A former Costco executive said that DEI was the company’s culture.
A former Costco executive is fed up with attacks on the grocery club’s DEI policies, saying that critics don’t understand the company’s culture.
“The term DEI didn’t even exist to us, it was the way we ran our business… it’s who we are,” former Costco International Division Senior Vice President Roger Campbell told Fox News Digital.
Campbell, 82, who retired from the company in 2015, began his career at Costco as a store manager trainee in 1986 and worked his way up the executive ranks. He spent 29 years at Costco and is fiercely defensive of it as the grocery chain faces an onslaught of attacks for its refusal to jettison its DEI initiatives.
The former executive claims that Costco has always valued the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, even before the term “DEI” existed. Costco executives see the company’s culture as a key factor in its success and that, to his ears, DEI is synonymous with the way the company has always done business.
While Campbell emphasized he does not speak for the company or any current executive or board member, he feels the reason Costco has been stalwart in defense of its DEI policies is because the board sees attacks on them as attacks on the business itself.
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“Our whole idea was taking care of the employee. Our whole idea was a very simple thing — if you hire good people, pay them good wages and give them good benefits, then likely good things are going to happen,” Campbell said.
Costco board members recently shot down a shareholder proposal to analyze the risks of its DEI policies. In response, 19 states’ attorneys general issued a letter to Costco CEO Ron Vachris demanding the company drop their DEI programs to conform with President Trump’s recent executive order banning DEI from the federal government.
Trump’s executive order comes in the wake of numerous companies announcing that they’re terminating their DEI initiatives following intense public backlash, with Facebook, McDonald’s, Boeing, Harley-Davidson and others all rolling back or outright nixing the programs.
But Costco, unlike other companies, has the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion hardwired into its DNA, Campbell claims, and feels no need to drop the programs despite the fact that they are no longer politically fashionable.
“It was the rules at some point in time. Somebody said ‘okay everybody has to get into DEI’ and you saw all these companies get into it and then get out of it because they never had one to start with,” Campbell claims, “Call it what you want to call it, but we had something that worked.”
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Campbell said that when it came to hiring, Costco always sought to ensure the employees at their warehouses and stores reflected the communities they were located in demographically. He says that Costco had no trouble achieving this goal, and never had to consciously alter its hiring practices to meet a certain quota.
“Diversity was a word that was used, but it was never ‘My gosh, we need to get a program. We need to train diversity.’”
Costco based its promotions on merit, not race or gender, Campbell claimed, adding that he had never heard anyone complaining they lost an opportunity because they were a White man. However, he conceded that when he decided on promotions he would take race into account if both candidates were “equally qualified” for the job.
“If I absolutely was looking at a promotion, and there were two people where either one of those two could do this job, I think, internally, there could be a couple times where I said, ‘you know what, I need to give this diverse person an opportunity instead of holding them back,’” Campbell admitted.
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Costco introduced its formal DEI initiatives as Campbell was leaving the company, but in practice he had not observed nor heard of any changes to the company’s core values.
“[The board is] associating DEI with the history of our company,” he said. “If it’s in our books or its in our program it’s just because it existed. We just never called it DEI, we just always thought of it as our culture.”
Costco, which is facing a potential strike from unionized employees in some of its stores, has always had a pro-worker image. The grocery chain lays claim to an 8% turnover rate according to Harvard Business Review, and its average hourly rate is reportedly $31.
The grocery club’s Chairman of the Board, Hamilton E. James, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic-aligned PACs in the last election cycle, with several other board members following suit.
Campbell, who identifies as a conservative, rejects the idea that the board forces its politics on the business.
Though Campbell maintains that Costco’s commitment to diversity has been longstanding, it has not seemed to translate to the highest ranks within the company. Of its top managers, 72% are men and 81% White, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“We need more diversity at the top levels,” Campbell conceded.
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