Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals."
Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees,
members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:
For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and
respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company
the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract
and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our
success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.
Costco's always interested me as a company. Still the only place where I pay to be able to shop. It's a personal point of pride whenever I go there and spend less than $100.
Interestingly, Costco’s core business model and marketing is built on membership gatekeeping practices which have disproportionate exclusionary effects along class and race lines.
I don't see them as different to any other company, really. I could imagine diversity in their staff of buyers would be useful, for example, to ensure they're stocking products that represent the different desires of different groups.
> I don't see them as different to any other company, really.
My point was in response to this. The idea is the available pool for a specific job may not match that of the general population. Different companies have different ratios of different jobs. So, assuming all things are equal, the diversity at different companies can only match the diversity of the qualified pool of workers. In that sense, different companies will be different.
For example, according to those statistics, Costco should be more diverse than, say, Netflix.
Yeah, I do. You don’t need race diversity to have product diversity. My wife is Taiwanese. But her friend who is Korean said “I wish there were Taiwanese noodles at Costco”. How did she do it? She’s Korean. Is it possible for her to know that Taiwanese food is nice. I don’t know. But she pulled off the nigh impossible.
You're being flippant but stocking things that people want is actually far more complicated than this. If you're looking to cater to an ethnic group you have to actually understand what they buy and how. If stock the wrong brands, or you import them from another country that does it slightly differently, then people won't buy your stuff. It's not about "Taiwanese noodles" it's "these are the noodles I would typically pick up at Ranch 99".
One way, but like Afghans can have a history of selling tamales, White people (and indeed Black people and whoever else) can figure this out too. It really doesn't need supernatural genetic knowledge via the spice melange.
The diversity isn't for you the customer, it's for the employees and the kind of corporate environment Costco wants to build.
Edit to add: A better corporate environment, of course, does tend to lead to a better customer experience, but the "visibility of diversity" should not be the goal but rather "genuinely fostering an inclusive environment where people are respected and feel willing to put in their best work," and I think that shows at Costco.
It certainly is not there for the customer, as their core business of exclusionary membership is a quintessential example of systemic racism and classism via disproportionate impact.
The cost of a Costco membership is $65 per year (really half that if you can share the 2 membership cards you get between two families), available to everyone, and the prices they have there are so good that even my 3-person family saves money each year by shopping there. Every family I know here in my local area shops at Costco, rich or poor, because the prices are so good for many things. I don't see how any of that is exclusionary on racist or classist lines, it seems to me like Costco is one of the good corporations trying to give a good service/product and low prices.
If the time, effort, and incidental costs of procuring a state ID card is enough to render the prospect of Voter ID requirements systemically racist, classist, and exclusionary then so are Costco cards.
The argument goes as such: up-front tolls change behavior to the degree of deterring people from even trying otherwise beneficial arrangements, as people are not perfectly rational. Look at the impact of NYC’s new congestion pricing. Compare your impression of Walmart shoppers to Costco shoppers. If they don’t match there are disproportionate effects at play.
It’s possible that some mildly exclusionary policies can be worthwhile and create more societal good than bad, even if they have some incidentally disproportionate demographic impact. Perhaps endless yak shaving fixated on residual disproportionality should not have been entertained by the DEI field in the first place, and was part of what undermined its reputation.
Citizens have the right to vote, not to be a Costco member.
Costco is not the sole source for anything. You can live a happy and fulfilled life never having set foot in a Costco warehouse. I often think of that just before I do, in fact.
> Compare your impression of Walmart shoppers to Costco shoppers.
That's interesting. Every company I worked at that instituted DEI policies claimed that achieving a workforce representative of the customer base helped the customer.
The subject matter is nominally the same, but I don't know how comparable I would guess the situations are. I 100% could see Meta making a very similar statement still today.
What are you talking about? A "yaml formatted string" is just a string. And the Costco shareholder meeting notes/ballots that the GP posted is not YAML either, it's a pdf.
