Summary
Costco shareholders voted overwhelmingly (98%) against a proposal by a conservative think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, to assess risks linked to the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Costco’s board supported DEI initiatives, dismissing the proposal as partisan and unnecessary.
This rejection contrasts with trends in other companies scaling back DEI efforts.
The vote comes amid new federal rules from Trump targeting DEI initiatives in federal agencies, potentially impacting private vendors working with the government.
And the hot dog is still the same price.
Rare corporate W
Even Costco’s shareholders are based. Love it.
Finally, some good fucking news
Fwiw, my company said similar. We’re not public or that big so I’m not naming it, but they have sent several broadcasts and discussed during a company meeting, that these are core values they are sticking with
Nice. My company isn’t likely to drop their DEI policies either. Public but not well-known.
Public but not well known but keeping DEI? Be nice if we could get the stock info so we can invest…
Remember, the Senate is DEI for white suburbia.
DEI is also just called “teambuilding”. All successful companies do it in some form
I don’t understand the hate on DEI initiates. DEI is just make sure you hire a diverse work group. So if these dei employees are bad, that’s 100% on the company for hiring them. Nobody made them hire that specific person and 99/100 times employees are bad because no one trains them.
You have to understand something about fascism’s base: its the mediocre. It really speaks to the sort of people who feel like they’re owed more (including personal achievements) but think that as a them specifically trait. It’s the sort of person who see a black woman being an engineer and think that they deserve that position not her, despite her having gone to engineering school and them having been a D student in high school who didn’t go to college or someone who failed out of an engineering program. They look at any success from historically marginalized groups as unearned because clearly they deserve that success more. And so DEI which seeks to encourage more diversity in successful positions out of an acknowledgement that diverse groups are more successful infuriates these people
This is how I feel, actually. Free education and paid training can rule out the need for any DEI initiatives, no matter what color/ethnicity, they’re qualified because they received the education and training that they need.
But then again, I can understand why a white manager would rather hire a white person.
But whose to say a black manager wouldn’t do the same and just hires black people. Or any race. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable with like minded people rather filling up your store with “diverse employees” ?
It’s a crutch that MOST people have. Like leftists only hiring leftists. Or conservatives only hiring conservatives.
Like you said, if the “diverse employee” is less qualified than his white counterpart, hire the more qualified individual.
If you’ve ever visited any VA hospital, you can see how many shitty people they hire, especially when half of the doctors are just interns. And no one gets fired.
I think the main issue is if you have two candidates for one job, one is white and one is black, even if the best candidate for the job is the white candidate the company might be forced to hire the black candidate to meet the DEI policies.
I have no idea if that actually happens or not, but I think that’s what the entitled white people think and get upset about. They feel is discrimination against white people now.
the company might be forced to hire the black candidate to meet the DEI policies.
This is not what actually happens though, at least not at larger companies. It’s more about treating them equally regardless of race, because the white person won’t always be the best candidate for the job.
It’s mostly elites that think they’re losing elite status–which to them feels like persecution. Additionally, I do think a lot of DEI initiatives at companies are poorly designed.
It depends on the implementation and the PR …. I’ve had several conversations with my conservative brother.
I describe how it’s a strength of my company to have a “melting pot” of different perspectives, getting the best skills from all people, we work better together when everyone is safe and comfortable being who they are …. I’m specifically happy that they plucked my coworker, as a woman in a male dominated field, out of the trenches because she’s an excellent manager
My brother sees unskilled workers forced on him by management fiat. He sees having to do more to make up for their lack of ability, motivation or work ethic. He sees a double standard where they can get away with stuff that would get him fired.
I dont know how much of this is the implementation and how much is the person reacting but we have very opposite perspectives
As a straight, white male, I think DEI is fantastic.
I’m going to use TERFs as an analogy to explain what I think it is (and I do mean TERFs, not your garden variety transphones). There used to be a subreddit called /r/GenderCritical, before it got (rightfully) banned for hate speech. I had a look around there a few times, trying to understand their incomprehensible ideology.
