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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: are they also diligent about firing people who don't pull their weight? The mantra is fantastic, but my experience has been it gets taken advantage of pretty quickly if you don't have a feedback loop to make sure you really did hire good people.

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On my second day at work they let go of the dozen people who had been our groups training “buddies” the night before. That sends a strong message. In the five subsequent years, I can’t recall anyone else getting let go. I later learned that my cohort was rare in that we were hired directly without doing seasonal employment. Every other group hired after me, they would select their top picks from the seasonal cohorts of 20-30 people. One year they hired no one, one year they hired more than 10.

There were some people I thought were lazy, but many people on my night shift were hard and proud worker.. not like that day shift though!

Yes, though people generally recognized the good thing they had and worked hard to maintain it.

Human diversity disallows even good-bad scale to align or converge well...there must be their secret sauce somewhere.

Standards for “good things” eventually branches into factions with conflicting axes or criteria.

Arbitrarily set and static point of reference can solve it e.g. a bible or a well though out system. I don’t think the former is the CostCo’s thing so I’m wondering what would be.

... How about we do the smart thing here and keep it simple. Notably better = good Better than what? Better than the competition in this sector in this general area. There. I don't think it requires an investigation into secret sauce.

> but my experience has been it gets taken advantage of pretty quickly if you don't ...

This is just my personal experience, in Canada, but I've never encountered rude and unhelpful employees at Costco like I have at many other stores.

In retail a store competes on price, selection, quality, service, and location. To me it’s astonishing that supermarkets have managed to yield the service advantage to Costco, a warehouse store. Half the staff is twice as helpful.

And the quality advantage, and even parity on selection. And the grocery chains don’t know why they keep losing money in their race to the bottom.

It helps that they have huge numbers of candidates for every opening, and can afford to be picky about who they hire.

Not at costco corporate, apparently, from the way my mother has described her coworkers.

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