Costco

Costco has issued a document [3] clearly leveled at the charges of mural damage and unnecessary tree removal. The company Swissguide AG provides additional business information on all Swiss companies. Costco tore down the Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to build a store there and has faced opposition [1] from TIAA-CREF shareholders as well as its own shareholders [2]. In Switzerland the company Swisscom Directories AG produces and distributes directories in several forms including internet-based yellow pages in four languages, including English. A yearly event (usually in mid-July) is pizza week, where $3 coupons are distributed for whole pizzas. In Sweden it's called Gula Sidorna, distributed by Eniro AB. The chicken strips found in chicken bakes are the same chicken strips used in the chicken salads. In Spain it's called Páginas Amarillas, distributed by Telefónica Publicidad e Información, S.A.

The company has added other types of food, such as pizza, chicken bakes, chicken salad, smoothies, churros, pretzels and ice cream. In December 2005 the Norwegian Supreme Court decided that Findexa holds an exclusive right to the trademark. The hot dogs used are kosher and the brands used are Sinai Kosher or Hebrew National. Yellow Pages) which is a registered trademark belonging to Findexa, which is owned by Eniro. As a matter of fact, the price of the hot dog and soda is still the same price as it was when they first opened, $1.50, a price Jim Sinegal has stated will remain indefinitely. In Norway the directory is called "Gule Sider" (i.e. These began as stand-alone impromptu arrangements outside of warehouses but are now built directly into current warehouses as actual mini-restaurants. The company Xybertek Systems provides additional business information on all Nigerian companies.

Finally, Costco is well known for its hot dog stands. In Nigeria, the Nigerian Yellow Pages is produced as internet-based yellow pages in English language by the company Xybertek Systems. Even the membership fee is fully refundable at any time. In Netherlands the equivalent directory is titled Gouden Gids; within the district concerned it is distributed free to each telephone subscriber. Computers, which most retailers loathe to accept for a refund, have a six-month return period. The Sección Amarilla is distributed yearly and free of charge by the homonimous company in association with Telmex; older issues are returned to the company, recycled, and used to print the latest issue. Buyers effectively "rent" the product temporarily by buying and later returning it for a refund. In Mexico the commercial phone directory is called Sección Amarilla (Yellow Section), while the personal phone directory is called Sección Blanca (White Section).

Many people take advantage of this with DVDs, software and other media. The phone book is updated regularly (typically every six months or a year) and is published in various editions (depending where the book is published). Unlike other stores, Costco allows returns of opened media. The phone book consisted of white pages and yellow pages. Costco has a very generous product return policy that allows customers to return most products indefinitely. Infomedia Nusantara (one of its subsidiaries), regularly publishes phone books. They have also introduced an automobile purchasing program where members can purchase new cars at specially arranged prices. In Indonesia, the telecommunication company TELKOM with PT.

Costco also acts as a broker for services such as investment products and travel including air travel and cruise vacations. In Germany a directory titled Die Gelben Seiten is distributed free to each subscriber, by the Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile. Some locations have liquor stores which are usually separate in order to comply with liquor license restrictions. In Finland the directory is called Keltaiset sivut. Many stores have tire garages, pharmacies,Hearing Aid Centers, optometrists, photo processing and gas stations. In Denmark the equivalent directory is titled De Gule Sider is distributed free to each subscriber, by TDC Forlag. It now sells many other products that are more difficult to handle, such as fresh produce, meat, seafood, fresh baked goods, flowers, clothing, books, software, home electronics, jewelry, art and furniture. In Colombia, the standard yellow and White Pages are published and distributed every year free of charge by Publicar, a Colombian subsidiary company of Carvajal, which also publishes and distributes yellow and white pages in other Latin American countries.

