CasdraBlog

The Wall Street Journal ran an article about Costco and it practice of treating it's employees to well for Wall Street's taste. Here's a breakdown from the article on Costco's practices versus arch rival Wal-Mart:

Comparing some work place statistics from Costco and Wal-Mart

	Costco	Wal-Mart
Employees covered by company health insurance	82%	48%
Insurance-enrollment waiting periods (Full-time)	3 mos	6 mos
Insurance-enrollment waiting periods (Part-time)	6 mos	2 yrs
Portion of health-care premium paid by company	92%	66.60%
Employees who work part-time	43%	30%
Annual worker turnover rate	24%	50%

I'm a huge fan of Costco and I avoid Wal-Mart like the plague. I'll only go in there when my wife forces me...even then I try to wait in the car. The sucking sound coming from Wal-Mart is the biggest source of the U.S. trade deficit and Wal-Mart is just a giant conduit to sell foreign goods in the U.S.

This article from the Teamsters web site discusses Costco's challenge to Wal-Mart and interviews Costco's CEO

Sinegal manages to be demanding without being intimidating. His bare-bones office helps set the tone for that style. So does his open-collared shirt and the nametag he wears, like everyone else. Not that he needs one. To walk with Sinegal from his headquarters building to the Costco next door is to hear a nonstop chorus of "Hi, Jim  Hi, Jim  Hi, Jim." He returns the greetings by using first names, without appearing to consult nametags. Sinegal has also kept himself in the good graces of subordinates by limiting his pay. His $ 350,000 salary last year was practically cause for drumming him out of the FORTUNE 500 CEO club; and at his own request, he took no bonus for the third consecutive year. He does have $ 16.5 million worth of options, but he's intent on capping his salary and bonus at about twice the level of a Costco store manager.
...
But unlike in any corporate budget meeting known to man, a Costco manager can be upbraided by Sinegal for doing too well. Fresh-foods buyer Jeff Lyons dreads the next session because of a problem he has created by having no problems. Lyons makes an allowance each month for produce spoilage. Because he had hardly any in October, he widened his profit margin by one-half percentage point. "Our margin goal is 10%, and there'd better be a very good reason you did better than that," Lyons explains. "Otherwise Jim will say, 'Well, why didn't you lower prices?'"

Sounds like my kind of boss. I particularly like the salary - TWICE the level of a store manager...wow. I'm more used to about 50 times that of a manager in the businesses I've been in involved in.