Ideas & Industry

Inside One of the World's Most Interesting Business Experiments: The Question That Helped Costco Build One of the World's Most Admired Companies

Every extraordinary business begins with a question, but the questions that change industries are rarely the loudest. More often, they quietly challenge an assumption that everyone else has accepted. For decades, retail operated on a straightforward idea: buy products from suppliers, add a markup, and earn a profit every time a customer made a purchase. The more efficiently a retailer managed that equation, the more successful it could become. It was a model so deeply embedde