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.
Even Costco’s shareholders are based. Love it.
And the hot dog is still the same price.
Shareholders, if you keep that up, maybe I’ll grudgingly, once in a while, “think of the shareholders”.
Only 2% of Coscosians are racist…Coscosians are Costco Shareholders.
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…
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! 🚀
I think I’d best run that by our PR folks first lol
Rare corporate W
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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.
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.
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.
Yeah, what are women doing working when they should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, am I right?
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.
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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.
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.)
I bought stock for like $650 a few years ago and then sold it at $800. Sort of regret it.
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
…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.
That sounds like a good and well thought out DEI program. But there are also DEI programs that were just quotas. I’m not saying they are the majority or even common but just one lends credence to the “it’s racism” narrative.
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.
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.
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.
Remember, the Senate is DEI for white suburbia.
Today my CEO at a large corpo org stood in front of a packed room of minority employees and assured us that the company would continue DEI policies regardless of the government and essentially said “fuck Trump” in the most politically correct way possible. It feels good that my workplace is such a safe space. I think we’re about to find out what companies actually give a shit versus those using optics to prey on the LGBTQ community, disabled people, and racial minorities.
“fuck Trump” is pretty politically correct.
My work is just packed with conservatives licking trump’s boots every news they hear
I also work for a large corpo org here, but instead of “DEI” we have “Belonging.” Under that label we have a council that informs and recommends things to our senior leadership, groups which offer support and community (LGBTQ+, Latinx, women, etc.), and provides learning resources. Overall I’m proud of the work we do. (I’m also proud of the two of people I’ve hired internally who were chairs in Belonging groups at some point!)
A couple months ago at a large event, someone asked if we’d be getting rid of DEI. Our Chief People Officer was able to say something to the effect of, “We’ve never had a DEI program but we are committed to continuing our Belonging practices.”
So basically we’re not backtracking on anything, and we have pretty good DEI, but because we never used the term “DEI” she was able to deflect the challenge to it. I never thought about it before that happened, but it made me wonder if it was an intentional choice to avoid the buzzword and so some of the criticism that comes of it.
Anyway, cheers to you also having a safe place of work!
It genuinely gladdens my heart to hear you say this, because it suggests that there is at least some length of genuinely caring about inclusion by the people in charge at your workplace; I have seen too many instances of corporations paying lip-service towards DEI whilst fostering a truly toxic workplace culture. It’s nice to hear a story from somewhere that’s different and that it makes a difference to how safe your workplace feels
Shareholders or board? I think they’re one in the same since they’re mostly held by institutional investment. I’m so curious what their thought processes are.
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.
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.
Well now I understand why you’re saying all the things you’re saying- disgusting bigotry.
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?
Talking about who was in the gulags in a thread about the gulags is not whataboutism and I have no idea why you think it is.
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.
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
DEI is also just called “teambuilding”. All successful companies do it in some form
