Summary
Costco’s board rejected a shareholder proposal to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, arguing they foster respect, innovation, and cultural alignment with customers and employees.
Shareholders claimed DEI could lead to lawsuits citing “illegal discrimination” against white, Asian, male, or straight employees, referencing legal cases like Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Costco countered that its DEI efforts comply with the law and enhance its culture, rejecting claims of legal risk.
The proposal will be voted on at Costco’s January 23 shareholder meeting.
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Don’t get used to it.
I like you.
Me too. They’re funny.
Don’t get used to it.
Costco knows their customers stan DEI because on average they’re more wealthy and educated.
Doubt it. Costco as a corporation has been very employee-friendly for a long time. I’ve heard Costco employees call the job a career killer because many who have aspirations for another career after they finish their degree (I’ve heard they have good education programs too) wind up working for Costco corporate because the pay and benefits are so good and Costco prefers to promote from within when possible.
Golden Handcuffs
How would that be a career killer? That’s a career.
But it’s not necessarily the career you set out to have.
Nowadays, if you set out to have a specific career and aren’t willing to adjust, you’re likely going to be missing out on opportunities.
I graduated university in 2011, and besides a few people who went on to develop for FAANG and have been there since, almost nobody is where they expected at graduation. Many are very successful, but in very different ways than they could have foreseen: The engineer who’s now the CFO of a charity; the English major who became an AI developer; the golf pro who became a sales rep and moved up from there in a billion dollar company.
There’s so many other similar stories just in the people I know. In the economy now, you have to roll with the punches and carve your own path, some which didn’t exist a decade ago.
Definitely not trying to say it’s a bad thing. We need more businesses like Costco.
Kills the career they intended to have before working at Costco
A lot of the votes are controlled by mutual fund managers and investment firms - this could go bonkers.
this could go bonkers
In what sense? I doubt that the voting or its consequences will be particularly dramatic regardless of the outcome. Costco wouldn’t be the first company to keep a DEI program, and it wouldn’t be the first company to ditch one either. In both cases, most outrage will probably come from a small but vocal group of people on the internet rather than anyone who could have a significant economic effect on Costco’s bottom line.
(There’s a small chance that the outcome snowballs into a public-relations problem, but I’m not sure what the safer outcome is in that context. Probably keeping the program, at least because maintaining the status quo attracts less attention, but with Trump as president, who knows…)
Shareholders can go get fucked, Costco, do the right thing.
Costco is one of the very few for profit publicly traded companies that seem to have their head on straight.
If you haven’t already, listen to Acquired’s episode on Costco.
One of my favorite quotes that I’m going to butcher: raising prices is like a drug. Once you start doing it, it’s hard to stop. We choose to find value and savings the hard way and to keep our prices competitive. Raising prices is the last thing we do.
I worked there for a few years in college!
Like great that Costco shut this down, because of decency and what is right but also… good fucking god the bar is so low.
I also forgot to say that a new Costco recently went in in my city, bulldozed yet another black neighborhood. So excuse me while I see some PR covering up some structurally racist hubris. Like i said, the bar is exceedingly low.
If they were going to bulldoze an inner city neighborhood, it’s likely that neighborhood was going to be predominantly black whether they like it or not. The white flight phenomenon predates Costco by a wide margin, and that fuckery already happened decades ago. While there were already inroads to corralling the country’s black population in cities around the turn of the century, the ball really got rolling on that in the post-war period following WW2 with redlining, block busting, widespread segregation prior to the civil rights movement, and the white middle class retreating to the then-new suburbs.
It is in a first ring suburb, a suburb that is very multicultural. The black neighborhood is exactly like my jewish working class neighborhood. The developer used questionable blighting tactics to use TIFs. Racist tale old as time. Every time they think their project is the exception to being racist. Every time they know they are lying to themselves.
Well, okay. In that case, definitely fuck 'em.
Shareholders have a point.
They can also just fucking leave.
Yeah what point is that?
That making hiring decisions based on imitable traits is discrimination. And there’s laws against that.
You should educate yourself on the goals of DEI initiatives and how they actually work. However, if you only have 30 seconds, here’s a clip from The West Wing that sums it up pretty well.
Hang on, I gotta write this down.
I’ll get you a crayon. Please try not to eat it. Again.
Not trying to be snarky, but do you understand the concept of equity?
Be snarky, they do understand the concept and are almost certainly not arguing in good faith.
First the hotdogs, now this. Go Costco management, go.
Don’t forget the $5 rotisserie chicken! And paying their employees a livable wage too!
And paying their employees a livable wage too!