At first, I only became more baffled. I saw so many stories that had the rough shape of “I am a women who was abused, victimised or otherwise oppressed by a cis man and/or men and that’s why I now hate trans women”. I just didn’t understand how those two things connected. I get that radical feminists tend to take a biologically essentialist view that undermines trans identities. However, I couldn’t understand why they put such effort into distilled down their bitterness and resentment into the vitriol to throw at trans women, as opposed to the men who hurt them (and the patriarchal systems that hurt them).
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that many TERFs have experienced trauma such that they feel powerless and small when looking at the actual cause of their systemic oppression (i.e. the patriarchy), so through a trick of transference, they direct their rage and grief onto transness instead. Fighting an already marginalised foe means that they get both the feeling of fighting something ideological that’s larger than them, but also they don’t have to confront how small they actually are when fighting against oppression (because each of us is small and helpless against systemic oppression; we can’t do shit without solidarity with other people). To be clear, I don’t consider this absolutely isn’t a legitimate excuse for someone to be an awful person; however, it does help me to understand why someone who calls themself a feminist would take such a stance (as much as I’d like to consider them “no true feminist”, I feel like I need to acknowledge the complex baggage of the term “feminist” if I’m to identify as one).
I think people who crusade against DEI initiatives are doing a similar sort of transference, where their real enemy is in fact Capitalism, but that feels like so impossible of a foe that they feel hopeless; it reminds me of that widely shared Mark Fisher quote about how it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And so they tell themselves that there must be some big, bad, insidious force at work, making organisations opt into DEI initiatives, and it must be the same force that’s responsible for the deep unease they feel when they look at the world, or contemplate the future their grandchildren have to look forward to.
In a sense, they’re right in that there are nefarious forces at play and the game is indeed rigged. The problem is that they’ve picked the wrong target and would be better served going after the oil barons and billionairess. In terms of my background, I probably have far more in common with the average Trump voter than I do the average Democrat, so I relate to the hopelessness that their misplaced rage protects them from feeling. The tragedy is that their ignorance hurts everyone, including themselves; None of us are free until all of us are free.
I’d say this is true, but it isn’t some accidental mind trick that people pull on themselves. It is the core tenet of the right wing narrative to deflect from how capitalism is failing regular people and pin the blame on some progressive boogey man. They blame bad pay and bad jobs on immigrants “stealing” the good jobs, and now POC doing the same through DEI. They tell men it’s not their learned misogyny that is keeping them from a meaningful relationship, no, it’s the feminists with their radical ideas about equality, body autonomy, and safety. And this can go on for every I’ll brought about by the current system. The tough trick though, is that this doesn’t just fool those who believe it, it also keeps those who disagree busy fighting over bigoted bullshit, and makes it nigh impossible to build any sort of coalition
It feels like the phase of the fantasy arc wherein the “minor bad” admits that he was lied to by the big bad, and that they believed that sacrificing 100 babies on the altar of Better Future would actually lead to a Better Future, and not summon ArchVillaeous, demon god of suffering.
Learning about the truth doesn’t mean I feel for that person being lied to. It means now I’m just angry at how willingly gullible they were. It really, really doesn’t change the act of sacrificing 100 babies.
Awesome comment. Thank you! This is where something starts to become visible: the weird indirect physical and psychological violence of liberal ideology.
It’s base claim is: If everyone, as a single enlighted decent individual agent, would just play by the rules (fair markets), everything would be at it’s best. All of them shall thrive.
Now all those good christians go through life working their ass of, actually trying to be “a good person”, but after decades they have to painfully find out: It doesn’t work out. Most of them get more stressed, poorer, there’s ecological destruction, war and so on. Almost no one get’s to thrive.
As you pointed out, finding out about capitalism and (neccessarilly collectively) paving a way to more rational production and fairer distribution, is difficult. You could almost say it’s practically and ideologically out of reach. You know, because your freedoms depend on liberal individualism.
They end up with two options: 1. Look for an outside menace to the otherwise funtional market game (immigrants, jews, or heck why not trans people) 2. Get more of the same: more privatizarion, less social welfare etc.
They cling ever harder to a political decision, the more it harms them. This is brutal and sad af imo.
Real agency is possible, just not the individualist kind liberalism is successfully promising them in their despair of heteronomy.
