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.
Fuck Costco and DEI bullshit.
I worked there and the women and minorities got preferential treatment the whole time. Any heavy lifting? Grab one of the guys who are already sweating their asses off outside the 100+ degrees heat. Pay no attention to the fact that the job requires that you be able to lift 50 pounds or however heavy that case of water is during the job interview. Literally had the lot lead look right past two female coworkers in front of him and point to me to help move 100 chairs and tables for some jackasses return.
Someone made a disgusting mess or broke something? Grab the closest male employee to clean it up. Can’t have any of the women getting dirty.
I lost count of how many times a guy was outside clearly struggling with heat exhaustion and he was asking to come back inside but nah. They need him outside. Can’t have any one of the 37 minority women that have been folding clothing since the dawn of time inside the air conditioned box swap places even though they are both technically working the same exact job title.
I was so happy to quit that fuckin job. Easily the worst management I ever worked for and I worked target nightshift in the ghetto as my first job. At least those assholes were pricks to all of us on night crew equally.
People downvote you but this is what I was talking about. It doesn’t really matter whether your situation was caused by DEI or not, what matters is that you feel that it happened partially because of DEI, which you wouldn’t if officially there was no DEI program. This is where he backlash is coming from, and people don’t see it because they are too focused on what it is on paper or how it is supposed to work.
Feels over reals, huh?
Well at the individual level, what you feel is your entire reality and none of us are free of that bias. Some politicians or leaders are better than others of taking this feeling and coalescing it into a narrative that drives you to action. The current wave of discontent can be very much be woven into a liberal or left wing (I really don’t like the terms right or left, they are mostly meaningless in current year) narrative that inspires action but instead liberals have become the agents of stagnation in a way and the people saw that, and being low information voters that they are, they chose the only alternative that was at least promising to change things in a big way. They (like always) just didn’t pay enough attention to the fine print to see what the big changes actually entailed.
If I applaud one thing about Trump is that more or less he’s delivering what he promised, albeit with total disregard for public order, safety or legality.
what you feel is your entire reality
No, what I infer from evidence is “my” (everyone’s) reality. I am perfectly aware that my feelings and perceptions can be very flawed. That’s why magic tricks and optical illusions work.
You can “feel” that there’s a bridge across the canyon all you want. You’ll still fall to your death trying to cross it.
Feelings are not reality and do not project your own issues onto others.
I’m not projecting anything. And I think your analogy is apt and does not really refute what I said. Someone could well believe with all their might that there’s a bridge and fall to their death. But the fact that they believed it so much that they tried to cross it against all reason means that to them the bridge was real. This is why I said “at the individual level”. Your truth is not the Truth, but it is still the truth for you until you somehow discover that your belief was wrong. Some never find out, others find out too late to reverse course and fall to their death.
You are 100% projecting. I do not trust my feelings, so my feelings are not reality. Things are not real to me just because I believe they are real. I do my best to get external confirmation.
Your truth is not the Truth, but it is still the truth for you until you somehow discover that your belief was wrong.
Again, projection. I do not automatically accept something is true just because I believe it is true. I come to most situations assuming my belief is wrong and get it confirmed.
You are not me and you do not know how I think and I know that not because I believe it but because I have had enough confirmation in my life that there is no such thing as a psychic.
Belief is not knowledge and it will never be knowledge.
Well when I say you I do not mean you specifically I’m talking about anyone. I’m talking about the indefinite “you” as it were. I can see now how it would be misunderstood, my bad.
But I would argue that in your case that your belief that you are free from false beliefs in all your beliefs because you do not trust your feelings is proof of my assertion. I don’t think it’s possible for any person can make that claim unless they thoroughly dissected every single feeling they feel through the day every day. Sounds exhausting and impossible.
Nah I hate DEI because once worked 2 years at a crappy job for meh pay because it was an opportunity to go into essentially my dream career and position at that time. Our manager finally left the company and then we all applied for the position. Instead of promoting any one of the VERY qualified people in my position (me and two other white guys) they hired a young Indian woman. She was very sweet and eager to learn, but she absolutely did not know a single thing about the job she was going into which was to be our manager. My boss literally had me train her because I was the most qualified (their words). They passed all of us over to grab this completely new employee that did not know a single thing about the job she needed to do. Literally zero experience in the field or as a manager. Her first fuckin job. And because I basically had to do her job while she learned and I was still doing my own job as well I got burnt out and quit.
