Think the CEO of Costco did a similar move with the hot dogs
Apparently they make more money from memberships than from sales margins, which are capped.
Last I heard, their profits were nearly entirely from memberships. This was probably five years ago though. I don’t know if their numbers have changed since.
Also. I believe, he also said , if the workers think they need a union, we’ve failed as managers.
So. Yeah
I mean, it’s an understandable viewpoint.
It’s when union busting tactics are being brought in that things are problematic.
I wish more companies had this mindset. If you treat your employees well and listen to their needs, they won’t need to unionize. When they do unionize, it means they don’t feel that they have been treated well and listened to.
It seems that the end result of this philosophy would be to treat your employees well!
If you have an employer that does the right thing, you should have a union that doesn’t need to do much. But you should still unionise, because it’s niave to think the company will always continue to behave that way. If anything, they naturally drift away from that state and it’s only a matter of time until it changes. The union is about having a level playing field with the company when you need it.
Close. The founder told the CEO if he raised the price on the hotdog “I will fucking kill you”.
So, who really gets the credit here is up to you.
The person who threatened to kill the CEO if the CEO fucked his customers, or the CEO who didn’t fuck his customers out of self-preservation?
They also bought 2 hotdog factories to minimize the loss.
Costco does pay decent as well.
Could they do better? Yes, but they are pretty decent for employees and consumers.
Oh come on, don’t be naïve. They bought two factories so they could switch from “hot dogs” to “mechanically-recovered animal-based byproducts” let’s be realistic
“I came to [Sinegal] once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends,’” Jelinek recalled in a 2018 interview with 425 Business. “And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’”
https://thehill.com/homenews/4696314-costcos-new-cfo-makes-announcement-about-1-50-hot-dog-combo/#:~:text=We are losing our rear ends%2C’%E2%80%9D%20Jelinek,effing%20hot%20dog%2C%20I%20will%20kill%20you.
Out of curiosity, how is it legal for Sinegal to say that to Jelinek? Or it isn’t but no one cares to press charges?
GabeN has been pretty cool.
Gabe has 6 yachts worth about $1 billion dollars. Not very cool at all, imho.
He didn’t kill anyone by denying them insurance or anything like that tho. Just took a commission on every game sold on Steam, a platform nobody’s forced to use.
And by running a casino that rakes in millions of dollars off kids. I can appreciate the positives he’s done with Steam, but I’m not about to ignore the negatives.
Being a bit greedy =/= Killing millions of people through death panels
Huge difference
Nobody becomes a billionaire by being “a bit greedy”
One billion dollars is an insane amount of money.
Isn’t the Steam business model to charge less than everyone else though?
That seems like the exact opposite of greedy.
Im a huge steam fan.
I am not a fan of someone who can own multiple yachts.
Sorry GabeN.
He’s not a CEO any more, but Bill Gates is on a mission to die a mere millionaire, and I think has already given away more than half his net worth.
Bill Gates is a massive piece of shit. Don’t let all the propaganda he puts out there fool you. When you start looking closer at his so-called charity work it’s not nearly as pretty as you might think.
I personally prefer all billionaires follow his path.
I’ve looked at his charities too over the last few years and didn’t see anything that was questionable.
Anything you want to call out?
Bill Gates fucked the public school systems pretty hard.
Something I think is extremely fucked up in general is that if you have millions to throw at a pet cause, you will disproportionately benefit your cause over other causes in a non-democratic manner. That means that every individual and organization involved in fields related to your pet projects are incentivized to focus on your pet projects over others. Because you have so much money, you basically individually shape public policy.
Look at the WHO (source):
…over 80 per cent of WHO’s funding relies on “voluntary contributions,” meaning any amount of money given freely by donors, whether member states, NGOs, philanthropic organisations or other private entities.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone is responsible for over 88 per cent of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO. Other contributors include the Bloomberg Family Foundation (3.5 per cent), the Wellcome Trust (1.1 per cent) and the Rockefeller Foundation (0.8 per cent).
So yeah, it’s great that they donate so much… but that also means they can stop donating… so they have control.
Could you be a little bit more specific with your criticisms of his charity?
He basically gave $54BN to the “Gates and Melinda Charity”.
Guess who controls the charity?
Guess if the “Charity” pays taxes?
It’s crazy how fast people simp for billionaires, old evil shitty hated-by-all billionaires too, just because they spend some publicities around.
