Michael Moore makes a great point in Post 187 about the demise of General Motors.
In that diatribe he talks about how GM, making record profits, decided to cheap out and send their manufacturing and jobs south of the border to Mexico. This meant that, on top of devasting communities like Mr. Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan, they also eroded a really important and loyal base of car buyers, to wit, GM workers.
This reminded me of the difference betwixt Wal Mart and Costco. As a patron of both stores I know that they both offer superlative value and customer service. Where they differ is in their attitude towards their employees, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid. Wal Mart is essentially minimum wage from cradle to grave; the guy chasing carts in the Costco parking lot is making 40,000$ a year.
The Costco reasoning is that they want their employees to be able to afford homes and to afford filling them with things bought at Costco. Costco CEO and co founder Jim Sinegal, in a fall interview on www.fastcompany.com [linked above] says as much. Jeff Chu and Kate Rockwood write that "Wall Street grumbles that Costco cares more about its customers and employees than its shareholders; it pays workers an average of $17 an hour and covers 90% of health-insurance costs for both full-timers and part-timers. Yet revenues have grown by 70% in the past five years, and its stock has doubled. In typically blunt language, co founder and CEO Jim Sinegal makes his case for why "big box" and "progressive" aren't mutually exclusive."
If General Motors had of torn a page from Mr. Sinegal's book perhaps, just perhaps, you and I would not be involuntary co owners of the company.
WFDS
No comments:
Post a Comment