it's very Costco-like in that way.
- ▶ 3:19:49 David Rosenthal I think it's gotta be a version of, uh, our Costco episode.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:02:57 Ben Gilbert In preparation for this episode, I talked to Jim Senegal, who's the co-founder of Costco, because I was asking about Ikea and the similarities, and he said he used to love going to Ikea to look at the KD furniture that they stocked.
- ▶ 1:03:22 Ben Gilbert The interwovenness with Costco is really interesting.
- ▶ 1:03:24 Ben Gilbert Another research call was with Bjorn Bailey, who ran Ikea in the U.S. in the late eighties, and he mentioned that Ingvar always looked up to Costco and thought they were, like, the greatest retailer in the world, so there's a lot of shared…
- ▶ 1:14:15 David Rosenthal So, later, once he, like Charlie Munger, got turned on to the virtues of Costco, Ingvar would hilariously formalize this idea, this manifesto, in 1995 as the hot dog product policy.
- ▶ 1:14:34 David Rosenthal Because in 1995, they copied Costco and they start selling hot dogs in the stores.
- ▶ 1:14:39 Ben Gilbert Okay, so I brought this up with Jim when I was talking about similarities between Costco and Ikea.
- ▶ 1:14:44 Ben Gilbert He did not believe that Ikea copied the Costco hot dog.
- ▶ 1:15:03 Ben Gilbert I don't think you had to look at Costco to observe
- ▶ 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.