Initially it preferred to sell only boxed products that could be dispensed by simply tearing the shrinkwrap off a pallet. By early 2005, there were a number of independent local and international yellow pages operators in numerous cities including Yilong Huangbaoshu, based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province with operations in Hangzhou and Ningbo. Over the years, Costco has gradually expanded its range of products and services. Later, another mainly state-owned telecom operator, China Netcom began to produce, either directly or on a sub-contracted basis, yellow pages in selected cities around the country. Sinegal in 2004, saying "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder." Sinegal counters that good wages and benefits more than pay for themselves by holding down employee turnover, reducing employee theft and by appealing to a certain percentage of affluent customers who appreciate that the low prices do not come at the workers' expense. In China, the modern yellow pages industry was started in the late 1990’s with the formation of two international joint ventures between US yellow pages publishers and China’s telecom operators, namely: a joint venture started in Shenzhen between RHDonnelley and China Unicom (later including Hong Kong’s PCCW and InfoSpace); and a joint venture between China Telecom Shanghai and what later came to be known as the yellow pages operations of Verizon Communications Corp.(NYSE:VZ). Wall Street analyst Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank criticized Mr. In Czech Republic and Slovakia the equivalent directory is titled Zlaté stránky and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber.

A recent estimate (New York Times, July 17, 2005) puts Costco's average pay at $17 per hour, or 42% higher than Walmart-owned "Sam's Club". Competitive local directories often include commercial directories on yellow paper, but cannot use the Yellow Pages brand. These perks are the highest in the industry and especially surprising considering Costco's price-centric sales strategy (similar to Wal-Mart's, a company criticized for its low pay and refusal to offer benefits to most employees). Other ILECs such as MTS and SaskTel publish their own directories and use the Yellow Pages name under licence. For instance, a cashier with four years of experience can earn more than $40,000 with full benefits, including medical, dental, Rx, disability, and life, and is even entitled to participate in a 401k program and purchase stock options. Yellow Pages Group is the market leader in print and online commercial directories and one of the largest media companies in Canada, producing the official directories of Bell Canada, Telus and Aliant. Costco is noted for providing full benefits and comparatively generous compensation to its employees. It produces and distributes directories in both English and French.

This use of float is a major advantage in its own right; Costco is essentially borrowing money from their suppliers with no interest. In Canada the company Yellow Pages Group owns the trademarks Yellow Pages and Pages Jaunes. Since Costco has such high sales volume and rapid inventory turnover, it is able to receive cash from the sale of a large portion of its inventory before it has to pay back its suppliers. In Belgium the equivalent directory is titled Pages d'Or (French) or Gouden Gids (Dutch), and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber. This encourages consumers to regularly visit their local warehouse for surprise deals. In (The Republic of) Ireland the equivalent directory is titled Golden Pages while in Northern Ireland it is "yellow pages". In many other categories the company constantly seeks the best deals currently available, so products will appear and disappear over short periods of time. More competition is expected in November 2005 from the libralisation of "12", the former unique "4-1-1" number of Renseignements Telephoniques, french for Directory Inquiry.

In some product categories, the company does not rotate products often, so customers can expect certain brands of snacks or beverages to be in stock indefinitely. Another French editor of Yellow Pages is Bottin. Many of the products it stocks are high quality at a reasonable cost instead of inferior quality at a low price. Since the liberalization of .fr domains in May 2004, the domain yellowpages.fr has been registered by Phonebook of the World.com. Costco concentrates more on overall value than the lowest possible price for its product range. Vivendi Universal moved to enter the French Yellow Pages market in 2001 with scoot.fr, but the attempt was a killed by a reorganisation of the struggling company. Rather, stores carry only a few very popular product categories and selected products within each category. Previously, many former state monopoly telecom companies outside the US had tried to ban competition by claiming the term "yellow pages", or the translation of "yellow pages" into the vernacular, as their exclusive trademark.