I have absolutely no problem with women or any race working above or around me. I absolutely have a problem with skipping over theost qualified person for the job just to check a box on a fucking diversity quota. Imagine your parents die in a fire because the fire department needed fill a quota for scrawny people that can’t carry much instead of hiring the most physically capable people possible.
I think job applications and interviews should be entirely anonymous. They shouldn’t know anything about me besides what is relevant to the job they need me to do. I do not understand how Hire the most qualified person became racist/sexist but that is the dumbest goddamn thing I have ever heard.
Sounds like your boss was the problem, not the DEI hires. But that’s okay, the racist conclusion is the most sensible one to jump to.
Yeah… No. It’s a Costco problem. Our stores general manager is best buddies with all the Costco higher up and most importantly the new CEO. So any attempt to report him or the other managers for the multiple things they were doing wrong would just end up with you getting less and less hours until you eventually quit on your own. I attempted to go over my bosses head and contact the regional manager and guess what. My hours were cut and I got a write up for something that I never did the very next week.
Again, sounds like the problem is the bosses and not the minorities who are just employees like you.
Is it really just my bosses when those minority or female employees repeatedly took advantage of the biases of those bosses once they realized how that power structure worked?
Every time we got a new hire and we saw them outside or doing shitty jobs like us we thought maybe they weren’t going to be the same but as soon as they realized they could suck up to the bosses and get outta shit constantly they would almost always take advantage of the preferential treatment. The few minority and female employees that also called them out for their shit also had their hours cut and had to leave for something else or transfer stores.
If you’re out there Ramona you were a real one homie.
they realized they could suck up to the bosses and get outta shit constantly they would almost always take advantage of the preferential treatment.
Sounds like your bosses, yeah. They couldn’t do that if not for your bosses. They’re probably paid less too, making them more valuable to the company than an expensive white boy.
There it is lol.
Took you awhile to admit you’re just racist but I’m glad you got around to it.
Also no despite me being comically over qualified for that position I was paid less than the majority of the minority and female employees there.
You’re doing everything, including calling me a racist and telling me your bosses pay you less, to not blame your bosses. Do you understand how dense that looks?
Is it really just my bosses when those minority or female employees repeatedly took advantage of the biases of those bosses once they realized how that power structure worked?
Sounds like you’re not blaming your bosses, and are blaming the minority and female employees.
Blaming them for taking advantage of an imbalanced system for their own gain. Not blaming them for their race or gender. Come on now.
Yeah, what are women doing working when they should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, am I right?
You’re blaming women and minorities for taking advantage of an inbalanced system but it has nothing to do with their gender or race? I agree, I blame the bosses.
Wow that’s funny because my sample size experience tells me the exact opposite of your experience. So my experience is also representative of the entire corporation
Your store must have been a nice store. I’m happy for you. My store was not. And yes I blame the higher ups because our GM was all buddy buddy with the new CEO and the top level people at the corporate office.
Meaning any complaints against our GM went absolutely nowhere. HR wouldn’t do anything. The boss of our boss wouldn’t do anything because technically even though he was only the GM of a store he was friends with too many at the top so he sorta had immunity from the district manager as well.
I never claimed my store was representative of all the individual stores. I did say it was a problem with my store and the top level management at Costco. Not the same claim.
No you clearly blamed dei and women and minorities.
I said “Fuck Costco and DEI bullshit”. Please point to where I blamed women or minorities for either of those things.
Here! Instead of blaming management you keep bringing up women and dei
Except for the rest of that comment which you cropped out where I go on to explain what I was blaming the management for. Because itnwas the women. Specifically the minority women who sat around doing the easiest jobs at any given time because the racist and sexist management allowed them to do so if they would play along with his creepy bullshit.
Except for the very top where you blame dei lol.
Shareholders, if you keep that up, maybe I’ll grudgingly, once in a while, “think of the shareholders”.
The whole dei firing thing doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like unqualified people were hired.
Anything that erodes the advantage of Cis Het White owners is a threat.
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.Right. Not sure why I used logic…
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.
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.
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.
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.
…called DEI programs “illegal, immoral and detrimental to shareholder value,”
Wrong, wrong, and only if they implemented DEI as a blind performance metric… Which is also wrong. You get half a point out of three, or 16.6%.
And with a grade that low, I’m completely justified in giving that person…
A Super F!
Once again, Costco surprises me with basic human decency that is largely missing in the corporate world. I know it’s not a high bar, not as if they’re on the forefront of progressivism, or anything. But it’s well beyond the average in the profit-driven and labor grinding society, and that sort of corporate action, among their other positives as an employer, should be recognized and supported. Good on you, Costco.
