Eric Ries
speaker
621 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 May
Eric Ries’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Uh, you hear people talk about Costco and that with a sense of mystery about it.
I was listening to an economist who was giving a big lecture about family-owned businesses.
They were going through a list.
Only family-owned businesses can think long-term.
Only family-run businesses can resist the pressure to exploit their customers.
Only family they were just going on and they were listing family-run business.
They were just name dropping X, Y, Z, Ford Motor Company, Toyota.
Which is like one after the other, family run business.
At the end of the lecture, they said, Oh, and also Costco for some reason.
They're not a family run business, but they also seem to do all this stuff.
And it's like, anyway, moving on, the lecture is like, Well, I thought the lecture was that only the family run businesses, oh, only and also Costco.
How weird.
And in fact, in most industries, there's one outlier exceptional company with an unusual structure.
And I just felt like part of my goal writing this book is to demystify this behavior.
And Costco's a
Great example because I mentioned in the plantation example how competing on price is seen as the ultimate market mechanism that disciplines companies and forces them to be exploitative.
But Costco is famously the low-cost retailer.
They actually have a decisive cost advantage in spite of the fact that they treat their suppliers well, they treat their employees well, they pay their employees above average wages.
And they treat their customers well.
They actually see their job as being a fiduciary to the customer.
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