The Weekly Minute - October 29, 2023
First of all, Fall Golf up in Michigan is spectacular.
Period.
What I Read This Week
Costco's $9B clothes business, explained (via Trung Phan)
While Costco’s clothes business may only account for 4% of the retailer’s total sales ($223B), it still compares favorably to other clothes retailers:
Gap ($16B)
Costco Apparel ($9B)
Lululemon ($8B)
Ralph Lauren ($6B)
Levi Strauss & Co ($6B)
American Eagle Outfitters ($5B)
“As with all things at Costco,” Phan points out in the post, “the retailer keeps its margins very low in order to drive turnover as it derives most its profit from the annual membership (~70% of its $6B net profit comes from membership fees).”
“While speaking with MIT students in the early 2010s, former Costco CEO James Sinegal explained how Costco once negotiated a big discount on Calvin Klein jeans and why the retailer didn’t keep the extra margin.” - Phan
“We pass the savings on to the customer, every time,” Sinegal said. “Do you know how tempting it is to make another $7 on a pair? But once you do it, it’s like taking heroin. You can’t stop.”
A Thought about Patient Experience
The hotel industry has always been cognizant of a certain staggered goal: satisfying guests as a minimum and exceeding their expectations as the goal. And they have devoted decades of effort and resources toward improving their products and management structures to keep the experience at a high-level.
The foremost priority of the healthcare industry is, and always should be, to improve patient health — but patient comfort and wellbeing should not be neglected along the way.
What I Watched
In 2009, Lin-Manuel Miranda was invited to perform at the White House. He explained that he'd been working on a “concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop...Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.”
In 2009, Lin-Manuel Miranda was invited to perform at the White House.
— Billy Oppenheimer (@bpoppenheimer) October 3, 2023
His musical “In The Heights” had just won a Grammy & 4 Tony Awards.
So the White House expected him to perform something from Heights.
Instead, he debuted a song from a hip-hop concept he’d been working on:… pic.twitter.com/o48B9HEHft
A Tweet About Brand and Healthcare
💥 Brand is the biggest moat for healthcare companies serving health systems.
— Joshua Liu (@joshuapliu) October 25, 2023
I really believe this now, but I never considered it for the longest time.
You learn about “moats” when your startup is raising capital. Investors fixate on it.
A moat is a set of competitive… pic.twitter.com/VsmT6VkqWd