It’s all about manufacturing consent to do away with the Civil Rights Act
More like getting rid of the renamed Affirmative Action. We already have an EEOC we don’t need this.
I worked at a company that made electronic devices and the diversity of the teams made it so we caught so many glitches white people would have missed before shipping. Sensors that didn’t work right because skin color or makeup. Things that even TurboHitler would have been annoyed at.
It’s illogical and short-sightedly dumb to forfeit knowledge and skill from any shape, size, color, or orientation of a human.
Haters won’t learn, I fear, until they’re truly marginalized as well.
Haters won’t learn, ever, because they will blame their shortcomings on “DEI” and “woke”.
If you read hard right tweets, you’ll see they use DEI in place of slurs for any minority. Just like critical race theory, they’ve twisted the meaning to whip up a frenzy and have something for the masses to hate.
“Kamela would be the DEI hire for President” is easier for the center to swallow than “Cmon, do we really want a [N-Word] [Synonym for Female Dog] running a white man’s show?”
Though the latter is what they mean
Same as what they did with BLM. They jump from one liberal cause to another, changing its meaning and context into something they can use to fuel their misinformation campaigns for the purpose of creating hate and fear amongst their more ignorant numbers.
Also happened to the word “woke”. Nobody says “stay woke” anymore cause they demonized the word.
Good point.
For example, using gender discrimination, there is a great pressure to hire female workers to ensure diversity but, in some areas, there are simply no female candidates. Companies should absolutely make an effort to hire the best for their needs and keep an eye for diversity, but if they should not be forced to hire a less capable female if other capable candidates exist just because the management is being forced to hire a certain diversity target among their ranks
This is sexism in disguise.
I don’t understand the hate on DEI initiates.
It’s hate, that’s all.
Hate and ignorance
Willfull ignorance at that.
It’s because some people only want to believe in straight white people.
Today my CEO at a large corpo org stood in front of a packed room of minority employees and assured us that the company would continue DEI policies regardless of the government and essentially said “fuck Trump” in the most politically correct way possible. It feels good that my workplace is such a safe space. I think we’re about to find out what companies actually give a shit versus those using optics to prey on the LGBTQ community, disabled people, and racial minorities.
It genuinely gladdens my heart to hear you say this, because it suggests that there is at least some length of genuinely caring about inclusion by the people in charge at your workplace; I have seen too many instances of corporations paying lip-service towards DEI whilst fostering a truly toxic workplace culture. It’s nice to hear a story from somewhere that’s different and that it makes a difference to how safe your workplace feels
My work is just packed with conservatives licking trump’s boots every news they hear
“fuck Trump” is pretty politically correct.
I also work for a large corpo org here, but instead of “DEI” we have “Belonging.” Under that label we have a council that informs and recommends things to our senior leadership, groups which offer support and community (LGBTQ+, Latinx, women, etc.), and provides learning resources. Overall I’m proud of the work we do. (I’m also proud of the two of people I’ve hired internally who were chairs in Belonging groups at some point!)
A couple months ago at a large event, someone asked if we’d be getting rid of DEI. Our Chief People Officer was able to say something to the effect of, “We’ve never had a DEI program but we are committed to continuing our Belonging practices.”
So basically we’re not backtracking on anything, and we have pretty good DEI, but because we never used the term “DEI” she was able to deflect the challenge to it. I never thought about it before that happened, but it made me wonder if it was an intentional choice to avoid the buzzword and so some of the criticism that comes of it.
Anyway, cheers to you also having a safe place of work!
Only 2% of Coscosians are racist…Coscosians are Costco Shareholders.
I wonder if Costco stock is a good buy right now. Currently $937 up from $300 in 2020. A P/E of 55, with 0.5% annual dividends paid quarterly.
With the new risk of being targeted by MAGAs for a boycott, I could see that being a problem. I don’t think Costco’s survival as a corporation depends on its stock. They do stock buybacks, which is going to be artificially inflating the price a bit.
If it drops significantly, I could see it being worth the pickup. Maybe I’ll sell some long put options.
US stocks are incredibly expensive right now based on their earnings. If Trump messes up just slightly on the economy, the market will take a huge hit. To prop up the market and thereby his own ego, he’s going to try to force Powell to lower interest rates even if it’s not supported by the numbers.