Honestly, that needs to be at the top of the list.
It shows that it is possible for a company to be very profitable without having to shit on its workers.
And the CEO, last I heard, doesn’t take an obscene salary… Still good pay, but not millions, more like a couple hundred thousand (that was a few years ago I heard that though so maybe that’s changed, IDK)
DEI sounds like an incredibly easy and cheap policy to follow if you weren’t already shitheels to begin with.
The worst things about DEI is that it has become politicized. What was once another boring HR policy about being fair at work, is now weapon for idiots it get all upset about.
The thing is, DEI was always going to become political. Evey single conservative is some level of white supremacist.
You cannot hold conservative beliefs and also be a fan of diversity, equity, or inclusion.
The conservative mind sees people as all innately fitting into social hierarchies. And brown people are always at the bottom.
Trying anything that changes that hierarchy is seen as a direct attack on conservativism. Because in a very real way, it is. Which is the fucking point. DEI policies were a subtle attack on white supremacy via capitalism.
The argument was that companies that practiced DEI made more money.
It worked for a time, but the jackasses would rather throw money away than abandon their social hierarchies.
They’re kind of mask off about it all now.
Those who would enforce social heirarchies belong at the bottom of them.
White supremacy is DEI for white people.
You cannot hold conservative beliefs and also be a fan of diversity, equity, or inclusion.
This is the way it’s been in recent US political culture, where everything has somehow turned into identity politics and social markers. But I don’t believe that applies to conservatism in general. Politics has almost always been driven by economic goals, not identity, and DEI has been implemented because it’s been determined to be good for the bottom line. That it’s useful to rile up the base on id-pol in order to get into power doesn’t change that. The owners still only care about profits, and would hire or fire anyone if it was determined that it’d add to the bottom line.
You don’t seem to actually understand conservatism.
I’ll give you a little primer. Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre created the philosophy of Conservatism as a response to the French Revolution. They were searching for a way to maintain the power of the Nobility in a world that was chopping off the heads of the worst offenders.
Make no mistake, the power of the nobility meant white supremacy as well, because that’s how the nobility always functioned.
But anyway, Conservatism says that the rich are deserving of their riches because they’re just better than you and I. Often invoking God or some bullshit argument that doesn’t boil down to the truth of “my ancestors were fucking monsters who stole a bunch of shit and would literally kill anyone who didn’t obey.”
Anyway, Conservatism has always relied on their being an in class, and then everyone else, but separating that “everyone else” into classes and then sparking resentment among those lower classes.
That’s how it works. Apartheid is when Conservatism is winning, you have your rich elite, and then two out groups, the poor whites and then the bulk of your disfavored minority group (who might very well be the actual majority).
This gives the rich assholes the opportunity to exploit two different groups against each other, lowering the pay of both. And that’s good for the bottom line.
Actually having to pay real wages to the minorities, to treat them as equal to the poor whites who are also being exploited, well that raises everyone’s wages and is seen as the greatest evil that conservatism knows.
Probably could’ve expressed my thoughts better, but I believe your definition and my thoughts aren’t necessarily opposed. I was clumsily trying to say that DEI as is doesn’t really upset the hierarchies you mentioned, and is therefore not opposed to conservatism. Accepting the premise that in conservatism the rich are deserving of their riches because they are better, my point was that DEI actually works to solidify that class disparity because it’s mostly designed to give the appearance of inclusivity in order to attract clientele from all segments of society, thus increasing the flow of income. If DEI means diversity at the bottom of the corporate structure while maintaining a homogenous owner class at the top, which is my argument, then it’s just a tool to transfer money from the bottom to the top, while expanding the pool of money to take from the bottom through inclusivity. I think I fucked up the argument again, but hope it at least clarifies what I was trying to say a little bit.
DEI was a direct response to white supremacist social hierarchies prevalent in the US for over 250 years. Whether or not a business sees it as profitable or good for business is irrelevant.
Modern conservatism is about returning America to greatness. Go out and ask random conservatives when that was. Can you guess?
How does including qualified candidates. That would have been passed over based on culture or race. Reinforce class hierarchies? Race and culture are not classes. Though they are used by supremacist to define classes. Something DEI directly if imperfectly addresses better than anything we’ve ever tried.
But please do explain how you think a policy that directly attacks class hierarchies in horses them. And tell us what you would do that would be better. That isn’t more of the economic liberalism that’s already failed.
How was DEI not politicized from the very beginning? It was literally born out of the civil rights movement.
