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.
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…
Even Costco’s shareholders are based. Love it.
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
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.
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
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.
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 don’t understand the hate on DEI initiates.
It’s hate, that’s all.
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.
It’s because some people only want to believe in straight white people.
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.
Remember, the Senate is DEI for white suburbia.
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.
Should have never come back from Siberia.
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.
Isn’t that the book Jordan Peterson keeps going on about?
You missed a couple history lessons, there, bro.
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?
A corporation not being absolute trash. Let’s hope they deal fairly with their unionized employees.
Not just the corporation, but their shareholders. Republicans have been worshipping at the altar of Shareholder Value since the 80’s.
Here you go, these shareholders just told you what they value! Will Republicans listen?
Not just the corporation, but their shareholders.
The “shareholders” are mostly just Vanguard/Black Rock/etc. mutual fund managers who always vote for whatever the board recommends. So yes, just the corporation.
Shareholder revolts against board proposals are exceedingly rare, and basically only happen when some individual rich fuck owns way too many shares.
Right, but those mutual fund managers don’t just vote “yes” because they aren’t paying attention. If anything, they are paying lots of attention, and get special treatment, since they own so much of the company, and were likely consulted ahead of this move.
And they are most definitely not bleeding-heart liberals. If they voted for this proposal it’s because they think it will lead to better outcomes for the company.
If anything, they are paying lots of attention, and get special treatment, since they own so much of the company
Let’s be clear about this: the fund managers own nothing. They are employed to manage the mutual funds that other people – you and me and everybody else with a retirement account – actually own. They disenfranchise us, the actual owners.
(Yes, technically, it’s true that the individual company shares are owned by the corporate entity of the mutual fund itself, and that what the mom & pop investors technically own shares in that fund. But that does not make it fair to say that anybody but the mom & pop investors deserve to vote the individual company shares, because it’s their money that’s being used for the whole thing!)
And they are most definitely not bleeding-heart liberals. If they voted for this proposal it’s because they think it will lead to better outcomes for the company.
If keeping DEI is better, why didn’t they demand it for all the other corporations whose boards didn’t propose keeping it? The answer is, again, the fund managers almost always just rubber-stamp the board. To claim that fund managers are actually forming their own opinion on the efficacy of DEI and influencing corporate governance accordingly is simply not true.
In theory, mutual fund managers are acting on mutual fund share holders’ behalf. In practice, “shareholders” of most large corporations are effectively asleep at the wheel – the investment industry literally calls shares held in index funds “dumb money” – and boards of directors can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. In the era of huge mutual funds, especially index funds where the even the choice of which companies to own shares in is no longer a feedback mechanism, the check & balance of shareholder control is basically broken.
The fix is “pass-through voting,” by the way:
To claim that fund managers are actually forming their own opinion on the efficacy of DEI and influencing corporate governance accordingly is simply not true.
That may a fair take, but take a moment to turn that around. The fact that fund managers are not forming their own opinion against the efficacy of DEI and influencing corporate governance accordingly is a sign that it’s simply not as harmful as Republicans let on, and may actually be helpful. Because they know how to wield that influence if they feel they need to in order to preserve their funds’ value.
I didn’t say not forming their own opinion “against;” I said “on” – i.e., not forming their own opinion about the topic at all, in either direction. It is not an argument that can be “turned around” in the way you claim.
When boards oppose DEI, fund managers support the board. When boards support DEI, fund managers support the board. My point this entire time has been that there is no influence being wielded here. The companies that are cancelling DEI policies are doing so on their own boards’/execs’ initiative with no meaningful shareholder control, and the companies that are keeping DEI policies are likewise doing so on their own boards’/execs’ initiative with no meaningful shareholder control.
Obligatory fuck Reagan
Republicans: Not like that.
YoU sAy ShArEhOlDeRs, I sAy RaDicAl LeFt OpErAtIvEs
98%?? I love costco
Welcome to Costco. I love you.
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.)
My vehicle makes the gas prices worth the membership, even if that was all I purchased.
$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.
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.
I picked a hell of a time to stop drinking alcohol
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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.”
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.
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.
FYI: for normal corporations (i.e. not ones with individual majority stockholders like Musk) shareholder votes are almost always dominated by votes from the big mutual funds, and the managers of those funds always vote for whatever the board recommends as a matter of policy. The actual mom & pop investors who own the shares through those mutual funds in their 401(k)s etc. are entirely disenfranchised.
In other words, the actual owners of Costco had mostly fuck-all to do with this. We’re just lucky that Costco’s board of directors isn’t terrible, for once.
