Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup. While we're talking about the people here, I think a related but separate playbook theme is truly the promoting from within culture there. It's always been the case going all the way back to FedMart and really carries through to this day. It's just astonishing to me that a $250 billion market cap company, this is so ingrained in the culture. Other companies talk about this. But then you'll see like, oh, they go do a CEO search, and they bring in somebody from McKinsey or something like that. Nobody walks the walk on this, except Costco. They're a very noble company. All the decisions they make are very noble. You get the sense that they're having a lot of fun being noble, but you only earn the right to be noble if your machine works. Their machine really works. I think that's the point. They've earned the right acting this nobly partially got them to where they are, but where they are earns them the right to continue to be noble. The company has never done a layoff. If they needed to, they would have done a layoff, but they've run the business in such a way and figured out the way that they've never needed to do that. Even after they did a merger. They merged two nearly identical companies, and they did not lay anybody off. That's wild.…

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