I commented this earlier but quite a few corps that tend to beat the market in returns have not abandoned DEI initiatives. These are corporations that will not bat an eye to plunge thousands into poverty or worse to save .007 cents on manufacturing costs. This tells you that they believe that DEI has some tangible value on their performance whether it’s through marketing opportunity or because their workforce is actually better.
But I think abandoning DEI for many companies is the right choice, as bad DEI is magnitudes worse than no DEI.
Is it not like anything else? It’s the implementation and execution of the program that makes the difference in whether it’s better or worse… DEI is an incredibly broad term. Many companies try to diversify their workforce because it’s always better for business to have different perspectives… no?
For example, work in a male dominant field, always trying to hire females, they are simply unicorns because they are almost non-existent in the field.
Yes, but most things that are badly implemented in a work place don’t lead to people feeling resented and angry at society.
People feeling resented and angry at society… Are these the same people that tell me I need to pull up my own bootstraps? If so, the two messages are conflicted.
Usually how this goes, there is a few bad implementations that go viral and make everyone else look bad…
I would a source to back this up if possible please.
Apple, Microsoft, Costco, and I don’t know if they are mentioned there but JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs too.
Nothing there, asides from corelation with capitalism being bad. Dei doesn’t seem to factor into your claim there.
Maybe I didn’t understand. For which comment do you want source on?
I wish you would better articulate what part of this you would like me to address because I believe the link I shared addressed this. Use words, or highlight the specific statement you’d like me to clarify.
You said these corps that like DEI are happy to plunge thousands into poverty. That is what I need a source for that DEI is the root cause of this, not just shitty corpos in general.
The backlash against DEI is at the individual level imo. How people feel is the reality, see the economy (which is also an attribute of using the wrong metrics to measure performance as it relates to the consumer but that is a different topic).
Let’s see if I can explain it: So let’s say you’re an average white guy, and you know your company has a DEI program. You feel like you work very hard, or at least as hard as everyone else in your workplace, but you see that your minority coworkers get promotions or that the new hire for a better paid position than yours is a minority you start to feel as though you’re getting passed over because of your identity. This could be because it is a diverse workplace and so the best people for the promotion may just happen to be of other races or women. It could also be actual racism which I’m sure happens but it’s probably very very rare. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is that you see people who are different from you getting promoted, and you don’t particularly feel they are better than you.
Then you maybe look a little bit into what the theory behind DEI is and you learn that it’s proponents argue that there is systemic favoritism towards white straight males which is why if you have two equally capable candidates but one is white and the other is a minority, you should choose the minority. As a straight white male you won’t feel (and frankly should not, I’m sorry) that you are responsible for your advantage in society, so what you’ll feel is that now you’re the disadvantage one and that DEI is just racism against white straight males. It isn’t but that doesn’t change how the individual feels.
My personal opinion is that DEI is more of a bandaid than a solution and some of the backlash is warranted. The real solution is for people to have equal opportunity at the lowest level, meaning education. There’s no reason for some schools to be better than others, and less for that difference to arise from the value of the houses in the schools district. Of course Trump and co will not fix it either because they campaigned on destroying the education system because they seemingly want a slave caste or something. But if everyone had equal access to good schools and colleges, I don’t think DEI as it is implemented in most orgs would be needed.
Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to @danc4498@lemmy.world
There’s a fundamental truth that certain white people (i would say over 50%) who don’t believe they are racist - will never hire a non-white person for a position, and they aren’t even consciously aware that this is the case.
There’s just a natural subconscious bias towards people that look and sound like you do. DEI helps to overcome that.
I think “will never hire a non-white person for a position” is a little far but I do think “are unlikely to ever hire a non-white person for a position” (maybe even “highly unlikely”) is fair.
Yes, but I think this a bias reinforced by the same point I made above about education. All schools should be as equally good as possible, or at the very least they should be equally funded and have the same program etc. And then we should aim that schools are as diverse as possible.
It will not completely solve the issues, rural areas by their very nature will probably remain very white and very entrenched. But it would alleviate it a lot.
That brings me to another point, that I think no one has made to rural Americans. If they are being left behind and there’s a housing crisis, why the fuck are their politicians not running campaigns on using government money to fund industry and development in the huge amount of literally empty space there is in this country? We could build the European walkable cities dems dream so much about in the heart of America, and make it affordable too, at least at the beginning. I’ve thought about a lot and I think a plan to develop the economy of the heartland of America would be a good platform for a democratic candidate to run on and it could fit within all the trappings of a The “Golden Age” of America that people want. And it would be a national project, something we sorely need to unite us again.