He may or may not be successful. Good luck.
To prop up the market and thereby his own ego, he’s going to try to force Powell to lower interest rates even if it’s not supported by the numbers.
Ah, just like in 2019, which is why they were already at damn near 0% and had nowhere to go when the pandemic started.
(Just in case people need a reminder of where all that “covid” inflation really came from.)
Fuck Costco and DEI bullshit.
I worked there and the women and minorities got preferential treatment the whole time. Any heavy lifting? Grab one of the guys who are already sweating their asses off outside the 100+ degrees heat. Pay no attention to the fact that the job requires that you be able to lift 50 pounds or however heavy that case of water is during the job interview. Literally had the lot lead look right past two female coworkers in front of him and point to me to help move 100 chairs and tables for some jackasses return.
Someone made a disgusting mess or broke something? Grab the closest male employee to clean it up. Can’t have any of the women getting dirty.
I lost count of how many times a guy was outside clearly struggling with heat exhaustion and he was asking to come back inside but nah. They need him outside. Can’t have any one of the 37 minority women that have been folding clothing since the dawn of time inside the air conditioned box swap places even though they are both technically working the same exact job title.
I was so happy to quit that fuckin job. Easily the worst management I ever worked for and I worked target nightshift in the ghetto as my first job. At least those assholes were pricks to all of us on night crew equally.
People downvote you but this is what I was talking about. It doesn’t really matter whether your situation was caused by DEI or not, what matters is that you feel that it happened partially because of DEI, which you wouldn’t if officially there was no DEI program. This is where he backlash is coming from, and people don’t see it because they are too focused on what it is on paper or how it is supposed to work.
Feels over reals, huh?
Well at the individual level, what you feel is your entire reality and none of us are free of that bias. Some politicians or leaders are better than others of taking this feeling and coalescing it into a narrative that drives you to action. The current wave of discontent can be very much be woven into a liberal or left wing (I really don’t like the terms right or left, they are mostly meaningless in current year) narrative that inspires action but instead liberals have become the agents of stagnation in a way and the people saw that, and being low information voters that they are, they chose the only alternative that was at least promising to change things in a big way. They (like always) just didn’t pay enough attention to the fine print to see what the big changes actually entailed.
If I applaud one thing about Trump is that more or less he’s delivering what he promised, albeit with total disregard for public order, safety or legality.
what you feel is your entire reality
No, what I infer from evidence is “my” (everyone’s) reality. I am perfectly aware that my feelings and perceptions can be very flawed. That’s why magic tricks and optical illusions work.
You can “feel” that there’s a bridge across the canyon all you want. You’ll still fall to your death trying to cross it.
Feelings are not reality and do not project your own issues onto others.
I’m not projecting anything. And I think your analogy is apt and does not really refute what I said. Someone could well believe with all their might that there’s a bridge and fall to their death. But the fact that they believed it so much that they tried to cross it against all reason means that to them the bridge was real. This is why I said “at the individual level”. Your truth is not the Truth, but it is still the truth for you until you somehow discover that your belief was wrong. Some never find out, others find out too late to reverse course and fall to their death.
Nah I hate DEI because once worked 2 years at a crappy job for meh pay because it was an opportunity to go into essentially my dream career and position at that time. Our manager finally left the company and then we all applied for the position. Instead of promoting any one of the VERY qualified people in my position (me and two other white guys) they hired a young Indian woman. She was very sweet and eager to learn, but she absolutely did not know a single thing about the job she was going into which was to be our manager. My boss literally had me train her because I was the most qualified (their words). They passed all of us over to grab this completely new employee that did not know a single thing about the job she needed to do. Literally zero experience in the field or as a manager. Her first fuckin job. And because I basically had to do her job while she learned and I was still doing my own job as well I got burnt out and quit.
I have absolutely no problem with women or any race working above or around me. I absolutely have a problem with skipping over theost qualified person for the job just to check a box on a fucking diversity quota. Imagine your parents die in a fire because the fire department needed fill a quota for scrawny people that can’t carry much instead of hiring the most physically capable people possible.
