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.
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.
Let’s just hope that some of the Black people who stayed in the inner city were able to buy their homes. Rising energy costs are going to cause a re-migration from non-viable suburbs to higher-density urban environments. That could be a nice payday for inner-city property owners, assuming they’re cashing out due to old age and not just moving house.
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)
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Don’t get used to it.
I like you.
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Me too. They’re funny.
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!
You wouldnt think that people who are anti-dei would invest in companies like costco.
Costco has, notoriously, been very “woke”, since before they were even told what woke was or to hate it by fox news.
Costco has, notoriously, been very “woke”
Like seizing the means of $1.50 hotdog production?
“I came to (Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty," Jelineck said, according to 425 Business. “We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise (the price of the) effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ That’s all I really needed.”
I don’t have a dog in this race (I’ve never had a Costco membership), but this quote makes me feel like Costco’s leadership has at least one of their priorities straight.
Hey pieces of shit that proposed this, please don’t boycott Costco. ! Pleasssseee!!! It would be such a bummer to have shorter lines and to not see you dragging your shitty kids around the store by the arm with you’re cart full of cheese and camo jackets.
What’s wrong with a cart full of cheese? I haven’t bulk bought cheese in my adult life, but I have bought several bars and several bags of shredded cheese at the same time. I’d do it again, too!
Just the illiteration… Cheese away, my friend!
My brain is exploding at the idea of cheese and jacket being illiterative and I hate it but the sound is so close that I can’t really argue.
Huzzah! I’m not stingy with the cheese, btw. Havarti plain, with dill, and with jalapenos for everyone!
Mmmm……and that giant Oaxaca Cheese Knot they sell. And 3 pound blocks of tillamook cheddar. God I do love cheese.
That Oaxaca cheese knot sounds amazing! Anyone know if Sam’s has something similar? We don’t have a CostCo near me.
I have seen the same brand of cheese at Walmart in a slightly smaller knot I think. It is such a great melting cheese.
Awesome! I’ll take a look there.
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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.
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 them…
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.
Sounds like there’s one company that cares more about employees than Nazi investors.
Bruh…
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.
How would that be a career killer? That’s a career.
Kills the career they intended to have before working at Costco
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.
Golden Handcuffs
Ok, but biggest owners are Blackrock & Vanguard megavultures (like all the everythings).
The proposal came from a racists NCPPR group, so without significant support & the board just jumped at the free PR opportunity.
Thanks for the quick deep dive nfo
Pressure from the rich racist fucks who own everything. Something is clearly wrong with them.
Technically, shareholder votes allow everyone who owns a stock share to vote. I regularly vote on Volkswagen, VYM, and others because a third of my savings are in stocks. It ain’t much but it’s honest work.
With that in mind, that means these votes very well could be from racist common folks, which is an even more grim scenario.
Common folks don’t own very much of the stock market.
Three Wall Street firms control the majority share of 95% of S&P500 companies
Thats fair, but in Costco’s particular case Vanguard owns 9.33% and BlackRock owns 7.49%. State Street Corp owns 4.20% (Nice)
Institutional shares in total are 71.86% split among 71 different 13F filers, which includes the three listed above.
That means 28.14% are owned by individuals with the largest individual owner being former CEO Craig Jelinek 0.08% of all outstanding shares as of July 19, 2024. He leads with a very very large margin.
So with that in mind, the most likely event was that a large enough number of companies and individuals voted yes, and that some mixture of both also voted no. But I absolutely do concede to your very well made point, you were correct to say, that disproportionately a bunch of rich suits and ties voted for the end of DEI. Especially if they perceived economic incentive to hire literally anybody, prioritizing high efficiency able bodied and minded people, over specifying a diverse team. I do not agree with that sort of business philosophy but I have to acknowledge their reasoning: a larger pool of workers means lower labor costs.
Costco stock price is about $930, so to become “a group of shareholders”, you’d technically need three people to spend that much money and then start making their demands.
Or at least I wasn’t able to find how large this “group of shareholders” was. If it had been a significantly large one, Costco wouldn’t have been able to brush it off so easily, I believe.
It’s a stupid conservative activist organization, not some random investors.
Costco’s most recent “Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders,” which contains information about business matters that will be voted on at the January 23, 2025 meeting, included an anti-DEI shareholder proposal that was submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Value Edge Advisors describes the National Center for Public Policy Research as a “reprehensible radical right” organization that has a history of filing anti-DEI lawsuits against various companies, including Starbucks, Nasdaq, and more. Its funders include right-wing groups like the Coors foundation.
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 still don’t understand why everyone’s so obsessed with Dale Earnhardt, Inc. He’s been dead for over 20 years.
Reminds me of Fans Against Gordon.
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…)
