CRITICAL THINKING


of Simplicity The GENIUS


Costco profits by taking great pains to keep it simple and embracing the ‘intelligent loss of sales’


T 106


his Critical Tinking interview is with Mr. Richard Galanti, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Costco


Wholesale Corp.


Galanti, who is also a member of Costco’s board of directors, began his retail career in 1964 at the age of 8, bagging groceries at his father’s grocery store in Canton, GA. He went on to earn a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Galanti joined Costco in 1984 as vice president, finance.


Previously he worked on Wall Street as an investment banker with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Corp., where he provided a variety of financial services to both public and private corporate cli- ents, including Costco in its infancy.


Army AL&T Magazine April–June 2013


He is currently serving a three-year term on the board of directors of the Fed- eral Reserve Bank of San Francisco and recently joined the advisory board of the University of Washington’s Michael G. Foster School of Business.


With 69.1 million cardholders includ-


ing individuals, families and businesses, Costco is the second-largest retailer in the United States and the seventh-largest in the world. It operates 622 warehouses in eight countries, employing a total of


160,292 full- and part-time employees. Costco’s $99.1 billion in revenues for its FY12 represents more than 2 million trans- actions a day including 113,000 carats’ worth of diamonds, 62 million rotisserie chickens, 36 million prescriptions filled, 3 billion gallons of gas, 16,500 mortgage loans totaling $4 billion, 160,940 vaca- tion packages, and 1.5 million pumpkin pies during Thanksgiving week.


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