OMG, a capitalist structure that succeeds through ethical practices? The world ends…/s
With Jelinek no longer at the reins, this might be the beginning of the end for Costco’s progressiveness. It’ll depend on which shitbirds are pushing for the anti-DEI resolution. Jelinek would have told them to go fuck themselves, much as he did throughout his tenure when there were pushes for typical line-goes-up enshittification policies.
How long until after the founder dies until the $1.50 hotdogs go away.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they did it before he was buried.
Jelinek wasn’t a founder, they’re long gone. He was CEO from 2010 or so until last spring when a large part of the growth occurred.
The founder threatened Jelineks life if he ever charged more for the $1.50 hotdogs.
Edit:and by extension any future CEO
Hahaha, good for him.
I think a MAGA-tard boycott would be just fine.
Good for them. There are some serious issues with current DEI policies, but too many places are folding to political pressure and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The shareholders argued that the Supreme Court ruling in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard found that Harvard’s use of race when choosing who to admit to the school violated the 14th Amendment.
We are just gonna keep paying a godawful price for allowing this vile stacked court.
For as long as you’re alive anyway.
Or until someone Luigi’s them during a progressive’s term. Not that that will ever happen. The progressive term, not the other thing.
We’re moving to a future where the elite will live in a fortified city where only the rich and elite can enter, while the plebs live outside the walls and luigi is just a plumber.
We already have gated communities for the wealthy…
So back to castles and seiges
If that happens, AVALANCHE won’t be far behind. Barrett, Tifa, and their friends will infiltrate and terrorize their cities till they stop killing the planet.
Some strifes call for more of a Cloud than a Luigi
In our reality, Luigi seems to be an awful lot like Cloud Strife. He’s certainly swinging around a massive
swordpopular clout.Edit: FUCK… I just made an argument for Kingdom Hearts to exist.
Going on vacation to a world with toon physics, don’t ask why I’m bringing lube and a bicycle pump.
My kids will be suffering from these policies long after I’m gone.
It takes a long time to rebuild systems and protections.
And very little time or effort to destroy the…
God, I love Costco
Hiring is one of the places DEI belongs, I only have a problem when it dictates creative endeavors.
Good on Costco. Get fucked shareholders
Depends on how it’s presented. If it’s tied to strict quotas in terms of hiring then that can cause a lot of issues as well.
True it would be awkward to be in the situation where you have a white male candidate who exceeds the qualifications, and a black female candidate who barely meets them… Doubly so if DEI people are pressuring you to deliver, but unfortunately your company is in a position where it absolutely needs someone who can give them a homerun.
Now I’m not saying white male candidates are always more qualified than black female candidates. I know someone will take this comment that way. What I’m saying is, talent doesn’t care what color you are before it decides to bestow itself upon you, unfortunately DEI Hiring practices do.
Sometimes it’s also just a matter of available local demographics.
The last position I helped interview for (my own as I was changing jobs) I saw the most diverse but frankly least qualified - or even interested - range of candidates ever. It’s also for - last I checked - one of the top employers in the area for wages/benefits, and fairly diverse in employee base already.
We had applicants who:
- No-showed video-interviews
- With knowledge that obviously did NOT match their paper skills/experience
- At least one who was possibly a stand-in
- And not least, just really bad communications ability
It was very heavy with people who fairly recently immigrated or still overseas but just getting their papers.
Like, I get off you’re enthusiastic about a job. I’ve even recommended people based on an obvious ability to learn, work in a team, and case skillset when they didn’t have the specific job experience (that can be learned after all). Having an idea about the area and local wage-scale is also important (e.g. maybe don’t expect New York/Silicon Valley wages or expenses in Oklahoma) but candidates didn’t even seen to know the posted scale nor anything about the area.
The last set we had to repeat (non technical parts of) questions multiple times to be understood, was asked stuff about WRITTEN questions that was literally in the question, or had to deal accents do thick none of us could understand. It was rough.
This went on for months and we honestly we getting ready to pick the “best of the unqualified” and just hope it worked out before we finally went one more round and got somebody decent.
Now is DEI part of that? Hard to say but if you start filtering interviews with that in mind, or narrowing your already-small pool of qualified candidate/applicants to meet such it’s not going to come out well IMO.
I’d be more than happy to work with a qualified candidate of wherever ethnicity and gender. I really enjoy hanging out with people from different places or backgrounds (because - frankly - average-Joes are often kinda boring) but when it comes to work being able to do the job and communicate needs to be a top priority. You can have a workforce full of diverse backgrounds but if they can’t apply that to the work and work together it’s just as unhelpful as having an office full of unoriginal middle-aged/boomer white guys.
