If you're doing your Christmas shopping over the next few weeks, why not consider Costco aka “The anti-Wal-mart“?
Their unique practices as a retailer – paying employees a living wage, offering generous benefits, customer-friendly return policies – has led to low employee turnover, a wealthier clientele in general and continued growth while competitors such as Wal-mart, Target and others see stagnant growth or even declines.
Costco's corporate culture (like others such as WestJet, Google and so on) reminded me of a blog post I read recently which said that, in essence, the entire history of management theory comes down to two schools of thought:
Between them, Taylor (management as the rational analysis of numbers) and Mayo (management as the humanistic art of influencing people) carved up the world of
management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save
yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature
once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The
Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist
replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes
on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of
reason and passion, of the individual and the group.
Here are a selection of Costco related stories that have been posted on Reddit if you want to read more about one of the world's most effective, successful retailers.
Comments 2
Speaking of Wal-Mart, I just caught this documentary, Canadian no less, on TVOntario the other night,
http://www.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/?lg=en&id=53676&v=h
or
http://waltown.com/
It's called Wal-Town: The Film, good stuff, slightly different slant from Walmart: The high cost of low price, which basically talks a lot about the Evil. 🙂
(http://www.walmartmovie.com/)
In a book I read recently on Wal-Mart (The Wal-Mart Effect), it said that Wal-Mart itself has developed four categories for their customers and the second biggest group is something like “objecting self-loathers” (Okay, that might not be the exact term but it was all these middle class people – like myself – who know Wal-Mart is evil for myriad reasons but still shop there because the deals are often so damn good – although, not always – some studies show Wal-Mart's vaunted “low prices…always” aren't…when compared to their various competitors.