The Costco in Aloha on a rainy Saturday is a specific Portland experience. Wet parking lot, a line at the hot dog counter that never moves and never seems to bother anybody, and a woman ahead of me buying eleven pounds of chicken thighs with total serenity. I have been thinking about that store all month for reasons that have nothing to do with poultry.
Costco shareholders vote today on a proposal asking the company to study the risks of its diversity programs. The board recommended voting no. Not quietly, not buried in a hedged legal paragraph. The proxy said the proponent was trying to restrict a program the board believes creates value, and then it stopped talking.
Which lands strangely in a month that has gone entirely the other direction. Walmart in November. Meta a couple of weeks ago. McDonald's, Lowe's, Ford, Tractor Supply. Program by program, quietly, usually on a Friday, usually with language about evolving our approach.
A value you drop the first time it costs you something was never a value. It was a position, and positions are cheap to adopt and extremely expensive to abandon.
Here is the part that gets lost in the coverage. Reversal is not free and it is not neutral. You pay to build the thing, you pay again to unwind it, and then you pay a third time in credibility, because every employee and every customer now knows the precise amount of pressure required to move you. That number is your actual brand positioning. You published it.
Costco's answer is cheaper because it never needed defending. The programs were described as operating practice, tied to hiring and merchandising and the people who shop there, not as a campaign with its own logo lockup and a launch film. Nothing about it was performance, so nothing about it required protecting. That is the whole difference between a commitment and a communications asset.
And it is consistent with everything else about that company, which is the real lesson. The hot dog is still a dollar fifty. Membership renewal sits north of ninety percent. Wages run above the sector and always have. Costco's answer here looks exactly like its answer on the hot dog: this is how we operate, the math already works, next question.
That number is your actual brand positioning. You published it.
The strategic case for conviction is boring and it is mostly arithmetic. Coherence is cheap to maintain and expensive to rebuild. Every brand I have worked on that got wobbly under pressure spent the next two years paying for the wobble, usually in recruiting, usually in the exact audience it was trying not to alienate.
I bought too much coffee and a rotisserie chicken and drove home. Truffles ignored the chicken entirely, which is her position, held consistently, under considerable pressure.