I think job applications and interviews should be entirely anonymous. They shouldn’t know anything about me besides what is relevant to the job they need me to do. I do not understand how Hire the most qualified person became racist/sexist but that is the dumbest goddamn thing I have ever heard.
Wow that’s funny because my sample size experience tells me the exact opposite of your experience. So my experience is also representative of the entire corporation
Your store must have been a nice store. I’m happy for you. My store was not. And yes I blame the higher ups because our GM was all buddy buddy with the new CEO and the top level people at the corporate office.
Meaning any complaints against our GM went absolutely nowhere. HR wouldn’t do anything. The boss of our boss wouldn’t do anything because technically even though he was only the GM of a store he was friends with too many at the top so he sorta had immunity from the district manager as well.
I never claimed my store was representative of all the individual stores. I did say it was a problem with my store and the top level management at Costco. Not the same claim.
No you clearly blamed dei and women and minorities.
I said “Fuck Costco and DEI bullshit”. Please point to where I blamed women or minorities for either of those things.
Here! Instead of blaming management you keep bringing up women and dei
Except for the rest of that comment which you cropped out where I go on to explain what I was blaming the management for. Because itnwas the women. Specifically the minority women who sat around doing the easiest jobs at any given time because the racist and sexist management allowed them to do so if they would play along with his creepy bullshit.
Except for the very top where you blame dei lol.
Sounds like your boss was the problem, not the DEI hires. But that’s okay, the racist conclusion is the most sensible one to jump to.
Yeah… No. It’s a Costco problem. Our stores general manager is best buddies with all the Costco higher up and most importantly the new CEO. So any attempt to report him or the other managers for the multiple things they were doing wrong would just end up with you getting less and less hours until you eventually quit on your own. I attempted to go over my bosses head and contact the regional manager and guess what. My hours were cut and I got a write up for something that I never did the very next week.
Again, sounds like the problem is the bosses and not the minorities who are just employees like you.
Is it really just my bosses when those minority or female employees repeatedly took advantage of the biases of those bosses once they realized how that power structure worked?
Every time we got a new hire and we saw them outside or doing shitty jobs like us we thought maybe they weren’t going to be the same but as soon as they realized they could suck up to the bosses and get outta shit constantly they would almost always take advantage of the preferential treatment. The few minority and female employees that also called them out for their shit also had their hours cut and had to leave for something else or transfer stores.
If you’re out there Ramona you were a real one homie.
Is it really just my bosses when those minority or female employees repeatedly took advantage of the biases of those bosses once they realized how that power structure worked?
Sounds like you’re not blaming your bosses, and are blaming the minority and female employees.
Blaming them for taking advantage of an imbalanced system for their own gain. Not blaming them for their race or gender. Come on now.
Yeah, what are women doing working when they should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, am I right?
You’re blaming women and minorities for taking advantage of an inbalanced system but it has nothing to do with their gender or race? I agree, I blame the bosses.
they realized they could suck up to the bosses and get outta shit constantly they would almost always take advantage of the preferential treatment.
Sounds like your bosses, yeah. They couldn’t do that if not for your bosses. They’re probably paid less too, making them more valuable to the company than an expensive white boy.
There it is lol.
Took you awhile to admit you’re just racist but I’m glad you got around to it.
Also no despite me being comically over qualified for that position I was paid less than the majority of the minority and female employees there.
You’re doing everything, including calling me a racist and telling me your bosses pay you less, to not blame your bosses. Do you understand how dense that looks?
What fucking risks you fucks? Hiring people with the wrong skin colors?
The news cycles since Trump won the election is fucking terrible. Every corporation is mask off and drop anything that might benefit the populace so that they go back to being cowboys and treat employees like shit.
I want to personally say fuck you to everyone that voted for Trump. I hope that you and all the members of your close circle that voted for Trump die a painful death, after being economically fucked out of any little wealth you have.
The world is better off without you cunts.
They think it’s discrimination against straight white males now and think they are going to get sued by someone with a rejected job offer because the decision may have been made due to skin colour, gender, or sexual orientation.
A gay man can sue if he was not hired because he was gay, these people think eventually a straight man can sue if he wasn’t hired because he wasn’t gay.
