Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Maybe for better as we talked about, but maybe for worse. We talked about most of it, but there's a thing that we haven't really discussed yet, which is Amazon's overhead is 30%. Target and Walmart's is something like 20%. The fact that Costco needs to run at 11% for it to work really did blind them to ecommerce. I don't think this was a conscious choice. This was a miss that they got really lucky on and happened to work out well for them, where they could continue to run their same playbook and skip ecommerce for a long time. They were 15 years late to ecommerce. Structurally, Costco can provide things at a far lower cost than Amazon. But at the end of the day, there really is no way that Costco can do ecommerce like these other companies. Even Walmart's figured it out. Walmart is as good for most use cases as Amazon, but they're paying the price. It's a huge amount of overhead to set up the infrastructure to do home delivery. One of the things we're going to talk about here in bear and bull, and I think we should transition, is what Costco is doing that is Costco-flavored ecommerce instead of Amazon-flavored ecommerce, but I will save that for my bookcase. A second bear case, it was popular in the past to say that Costco would have an issue with young people. I guess this isn't really a bear case. This is false for a couple of reasons. There is nothing more Gen Z than Costco.…

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