In our next part of the lesson, you'll find out about a Seattle area company called Costco. Costco is a membership warehouse store. You might have heard of it or even shopped there. If you have, you'll know that at Costco stores, you can buy products in bulk, often at low prices. There may also be similar stores where you live. In course one of the specialization, you learn some vocabulary to describe companies. This will give you a chance to review what you learned. You'll then hear an interview with a Costco employee talking about real-life experiences of meetings in a US business. Before we listen to the interview, let's find out about Costco. Read the following questions and then read the text to find the answers. What kind of business is Costco involved in? Comes the first Costco opened. In how many countries is Costco found? What is Costco's business model? How successful is the company?

Costco is a familiar name in the US retail industry. You can find Costco stores in and around many major cities in the US, as well as a number of other countries. Good Costco is no ordinary store. When people shop at Costco, they will have a very different experience. A Costco store is a huge warehouse, and to shop at Costco you must be a member and show your membership card before you can enter. We call Costco a membership warehouse club, and since it opened its first warehouse in Seattle in 1983, it has become the biggest membership warehouse club in the United States, and the third biggest retailer in the world. Costco has over 650 warehouses in nine different countries, although the majority of warehouses are in the US. Costco headquarters are in Issaquah just outside of Seattle.

Costco has a simple business model, reduce overhead costs, and sell quality goods at cheaper prices to consumers. Most Costco warehouses are located just outside the city limits, where real estate prices are cheaper. Costco also saves money by buying in large volumes directly for manufacturers instead of distributors. By buying in volume, it can get a discount, which it passes on in lower prices to consumers. Costs are shipped to the warehouses, and directly placed on the floor of the warehouse. Many products at Costco are sold in big sizes, especially everyday household items. Costco does not spend a lot of money on creating displays, making the stores attractive, or marketing, again saving money. Finally, people also have to pay an annual membership fee, so it can sell products at close to break even.

Compared to other super stores, there are actually fewer products in a Costco warehouse. Costco chooses only certain products to sell at a time. A product may be available one week and gone the next. This again helps reduce the amount Costco has to spend on storage and tracking how much of a product they have left. Costco also has started carrying its own brand of products, usually significantly cheaper than equivalent name brand products. Costco has expanded into online shopping, insurance, car sales, and travel, and the company continues to grow. For financial year 2015, Costco reported total sales of over 100 billion.

Now listen to a Costco employee talk about meetings. Today we are speaking with Ron Hanstein from the Warehouse Retailer and Costco about business meetings. So welcome Ron, and thank you for speaking with us today by a Skype. You're welcome. First, could you describe your job at Costco? I'm a general manager with one of the Costco's. There is 698 Costco's throughout the world, and a general manager is accountable for the entire operation of the entire building. An average Costco will have around 216 employees, about 18 to 20 sourcing managers and then 20 to 30 hourly supervisors. A general manager is accountable to protect and come to the assets and ensure the safety for the employees and the members and the buck really stops with the warehouse manager.

Everything is good. You get the act of late, something isn't so good. You hear about it, so it's a buck stops at the gym. And how long have you worked at Costco? I've been there 29 years, 28 of the 29 years, I was a general manager. About six different locations. And about meetings, how many meetings do you have in a typical day or a typical week? Well, we have throughout a typical week we will have, you know, 5 to 6 feet to, you know, depending on the needs and the different structure that we're supposed to do, that there's one formal meeting every Monday. And that's where the entire staff needs and then I have two assistant general managers and they respectively be with their areas of accountability throughout the week. So in a typical week, it will be around 5 to 6 and then it confiscates, you know, new training that's coming along, changing to the employee agreement, book safety meetings, half-man meetings.

Do you ever organize or run a meeting? Yes, as a general manager, I'm accountable to organize and run all the meetings. However, the managers are there coming up through the ranks. They are the future of the company. So we want them to participate in the meetings and set them up. We have a formal meeting every week as a power point, every manager has to talk about their sales, their new items and the people issues and the needs for their particular departments and they put the slides up and do a presentation so we want to look down and teach them. My focus in the meeting is to keep all my managers on course and tasks of what the corporate office expects of us when they have their meeting.

Okay. And how do you set up a meeting? Where we set it up and through the information that's disseminated from my bosses, from the visual bosses, vice presidents and from our corporate office or corporate office, meets once a month where our president and she thinks I can have a officer vice and all of his key executives from all over the world. They can do it on a format like a telecom participant. We do it because our president wants to have the synergies of all of the people that run the company in the same room in the same day. And so they can interact with each other. And that information that comes out from those meetings has handed down to the different regions throughout the world and then we go back to the point. So we base a lot of our content and our meetings from what we get from our corporate office.

What do you think are the keys to a successful meeting? The keys to a successful meeting are to keep the people engaged and that they fill the passion for the business, the same passion that I am as a general manager at my assistant GMs to make the meetings fun and enlightening and to keep them on track usually at a formal meeting on Monday will be an hour to an hour and a half. So we want to keep the meeting flowing, keep the people entertained and that make sure that after the meeting that they go back to their individual employees they disseminate the information from the staff meetings and the weekly meetings to their employees which is critical because if we don't do that the meeting will not be effective at all.

Do you ever have meetings with international partners and if so are there any particular challenges? Just internationally my exposure to the Los Angeles region in Southern California is I am very minimal. We all the managers throughout the world meet formally and see how I want to hear for a conference. I just get to interact with them there but things that would have been internationally that are pertinent to other regions in the world are passed through us again through our corporate office. So my personal involvement is a general manager's pretty minimal with the other.

Are there any differences with how Costco runs and organizes meetings to other companies that you know? Yes, they are very efficient and very hands on. Costco keeps itself very lean. Keeps our administrative costs low compared to other companies that I have worked for. You get too hung up on too much bureaucracy and you are not really able to function. Costco keeps things engaging and very efficient and very simple right to the point.

If you could change one thing about how a meeting is run, what would it be? Well, I have been keeping it simple and keeping in our core values in fact and maintaining our culture I think is the biggest challenge for any company no matter how big or small they are. And so I don't really see the need for any changes in them and keep the focus on keeping our core values and what our culture is and pass that on to the new younger managers that are coming up because they are the future of becoming events and keep things again simple and very streamlined and very efficient as we do so we can keep reducing prices and cost of that's what Costco all of ours is making things simple and cheap ones. So am I right? You like meetings? I like meetings if we keep them up to task and keep the people to fill again full faster for the business and keep the employees engaged as what is going on and again when I mentioned earlier very importantly that managers and the supervisors pass on that information because if we don't do that, the meetings are really always in time. Well, thank you Ron. You've answered some great questions and thank you very much for joining us. You're welcome.