David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Right, and you're the third biggest player in the largest market, America behind Amazon, and Walmart. This Acquired episode is different because so much of it is just nerding out over the awesome nuances of Costco's business model. Then this crazy thing happened because it was a bunch of stand-up guys making an intelligent set of trade-offs, really thinking hard, and then a whole bunch of people working hard for a long time. That's the story. Once Sol got things figured out in the second iteration with Price Club, really straight line to today. Let's paint the picture today. I think what's interesting to talk about next is, okay, everybody knows how this all works. How is it defensible? Why does only Costco do Costco? But first, tell us about Costco today. I don't think people realize, maybe by this point of the episode they do, but certainly not before, how big Costco is. It's a sleepy story since it's tucked away in the Seattle suburbs. They don't do a lot of chest pounding. They just are quiet. They do $230 billion in revenue. They're the third largest retailer in the US. They have 124 million members worldwide. One-third US shoppers are Costco customers. They have a little over 300,000 employees at 860 stores. We talked about this. They do $750,000-ish of revenue per employee.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.