James Sinegal Quotes
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Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company. The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.
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You could raise the price of, say, a bottle of ketchup to $1.03 instead of $1, and no one would know. Raising prices just 3% per product would add 50% to your pretax income. Why not do it? It's like heroin: You do a little and you want a little bit more. Raising prices is the easy way.
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It doesn't do Costco any good if nobody can afford to buy anything.
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Paying your employees well is not only the right thing to do but it makes for good business.
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The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.
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You take an educated gamble. If you don't occasionally make a mistake, you're not doing your job.
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I think that most of the people running companies today are motivated and pay is a small portion of the motivation.
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Everybody is watching you every minute anyways. If they think the message you're sending out is phony, they're going to say, 'Who does he think he is?' It's again good business. But it is also an obligation.
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It's like heroin: You do a little and you want a little bit more. Raising prices is the easy way.
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In the final analysis, you get what you pay for.
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We are a company that promotes 100% within the company.
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If you hire good people, give them good jobs, and pay them good wages, generally something good is going to happen.
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One of the strengths of our nation has always been a strong middle class who could afford their own homes and send their children to school.
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It doesn't do much good to have a quality image, whether it's with the facility or whether it's with the merchandise, if you don't have real quality people taking care of your customers.
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We would rather have our employees running our business.
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Paying good wages is not in opposition to good productivity.
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When you hire good people, and you provide good jobs and good wages and a career, good things are going to happen.
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If you've got to work for the rest of your life, you'd better do something you'll enjoy.
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We always strive to be the best in the wage package.
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You destroy the initiative of the working people if they don't feel they have a fighting chance to be a part of the American Dream.
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We want to turn our inventory faster than our people.
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If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.'s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.
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Our attitude has always been that if you hire good people and provide good wages and good jobs and more than that - if you provide careers - that good things will happen to your company. I think we can say that that has been proved by the quality of people that we have and how they have built our organization.
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There was a proposal in California that would keep out Wal-Mart but allow Costco. You opposed it. Are you nuts? That's true: I always oppose these kinds of things. Competition makes us better. Some of our best stores have a Sam's Club next door.