Which may happen with Trump in power now, I wouldn’t be surprised if he started working on laws that will allow people to do that
The gulags were populated for good reason. “Waaahhh communists killed millions in their gulags,” yeah, millions of Nazis. Yet apparently that still wasn’t enough.
Interesting how you didn’t mention that Stalin also sent a huge number of Jews to the gulags.
What was the good reason for that?
Same reason the Nazis targetted them - they were marxists.
Buddy, I’m with you on Communists being antifascist, but the gulags are not something to be praised. Many innocent people were sent there for simply displeasing Stalin in some way.
Yes, WW2 would have been much longer and likely unwinnable without Soviet involvement, but praising the Gulags is just picking which concentration camp you like best.
Stalin should’ve gone to the gulags.
No. The Gulags, like the Nazi concentration camps, shouldn’t have existed at all. Stalin should have been deposed and forced to live out his days in obscurity or killed outright. No one should be tortured.
Is that who you think Stalin put in them…? Really?
Yeah he should’ve put himself in there too while he was at it. America didn’t put any fascists in gulags though, they hired them to help fascists continue the fight and they’ve been winning ever since.
Were the over 1.5 million Red Army POWs that had spent years in Nazi camps before Stalin decided they were traitors for getting captured and put in gulags for it all fascists?
I mean if we want to keep doing whataboutisms, what country today has 25% of their population in prison?
You missed a couple history lessons, there, bro.
Lol no, they killed literal civilians, the ones they swore to protect
That’s because they didn’t put enough fascists in the gulags, including the ones that turned on their own people and put them in the gulags.
I think you need to read The Gulag Archipelago. Or are you going to claim that Solzhenitsyn, who was literally a battery commander in the Red Army, was also a fascist? Because I’d love some evidence of that.
98%?? I love costco
Yeah I was on the fence about getting a Costco membership since I am single and dont shop much.
But just for the few times I need stuff that is available at Costco I will get a membership.
Even if I end up paying a little more overall.
I’ve had a membership most of my adult life and t is so worth it. As a once again single guy, I only go 3-4 /year now, but that takes care of a bunch of non-expiring things like tp, paper towels, laundry detergent, dishwasher detergent, etc. I got a chest freezer so those also take care of most of my meat purchases, and my weekly grocery trips are much smaller. more importantly they’ve been a surprisingly frequent source for those bigger one time purchases such as electronics or appliances. And now they sell Kewpie mayo in a normal sized container!
I only regret the bakery. The calories are bad enough, but what can a single guy do with 12 xl danishes, or a 5 lb tiramisu?
I got my membership as a 20-something living alone and have never regretted it. Purchasing contact solution alone made up the cost of the membership! Then if I got gas there a couple times a year I was definitely saving.
The one thing I dislike about Costco is that I have to psyche myself up to go. I hate shopping in general because it uses up a lot of spoons for me, and Costco tends to take even more. It’s usually crowded, there’s so much stuff that I typically want to wander, and then everything I buy is huge so loading up the car can be a pain. By the end my back hurts, I’m tired, and I’m sick of people.
And yet I still haven’t even considered giving up my membership in over 10 years.
Just wanted to say I appreciate you including the link. I found it an oddly touching read and it made me think about people in my life who might be dealing with similar experiences.
Thank you for taking the time to read it! The metaphor gives us a simple way to convey a big, difficult concept.
My partner and I both deal with chronic physical issues and mental issues. A common question is, “How many spoons do you have for dinner?” And it opens the door to discuss things like I might have (physical) spoons to cook, but I don’t have (mental/social) spoons to go out to get something. It still feels like a chore to figure out dinner, but it’s at least easier to talk about. (Oh, and meal prepping or cooking a large meal for a week will typically use up all my spoons for a day and sometimes more, so as nice as it would be to only need to think about it once, I just don’t have the physical capacity to do that kind of prep.)
Oh yeah, it’s a great metaphor hat’s really taken off with disabled people. I really love how in the original story, the choice of spoons was convenient, and are just a placeholder for “arbitrary units”; the slight absurdity of spoons in this context means that when someone says “I’m running low on spoons”, it causes me to reflect on the entirely subjective and relative experience of ability and disability.
