Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Costco was founded, as many people know, in the lovely city of Seattle in 1983 by retail veterans, Jim Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman. Jeff came from a long line of Seattle retailers. His dad was a retailer, his brother is a retailer. Jeff was one of the first investors and board members of Starbucks. Super cool. We'll talk about Jim as we go here. If you were around in the shopping age, shall we say, in 1983, you know that the true history of Costco dates way further back than that. To someone that we talked a lot about on our Walmart episode, the legendary Sol Price and his two companies, FedMart and Price Club. Although "Costco" was founded in 1983, the organization that we know and love today is actually the result of a merger between Costco and its predecessor company, Price Club. Price Club is really, of course, the actual result of Sol's previous company, FedMart, which itself really came out of Fedco in the 1940s. In some ways, we have to tell a whole industry history here. But in other ways, these are all the same company, because they're all stacked learnings from Sol Price and his various brain children over the years to create the Costco that it is today. Totally. We start history and facts in January 1916 in New York City, in the Bronx, where one Solomon, Sol Price, is born. Sol's parents were Jewish immigrants from Belarus. They'd arrived just a couple of years before at Ellis Island as teenagers. They had absolutely nothing. They spoke no English, they had no money, nothing. Sol's parents, like many Jewish immigrants around then in New York, ended up getting jobs in the garment factories in the Lower East Side. The conditions in these factories were just absolutely terrible. If you went to school here in the US, you might remember learning in American history class about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. You remember that? This is the start of the American labor movement. The Communist Party and the Socialist Party emerged as a reaction to this in America, because it's a terrible disaster. Literally, the factory owners had locked the doors to keep the workers in the building so they wouldn't steal. Then a fire breaks out, 146 people are killed, mostly women and young girls. This is terrible. Sol's parents didn't work at Triangle, but they worked at other factories just like this. Crazy, and you can't make this up. Sol, maybe the most influential American retail capitalist in history, comes out of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory movement, communism, socialism, and everything that's happening in New York and the Jewish community at this time.…

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