Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yup. You'll be happy to have our business, not the other way around. It's crazy. Of course, with Costco's margin structure, they literally couldn't. Speaking of trade-offs, they literally couldn't ever accept credit. How with an 11% gross margin are you going to go give three percentage points of that 11% to a Visa? It actually would flip the business upside down. We talked about it a minute ago. They make $7½ billion of operating income on $230 billion of sales. The credit card companies eat all your profitability if you let them in the door. It's a pretty incredible position, toughing it out and doing the hard thing first, and then being able to flip to the other side of the table. Anyway, I love that point on the payment processing. I think it's an amazing playbook that Costco ran over the years and a necessary one. Every single time Costco does something amazing, they needed to because of the trade-offs that they chose. Yup. I think that's the last big piece. Let's take it to the business today.…

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