Edit: That is to say that whilst the person you’re replying to struggles to go to Costco when they’re low spoons, for a different person, going shopping may be something they find easier to do with low spoons.
$1.50 hotdog & soda too! The CEO said he’d rather burn the company to the ground than increase that price.
And they are large hotdogs. I eat lunch there more than I should.
If you ever need to make a big purchase and it’s something they carry (e.g stove, washer/dryer, big tv) the membership can make the difference even if you just do it for the 1 year.
I pay for the $60/yr one. In the last year, I got a leaking car tire patched for $20, and did 3 quick trips to the warehouse for items on my shopping list.
Worth it.
They do sell stuff in larger packages than most stores, but very little of it is actually in such an absurd quantity that a household of 1 or 2 couldn’t reasonably use it. Another thing I appreciate is that since they typically only carry 2 or 3 options for any given product, I feel reasonably confident that their buyers have vetted those products well, and the non-staple things we do buy generally seem to be pretty solid quality.
It’s also one of my first shopping stops for electronics and appliances, since they usually offer include and extra year or 3 of warranty coverage.
As someone who previously worked in food manufacturing, getting your products into Costco was a huge deal. But also, the Costco audits were a huge deal and boy are the ones I dealt with thorough. It made me respect Costco even more.
And if their buyer messed up they will take it right back. They want to know if anything isn’t up to standard.
They do sell stuff in larger packages than most stores, but very little of it is actually in such an absurd quantity that a household of 1 or 2 couldn’t reasonably use it.
Yeah, you gotta go to a special “Business Center” Costco to get the real bulk experience these days.
Man i had forgotten those exist. Gonna have to make the trek to one, one of these weekends and then post about it on the Dull Men’s Club 😂
I gotta have somewhere to purchase the metric shit tons of beer I require to live in this country without constantly wanting to put a bullet in my brain, and Costco fits the bill nicely with its wide variety of local (and imported!) beer available for purchase at low, low prices every day. 🍻
Taking the edge off of the apocalyptic hellscape that is America in 2025. Thanks, Costco! 🤗
Do they still have that Kirkland brand vodka? This was another fascinating little tidbit when I visited the U.S. last (and since I’ll probably never go again I’m curious).
Grandparents spending their evenings getting loaded on no-name vodka and Fox News. It was really depressing.
Grey Goose is still Kirkland last I heard!
I picked a hell of a time to stop drinking alcohol
If you actually did and were not just setting up joke for meme, hey-- Good Job!! Shit’s hard but you got this :) I quit drinking the last time Trump was in (2016), so I feel ya.
I honestly do not miss hangovers, and have more money.
Thanks, money and health were the main reasons. I feel no different than I did before, as I rarely drank to the point I’d get a hangover, but I still figured I’d feel better over all.
I still love the quip by Sinatra, “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”
My vehicle makes the gas prices worth the membership, even if that was all I purchased.
Shit. I might just re-up to the executive membership this year. I don’t shop there as much as I used to but I could still probably manage to get enough rewards to cover the membership price.
One thing to look into is their car insurance. It dropped my rate by $100 a year which was more then the cost of membership.
Oh yeah, we already got coverage through them. Home and auto bundled. I don’t know that it saved us much but the coverage is a lot better.
Welcome to Costco. I love you.
The backlash against DEI is at the individual level imo. How people feel is the reality, see the economy (which is also an attribute of using the wrong metrics to measure performance as it relates to the consumer but that is a different topic).
Let’s see if I can explain it: So let’s say you’re an average white guy, and you know your company has a DEI program. You feel like you work very hard, or at least as hard as everyone else in your workplace, but you see that your minority coworkers get promotions or that the new hire for a better paid position than yours is a minority you start to feel as though you’re getting passed over because of your identity. This could be because it is a diverse workplace and so the best people for the promotion may just happen to be of other races or women. It could also be actual racism which I’m sure happens but it’s probably very very rare. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is that you see people who are different from you getting promoted, and you don’t particularly feel they are better than you.