Not always. I get proxy vote requests pretty often.
You also have the option to choose opinionated funds that only invest in things like green energy.
I’m not sure why you’re specifically focusing on mutual funds. Holding of public shares is supposed to be a passive income whether it’s individual investors (who are hopefully diversifying their investments), mutual funds, ETFs, etc. The board works for the shareholders by collecting data, assessing that data, and then making recommendations so that investors don’t have to do that research. Sure, it’s possible that the shareholders vote against the advice of the board, but it’s pretty rare. If the board is out of step with the shareholders, they should probably be replaced. This is a virtuous cycle (or vicious cycle for other stocks) where Costco is seen as a fairly ethical company, so investors who are looking for stocks that meet their values choose companies like Costco (whether they are individual investors or investment vehicles marketed as fitting certain values). These investors choose a board who represents their values, so I don’t think, “we’re just lucky that Costco’s board of directors isn’t terrible,” I think it’s a part of this virtuous cycle.
I’m not sure why you’re specifically focusing on mutual funds. Holding of public shares is supposed to be a passive income whether it’s individual investors (who are hopefully diversifying their investments), mutual funds, ETFs, etc. The board works for the shareholders by collecting data, assessing that data, and then making recommendations so that investors don’t have to do that research. Sure, it’s possible that the shareholders vote against the advice of the board, but it’s pretty rare.
I’m focusing on mutual funds because, when you own shares of a fund instead of shares in the business directly, you don’t get to vote (usually) even if you want to.
And now I’m going to focus even more specifically:
This is a virtuous cycle (or vicious cycle for other stocks) where Costco is seen as a fairly ethical company, so investors who are looking for stocks that meet their values choose companies like Costco (whether they are individual investors or investment vehicles marketed as fitting certain values).
Most stocks these days are held not only in mutual funds, but in index mutual funds, where they literally don’t make the decision you just cited as the thing that keeps the corporate boards aligned with the shareholder values. They just buy every company weighted by market cap instead, and in so doing, jettison all of that kind of influence they would have otherwise had.
In summary, mom & pop investors (i.e. folks who invest entirely or almost entirely via the index funds offered by their 401(k)) are not only disenfranchised in terms of share voting, but also don’t actually choose what companies to invest in – the fund managers and 401(k) plan administrators have taken all of that power from them.
Do you see the problem yet?
spoiler
To be clear: the takeaway should not be “index funds bad” – I like index funds and own index funds. The takeaway should be “every mutual fund should be required by law to offer pass-through voting of shares.”
Mutual funds are a systemic risk by being dumb money. Normally this is talked about in the context of index investing. The more money blindly tracks an index, the more that index becomes detached from reality. This causes measurable inefficiencies in the market [0]. In practice, this isn’t that big of a deal, since “follow the index” essentially means “do what the smart money does”, so the distortion is not that great.
In the context of voting, the analogous action would be abstaining (or voting with the majority of voting active shareholders). I suspect the reason this is not done is a combination of there not being enough active voting shareholders (as you say, that is why boards are a thing), and the risk of activist investors.
On a much smaller scale, we have something similar happening in my local HOA. The county owns about a dozen units as part of it’s public housing program. Combined with the low turnout at HOA meetings, and the 1 property = 1 vote, this means that they could vote for essentially anything they want.
In practice, their policy is to show up to all meetings but abstain from votes unless they are needed to make a quarum. If they are needed, they vote for whatever the consensus was among every else there.
[0] See the index effect. Being added to an index increases a stock’s value, despite there being no change to the underlying fundamentals.
Rare corporate W
Only 2% of Coscosians are racist…Coscosians are Costco Shareholders.
Shareholders, if you keep that up, maybe I’ll grudgingly, once in a while, “think of the 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.
I bought stock for like $650 a few years ago and then sold it at $800. Sort of regret it.
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.)
The whole dei firing thing doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like unqualified people were hired.
Actually, that’s exactly what they think.
The anti-DEI crowd thinks exclusively in zero-sum outcomes. There is exactly one Best Candidate for a position, who happens to look like them. If a different candidate is hired, then the whole process is obviously unfair, because they didn’t hire the one
whiteright candidate.The weird thing is, equity and inclusion aside: it looks like diversity is a good tiebreaker when you try to measure this.
So even if it were a zero sum game, the right candidate is unlikely to be the one who resembles your current team.
Right. Not sure why I used logic…
Anything that erodes the advantage of Cis Het White owners is a threat.
