Excellent essay on how Costco does it and how it manages to survive the retail apocalyse. Worth reading in it's entireity. For me these lines stood out the most:
Corporations only act as ethical as their subset of consumers, and consumers only are pressured to only act as ethical as their value-maximizing formulas allow them to be. This means that making a premature leap towards offering more progressive yet more expensive products or services comes with risk. Risk averse corporations, especially large ones like Costco, have to be completely sure that a market has come maturity before they offer up a product that represents a premium shift in its consumers' ethical frameworks.
The author concludes by offering a solution that seems to address the needs of both retailers and customers
Instead of reacting to the slow evolving standards of decency of its shoppers, there's nothing that's stopping a company from playing a more proactive market making role as long as they accompany this push with convincing evidence for consumers why a new offering is valuable for them.
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