Then you maybe look a little bit into what the theory behind DEI is and you learn that it’s proponents argue that there is systemic favoritism towards white straight males which is why if you have two equally capable candidates but one is white and the other is a minority, you should choose the minority. As a straight white male you won’t feel (and frankly should not, I’m sorry) that you are responsible for your advantage in society, so what you’ll feel is that now you’re the disadvantage one and that DEI is just racism against white straight males. It isn’t but that doesn’t change how the individual feels.
My personal opinion is that DEI is more of a bandaid than a solution and some of the backlash is warranted. The real solution is for people to have equal opportunity at the lowest level, meaning education. There’s no reason for some schools to be better than others, and less for that difference to arise from the value of the houses in the schools district. Of course Trump and co will not fix it either because they campaigned on destroying the education system because they seemingly want a slave caste or something. But if everyone had equal access to good schools and colleges, I don’t think DEI as it is implemented in most orgs would be needed.
Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to @danc4498@lemmy.world
I work at a pretty progressive company (comparatively but definitely not perfect) and DEI there has nothing to do with preferential treatment, nor does it need to be.
The fact is that if you want to hire the top X people in the labor market, but your hiring and business practices exclude, say, half of that market, you absolutely will not get the actual top X. You will have to reach deeper into your half and be forced to pick people that are less qualified and/or capable.
So DEI, at least where I’m at, is about widening that pool so that you can actually get top talent. That means reevaluating your business practices to figure out why you’re excluding top talent. Maybe your recruiters always go to specific colleges for recruitment and certain websites. Maybe just the way they’re talking to candidates is more attractive to a certain type of person. Maybe you’ve got hiring requirements and an interview process that is not actually predictive of success. Maybe candidates are looking for some benefit that you’re not offering. Everything needs to be looked at.
For example, “Women just want more flexible working arrangements so that’s why we can’t get them” is something I hear often. Well, have you actually evaluated why your company is so inflexible? Is it actually necessary? Or are your executives a bunch of people who learned how to manage in the 20th century and haven’t changed since then? Maybe there are things you can do to enter the 21st century and make room for more women, not just because they’re women, but because you gain access to people who are actually better at their job than the ones you’ve had. Not every company can be supremely flexible, of course, but the number of times that inflexibility is actually necessary of much smaller than its prevalence.
The demographic breakdown of your workforce is a quick and easy weathervane to help figure out how these efforts but of course they’re not everything. Diversity comes in maybe forms, not just skin color and genitals. But in my company they’re used in a backwards looking manner, to see how new policies are working, not for quota filling and preferential treatment.
…see the economy (which is also an attribute of using the wrong metrics to measure performance as it relates to the consumer but that is a different topic).
I mean, I guess, yeah, the wrong metrics issue is a little tangential, but papering over the spiraling inequality sure isn’t helping the proverbial white working-class guy stop misattributing his failure to get ahead.
There’s a fundamental truth that certain white people (i would say over 50%) who don’t believe they are racist - will never hire a non-white person for a position, and they aren’t even consciously aware that this is the case.
There’s just a natural subconscious bias towards people that look and sound like you do. DEI helps to overcome that.
Yes, but I think this a bias reinforced by the same point I made above about education. All schools should be as equally good as possible, or at the very least they should be equally funded and have the same program etc. And then we should aim that schools are as diverse as possible.
It will not completely solve the issues, rural areas by their very nature will probably remain very white and very entrenched. But it would alleviate it a lot.
That brings me to another point, that I think no one has made to rural Americans. If they are being left behind and there’s a housing crisis, why the fuck are their politicians not running campaigns on using government money to fund industry and development in the huge amount of literally empty space there is in this country? We could build the European walkable cities dems dream so much about in the heart of America, and make it affordable too, at least at the beginning. I’ve thought about a lot and I think a plan to develop the economy of the heartland of America would be a good platform for a democratic candidate to run on and it could fit within all the trappings of a The “Golden Age” of America that people want. And it would be a national project, something we sorely need to unite us again.
Because change is hard, and people would rather be told comfortable lies. So the grifters and liars get into office on their platforms of lies, and instead of doing anything useful they just grift.
I think “will never hire a non-white person for a position” is a little far but I do think “are unlikely to ever hire a non-white person for a position” (maybe even “highly unlikely”) is fair.