Because change is hard, and people would rather be told comfortable lies. So the grifters and liars get into office on their platforms of lies, and instead of doing anything useful they just grift.
…see the economy (which is also an attribute of using the wrong metrics to measure performance as it relates to the consumer but that is a different topic).
I mean, I guess, yeah, the wrong metrics issue is a little tangential, but papering over the spiraling inequality sure isn’t helping the proverbial white working-class guy stop misattributing his failure to get ahead.
I work at a pretty progressive company (comparatively but definitely not perfect) and DEI there has nothing to do with preferential treatment, nor does it need to be.
The fact is that if you want to hire the top X people in the labor market, but your hiring and business practices exclude, say, half of that market, you absolutely will not get the actual top X. You will have to reach deeper into your half and be forced to pick people that are less qualified and/or capable.
So DEI, at least where I’m at, is about widening that pool so that you can actually get top talent. That means reevaluating your business practices to figure out why you’re excluding top talent. Maybe your recruiters always go to specific colleges for recruitment and certain websites. Maybe just the way they’re talking to candidates is more attractive to a certain type of person. Maybe you’ve got hiring requirements and an interview process that is not actually predictive of success. Maybe candidates are looking for some benefit that you’re not offering. Everything needs to be looked at.
For example, “Women just want more flexible working arrangements so that’s why we can’t get them” is something I hear often. Well, have you actually evaluated why your company is so inflexible? Is it actually necessary? Or are your executives a bunch of people who learned how to manage in the 20th century and haven’t changed since then? Maybe there are things you can do to enter the 21st century and make room for more women, not just because they’re women, but because you gain access to people who are actually better at their job than the ones you’ve had. Not every company can be supremely flexible, of course, but the number of times that inflexibility is actually necessary of much smaller than its prevalence.
The demographic breakdown of your workforce is a quick and easy weathervane to help figure out how these efforts but of course they’re not everything. Diversity comes in maybe forms, not just skin color and genitals. But in my company they’re used in a backwards looking manner, to see how new policies are working, not for quota filling and preferential treatment.
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.
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.
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 😂
And if their buyer messed up they will take it right back. They want to know if anything isn’t up to standard.
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?
My vehicle makes the gas prices worth the membership, even if that was all I purchased.
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.
Grey Goose is still Kirkland last I heard!
I picked a hell of a time to stop drinking alcohol
If you actually did and were not just setting up joke for meme, hey-- Good Job!! Shit’s hard but you got this :) I quit drinking the last time Trump was in (2016), so I feel ya.
I honestly do not miss hangovers, and have more money.
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.”
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.
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.
Oh yeah, it’s a great metaphor hat’s really taken off with disabled people. I really love how in the original story, the choice of spoons was convenient, and are just a placeholder for “arbitrary units”; the slight absurdity of spoons in this context means that when someone says “I’m running low on spoons”, it causes me to reflect on the entirely subjective and relative experience of ability and disability.
Edit: That is to say that whilst the person you’re replying to struggles to go to Costco when they’re low spoons, for a different person, going shopping may be something they find easier to do with low spoons.
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.)
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.
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.
$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.
And the hot dog is still the same price.
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?
YoU sAy ShArEhOlDeRs, I sAy RaDicAl LeFt OpErAtIvEs
Republicans: Not like that.
The “shareholders” are mostly just Vanguard/Black Rock/etc. mutual fund managers who always vote for whatever the board recommends.
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:
I hadn’t thought about it quite like this before, so thank you for your comment
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.
Narrator: The Republican politicians did not listen.
I want Samuel L for my narrator on this one.
Say “what” again.
Say “what” again.
Obligatory fuck Reagan
Rare corporate W
Even Costco’s shareholders are based. Love it.
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…
I think I’d best run that by our PR folks first lol
All right, I got the OK from PR. The company I work for is called Olo (stock symbol: OLO). We’re not well-known because we operate behind the scenes in the restaurant industry, enabling online food orders to appear directly in our clients’ POS systems rather than on a separate tablet. We do a lot more than that now, but those are our roots.
Thanks! Your stock is surprisingly cheap and seems to have cratered since its hay days in 2021. Oh well, good for me.
I honestly believe the stock is undervalued. I hope to help take you to the moon! 🚀