Unlike many retailers, stores do not maintain a full range of every product type and every major brand within each product category. This court decision defended by the Parisian Lawyer, Andre Bertrand, was path-setting for the whole European Yellow Pages industry, as it decided that the phrase "Yellow Pages" cannot be considered the property of a single company. Besides frugality, Costco is also famous for its idiosyncratic inventory practices. pagesjaunes.com, the .com version of Pages Jaunes, was the issue of a major court case at WIPO; the original registrant, an individual from Los Angeles, won against France Télécom. Costco caps its profit margin on most products at 14% and allows itself slightly higher margins only on its Kirkland Signature store brand (a name derived from its previous headquarters in Kirkland) with a strict 15% profit limit. They are distributed free by Pagesjaunes.fr, a company affiliated with France Télécom. This contrasts with other retailers who take the additional trouble to break down pallets and stock individual products on shelves. In France Yellow Pages are referred to as Pages Jaunes.

Most products are delivered to the store on shipping pallets, and the pallets are used to display products for sale on the retail floor. The most famous of these immortalised the phrase 'Not happy, Jan!' in the Australian vernacular. The company's warehouses are sparsely decorated, with the exception of colorful marketing banners. The Yellow Pages have for many years produced some of Australia's most popular television commercials, often highlighting the perils of not placing an advertisement in the directory on time. The corporate jet is not used unless it is filled to capacity. Today, the Yellow Pages is produced by Sensis, a wholly-owned advertising subsidiary of Telstra. Costco doesn't have a public relations department either, believing it is unnecessary. The directory was originally produced by the Postmaster General, and continued to be produced by the government, as the telephone system transferred to Telecom Australia and now Telstra.

In fact, many senior executives, including Costco's CEO, use office furniture that was purchased from the Boeing Company when Costco was started. Australia's business directory was first published in its own volume in 1973 as the Yellow Pages. Costco is able to charge sometimes astonishingly low prices by keeping overhead low, returning savings to consumers. After the one year "no competition" clause expired BT too went into competition with the Yellow Pages, re-entering the market by adding similar content to their existing "The Phone Book", adding a classified section to the traditional alphabetical domestic and business listings. Purchases made with gift cards, called Costco cash also do not require a membership. Yell was bought by venture capitalists in 2001, and in 2003 was floated on the Stock Exchange. Purchases made at Costco's website do not require a membership, however a 5% surcharge is added to purchases made by non-members. In the mid-1990s the Yellow Pages business was re-branded as Yell, although the directory itself continued to be known as the Yellow Pages.

Memberships must be purchased in advance; the cheapest membership costs $45 for one year. In 1984, the year that BT was privatized, the department producing the directory became a stand alone subsidiary of BT, named Yellow Pages. The food court where one can purchase fast food items such as hot dogs and pizza is open to both members and non-members. At the same time, The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Directories Ltd, and began to publish the Thomson Local directory, which would remain the Yellow Pages' main, and often sole, competitor in the UK for more than the next two decades, and would be the competitive driving force behind such changes to Yellow Pages as the adoption (in 1999) of colour printing and "knock-out-white" listings. As a warehouse club, Costco is open to only members and their guests, except for purchases of liquor, gasoline and prescription drugs in some US states due to state law and liquor license restrictions. The Yellow Pages directory continued to be distributed to all telephone subscribers by BT. These goods are usually bulk-packaged and sold primarily to large families, small businesses and small business owners' families. Thomson Yellow Pages was sold by The Thomson Corporation in 1980, at the same time as Post Office Telecommunications became the (then) state-owned British Telecom (BT).

Costco's success is a result of its focus on selling products at low prices, often at very high volume. The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Yellow Pages in 1966 to publish and to distribute the directory to telephone subscribers for the GPO, and later for The Post Office. As of 2005, Sinegal and Brotman act as Chief Executive Officer and President and Chairman, respectively. With the encouragement of The Thomson Corporation, at the time an advertising sales agent for the nationalised General Post Office's telephone directory, a business telephone number directory named the Yellow Pages was first produced in 1966 by the GPO for the Brighton area, and was rolled out nationwide in 1973. Costco's closest competitor, Wal-Mart-owned Sam's Club, has two hundred more stores than Costco, yet routinely earns more than $1 billion less in revenues each year. Los Angeles telephone users can select from telephone directories published by SBC, Verizon, and several independent advertising companies. Costco employs about 103,000 full- and part-time employees, and for fiscal year 2004, ended in August, the company's store sales rose 13% to $47.1 billion. For example, SBC Communications is the dominant local telephone service provider in California, but since Verizon acquired GTE, it now provides service in many pockets such as West Los Angeles.

