Ben Gilbert

But I knew a lot going into the meeting with Richard.

I wanted to be able to hear the things he was saying that were different than common wisdom.

There's a lot of think pieces out there about Costco.

The Wall Street Journal loves to write about it.

Investors love to write about the stock.

So you can kind of read that stuff.

And I wanted to hear, this was actually one of the last pieces of research because I wanted to be really prepped.

Low SKU count drives everything.

Do you want the Charlie Munger talk?

Walmart has 100,000 to 200,000 skis.

4,000 things.

And here's all the knock-on effects of that.

If you only sell 4,000 things, it doesn't take a lot of volume before, very quickly, you are a meaningful seller to every single one of those products, those vendors.

Suddenly, you become really important to that vendor.

Your merchandisers, since you only have 4,000

So your incentives start to align.

Yes.

The merchandisers have a very small portfolio.

You're not dealing with 100 vendors.

You're dealing with seven.