Some of that propaganda is in the form of material help to people around the world. Like sure, he’s not great, no question. But if every other CEO funded global healthcare to the extent he did to whitewash their own problems, I wouldn’t complain. Sure his charity work is by no means ideal, but even the ugly charity he does actually winds up saving lives.
The question was “are there any CEOs we should save” and the answer is still “not Bill Gates” in this context.
In camp “BG still has 4240000x times more money than me”.
Not to mention he executed the “trolley problem meme” by killing a million to save a million. Now, he did not literally kill people (unlike some other CEOs I’ve heard about), but he did fuck over a ton of people, all in the name of “Business” (which is PR/propaganda for “greed”).
He was kind of a prick becoming a billionaire, so his is more of a redemption arc than a hero’s journey.
Watching people totally fall for Gates’s incredibly shallow face value self image propaganda bullshit is wild to me. FUCK that guy, so hard. One of the biggest reasons we have enshittification today is this one man.
incredibly shallow face value self image propaganda bullshit is wild to me.
He’s given away billions of dollars, and that’s face value to you? Besides, he hasn’t been in control at Microsoft for decades at this point.
We wouldn’t need him to make these donations if he actually paid his fucking taxes is the thing though. And it’s significantly less.
Also I don’t understand how you can defend a man who convinced a bunch of people to not give away the COVID vaccines for free. This is not the actions of a humanitarian. It’s the actions of a monster.
My boss checks in on me occasionally with directness, and did so the other day:
“viva, how’s it going?”
“I want to fight Bill Gates.”
This is understood to mean, “windows is fucked. My computer is fucked. All of this massive, utterly brutal buttfucking inconvenience could have been avoided at some point, and now isn’t, because [our company] bought so hard into Microsoft’s “business solutions” that there’s no turning back, and because of the nuances of the problems you’ve asked me to solve, I am facing said brutal buttfucking inconvenience, and I’m mad about it.”
Apologies for detailing the conversation, but I have noticed the implementation and configuration of MS products (something MS has no control over) really impacts their usability. For example, I worked at a soulless corporation that managed to set up PBI and ADO so there was no live feed of data (and they only allowed for the web version of PBI, which reduces functionality substantially). They were also so far behind on Office versions that the employees didn’t know more than one person could update a file at a time. There are all sorts of very real reasons to dislike MS, but I do wonder how many people dislike them because of a stupid configuration.
Yeah how dare he run a tax scheme by
*checks notes
Saving millions of people across all of Africa by providing free healthcare for treatable diseases and potential pandemics?
I’ve noticed that some people really don’t like Africans. I believe there’s even a word for such behaviour, don’t remember which one right now though…
Bill Gates’ net worth has grown substantially despite his philanthropy, rising from $126.8 billion in early 2023 to $156 billion in December 2024.
Regarding COVID-19 vaccines, Gates actively opposed patent waivers and influenced Oxford University to privatize its vaccine through AstraZeneca rather than keep it open-source. He pushed for maintaining intellectual property rights through COVAX, despite public funding supporting vaccine development.
Not a good guy by any metric.
Thats a good criticism but the CEO he put in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation went against him and supported waiving the patents anyways, which Biden and the WTO went ahead and did regardless.
His argument against the TRIPS terms was that it wouldn’t actually increase production, that every facility capable of producing vaccines was doing so regardless of the patent’s costs especially given that they only had to worry about intellectual properties when importing to countries where the patent is held.
He was wrong, I give you that, I think there is no room to be penny pinching and arguing when even 1 more vaccine could have saved lives. However, that doesn’t even come close to offsetting the number of lives he has saved or improved by handing out vaccines and medicines for free across Africa. The vast majority of Gates’ opponents are generally not fond of Dark Skinned people.
BofA is totally worth keeping around
Terrible bank, like most that aren’t credit unions, they have over leveraged tens of billions against individual account balances and been a leaky sieve in tech security.
I have no idea why most people don’t use credit unions. I guess just ignorance. My “overdraft fee” is “keep at least $50 in your savings account and we won’t charge you one.”
Convenience. I have accounts with BofA because they’re three blocks from my house. It’s them or Wells Fargo, who are a little further, and then the nearest credit union is a 10m drive. So convenience. I also have USAA, but having zero branches in my state is kind of a pain.
I hate BofA, but I opened my first credit card with them 19 years ago and I value my stupid credit score for some reason, and so I have to keep it forever.
Your overdraft policy is don’t overdraft or you’ll be charged a fee — so there’s an overdraft fee?
All of them
at minimum wage
Make their pay and benefits the same as the lowest paying position in the entire company.
Simple and effective