As of July 2005 Costco has 456 locations:. Others are telephone companies who provide local telephone service elsewhere. Costco has also changed the site of its corporate headquarters from the city of Kirkland, Washington, to Issaquah, Washington. Some of these publishers are pure advertising operations with no phone infrastructure. In 1997, PriceCostco changed its name back to Costco, under which the company currently operates. Since the Bell breakup, other companies publish directories that compete with those of local telephone companies for advertising business. Costco's web site was first introduced in 1995, and it started conducting e-commerce in 1998 at Costco.com. Then and since, phone companies or their agents sell the right to place advertisements within the same category, next to the basic listings.

In 1993, Costco and Price Club merged, forming "PriceCostco." The combined company had 206 locations generating $16 billion in annual sales and created the company's current structure. Directories were published on behalf of the component Bell companies by the various publishing companies. This new venture proved very successful; Costco became the first company ever to grow from zero to $3 billion in sales in less than six years. At least until the anti-trust breakup of the Bell System in the late 20th century, the term "Yellow Pages" was a trademark for commercial directories and the commercial portions of the by-commercial-category sections of directories that also include by-name listings. Its unique model of serving primarily small-business owners proved very successful, prompting James Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman to open the first Costco warehouse location in Seattle. In 2004, the search engine A9.com added a similar feature for many cities in the United States when it launched its Yellow Pages feature. Costco's first location, opened in 1976 under the "Price Club" name, was housed in a Quonset hut in San Diego. Thus, French Yellow Pages users can see a photograph of a business along with its phone number and street address.

. In 1999, a new tactic was pioneered by France Télécom's Pages Jaunes, which dispatched photographers to record nearly every possible view in front of nearly every address in certain French cities. Costco Wholesale Corporation NASDAQ: COST is the largest membership warehouse club chain in the world, and headquartered in Issaquah, Washington, United States, with its flagship warehouse #1 in nearby Seattle. The information contained in the Yellow Pages is essentially a commodity, so publishers often engage in product differentiation tactics like bragging that their listings are more comprehensive or up-to-date. 4 in Taiwan. Many publishers now make their listings available on the World Wide Web, on "Yellow Pages" Web sites. 5 in Japan, and. When an advertisement is printed with a white background, its part of the page does not receive yellow ink - so the white is actually the natural color of the paper.

5 in South Korea,. Interestingly, most yellow pages are not printed on yellow paper; rather the yellow is printed onto the paper. 16 in the United Kingdom (1 additional store opening soon),. Many publishers also offer the option to have advertisements appear with a white background to make them stand out more. 25 in Mexico,. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a trend among Yellow Pages publishers to add four-color printing for some advertisements. 65 in Canada,. Yellow Pages publishers make their profits by selling special value-added features to businesses such as a larger font size for their listing, or an advertisement box next to the listings in a category.

336 in the United States and Puerto Rico,. The majority of listings are in plain small black text. Yellow Pages directories are usually published annually and distributed for free to all residences and businesses within a given coverage area. . As the name suggests, they are usually printed on yellow paper.

In many countries, the Yellow Pages refers to a telephone directory for businesses organized by the category of product or service. URL accessed on February 15, 2005.. Yell: UK Operations. UK History: 1990-1999.

URL accessed on February 15, 2005.. Yell: UK Operations. UK History: 1980-1989. URL accessed on February 15, 2005..

ketupa.net media profiles. Thomson Group: chronology. URL accessed on February 15, 2005.. TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES & DIRECTORY ENQUIRIES UK 2004.

Thomson Directories.