The Costco Connection: a Lifestyle Magazine for Costco Members.

Costco Connection is a magazine sent free to members of the warehouse club Costco and includes articles which regularly tie into the corporation along with business, political, health, and social articles. (Wikipedia.org)

The monthly Online Edition combines a replica of the print version with bonus content. Cover stories and popular features such as Buying Smart are extended with supplemental material. This electronic version makes the magazine easy to find, print and share articles with family and friends.

Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ: COST) is the largest membership warehouse club chain in the world based on sales volume, headquartered in Issaquah, Washington, United States, with its flagship warehouse in nearby Seattle. Costco's Canadian operations are based near Ottawa, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Costco Wholesale Corporation (Costco) operates membership warehouses based on the concept that offering its members very low prices on a limited selection of nationally branded and selected private-label products in a range of merchandise categories will produce high sales volumes and rapid inventory turnover. It buys the majority of its merchandise directly from manufacturers and route it to a cross-docking consolidation point (depot) or directly to its warehouses.

The Company’s depots receive container-based shipments from manufacturers and reallocate these goods for shipment to its individual warehouses, generally in less than twenty-four hours. The Company’s warehouse format averages approximately 140,000 square feet; newer units tend to be larger. Its warehouses operate on a seven-day, 69-hour week. It carries an average of approximately 4,000 active stockkeeping units (SKUs) per warehouse in its core warehouse business. (Google Finance)

Costco.com: Offering thousands of items you won’t find in your local Costco.

COVER STORY: Schooled in Value

At Costco, education leads to advancement in many ways, ultimately benefi ting employees and Costco members alike.

SOME COMPANIES use the “command and control” philosophy—a strongly regimented structure with top executives barking orders that are passed down the line until someone jumps.

“Costco functions more like a college,” says John Matthews, senior vice president of human resources, “with top executives as professors, sharing knowledge and encouraging an environment of learning.” ...

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From the Publisher’s Desk
Ginnie Roeglin

AS SUMMER WINDS TO A CLOSE and kids prepare to go back to school, it seems appropriate to turn our attention to education in this month’s issue. Here at Costco, though, education is a year-round activity. Our CEO, Jim Sinegal, often reminds us that 80 percent of our job as managers is to teach, teach, teach. We are to teach our newer employees about Costco’s core values and ethics, member service and essential operating philosophies.

That is how we sustain the founding principles of our company as we continue to grow in size and geography. As you’ll read in this issue’s cover story, we do not believe in simply buying products and putting them on our shelves for sale. Instead, our buyers are involved in every link of the supply chain, starting with the growers or factories that produce our products, to deliver the highest-quality products at the lowest possible price, in a sustainable manner.

Our buyers must have an in-depth knowledge of their items and the market factors affecting their supply and cost. They need to teach our suppliers about Costco’s philosophy and standards and continuously work toward improving the quality and value of every item we sell. Likewise, the managers of ancillary Costco businesses such as Gas Stations, Hearing Centers, Optical, Pharmacy, Photo Centers and Tire Centers are certified experts in their fields, well exceeding the typical state requirements. We do our homework so you don’t have to. That will leave you with a little more time to help your kids with theirs!

August also wraps up our 2008 Passport to Savings coupon program. This month you’ll find savings on back-to-school products such as HP notebook and desktop computers, Samsung LCD computer monitors and SanDisk USB drives, as well as Bissell carpet cleaners, Sonicare toothbrushes, Garmin GPS, Singer sewing machines, Cuisinart coffee makers, bedroom furniture, Philips 52-inch LCD HDTVs, leather recliner chairs and more. You’ll also save on a variety of services, including online investing, money market accounts, identity protection, mortgage and real estate services, and more services for small businesses.

Enjoy the savings this August from all of us at Costco!

From the Editor’s Desk
David W. Fuller

IF YOU ARE ONE of the many eagle-eyed regular readers of this magazine, you may notice a proliferation this month of two words that have been placed on several of our pages. The words are “paid advertisement.” You may wonder why these words are placed on some ads but not on others.

Well, there is a method to this madness. It has to do with what publishers traditionally have termed “the division of church and state.” To publishers that division means the all-important distinction between advertising and editorial material.

Generally, ads clearly look like ads and articles clearly look like articles. Publishers interested in maintaining editorial integrity and conveying such efforts to their readers have policies that do not allow ads to mimic the look of articles. There are times, however, when even the best give-and-take between publisher and advertiser yields an ad that still might be mistaken for something the editors may have created. That is when the words “paid advertisement” come to the rescue.

Now, if that all seems somewhat self-evident, I can assure you that even with this precaution readers continue to confuse paid content with editorial content. It’s hard to blame them since we live in an age of product placement (when advertisers pay to have their products placed in movies or on TV shows) and of ever-blurring lines between “church and state” in the media world.

As ironic as it may seem, The Costco Connection, a publication produced by a commercial enterprise largely to encourage shopping, is proud of its efforts to clearly delineate our paid advertising from our non-paid articles.

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