Costco CEO Finds Pro-Worker Means Profitability

[OneGrassRoot]

Wow, I'm now a Costco fan for sure, even though I don't have one close to me.

Any other large companies of integrity that you know of? I'm sure Costco isn't perfect -- nothing is -- but if the basic values are in place, we can encourage them to keep going in the right direction.

If he made the company a worker-owned co-op, that would be closer to perfect. This article is old, from 2006; hopefully the positive aspects of Costco haven't t changed much since then.

:thumbsup:

Many Costco workers have been with the company since it was founded in 1983. Once hired, they rarely leave.

Susan MaConnaha, a Costco vice president and head baker, said working for Costco is a family affair. "My whole family works for Costco, my husband does, my daughter does, my new son-in-law does," she said.

And Sinegal rewards that loyalty. "We promote almost 100 percent from within our company. We have guys who started pushing shopping carts out on the parking lot for us who are now vice presidents of our company," he said.

In an era when many CEOs are seen as greedy and sometimes corrupt, Sinegal is proving that good guys can finish first -- and without all the corporate frills. Sinegal even sends out his own faxes from his bare-bones office-without-walls at company headquarters near Seattle. But the most remarkable thing about Sinegal is his salary -- $350,000 a year, a fraction of the millions most large corporate CEOs make.

"I figured that if I was making something like 12 times more than the typical person working on the floor, that that was a fair salary," he said.


FULL ARTICLE: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Business/story?id=1362779