Costco is looking at the enormous shortfall in human labor, flipping open its Econ 101 textbook, and deciding "High demand? Low supply? Price must go up."
That's not "fighting fascism" just running a business intelligently. I've heard similar stories from HEB, from my local auto repair guy, and from a few neighboring restaurants. Businesses are struggling to keep staffed so income pressure is rising.
Their very public decision to keep DEI in addition to a long history of not exploiting their employees has led me to purchase a membership this morning. I'm okay with financually rewarding reasonable behavior.
My least favorite thing about capitalism is that if everyone did it correctly, and worked together to maximize each other's value, it wouldn't even be that bad. Being a middle class wage worker wouldn't be too bad if my management cared about increasing the value they can extract from me by enriching and teaching me instead of being slave drivers
The workers didn’t need to strike. Costco is notoriously an amazing employer to work for. They have some of the lowest turnover in the industry. The CEO often gets grilled in earnings calls on things like employee costs and he always rebuts that happy employees are productive. I am very pro unions but this is one of those examples of a good employer.
I saw Costco raise membership fees, reduce people entering without a membership, and wondered if it was just profiteering without improving pricing. While their max profit is set to 14% which at least seems better than the price gouging under the label of inflation, I hope this is part of that improvements for society. It may not calculate out properly, but hopefully it does. For a lot of people, the 🌭 and 🍕 is also a great help too. They also stood up for DEIA and humanity, avoiding the falsehoods of fascism and scapegoating of the people systemically vulnerable and a real path to equity for all.
I made scraps for a couple years when I first started in the industry but landed a pretty sweet job on a whim. I say keep an eye out and be sure to have a decent portfolio (though admittedly mine was nowhere near perfect)!
I'm not worried haha, I've just this month completed my first year of experience at the company I work at. But I have to say I'm so envious of US salaries