My employees blow it and I help them to get better at customer service. If they don’t get better over time, then they move on.

I am an operations manager and own a business, have a family, go to school, etc… As much as I would like to respond to everyone as the owner of my company, it is unrealistic to do so. I have to trust others to do so and, like we have seen in many posts above, people fail. My employees blow and I train them and they get better. If not, they move on. Unfortunately, some managers become managers with very few skills, especially in a big company. It is disappointing they didn’t respond at all to Andy’s letter with at least thanks for the observation and suggestion. A simple response goes a long way to keep customers and I would have to say it is probably the exception at Costco, not the rule, since they had over 58 million members in fiscal 2010 (Costco Audit, 2010).

Whether people agree or not, Costo is a decent company in the sea of corporate America. I have done a lot of research on Costco and written several papers on their business strategy. Public record supports the fact (not emotion) that Senegal cares about his employees overall, even though he can never please them all. When you stack up their track record against the competition, they compensate their employees well; yet, senior leaders have comparably lower compensation packages than the industry standard. This is by Jim’s own choice even though he started the company and could demand more. The average stock crew member appears to make over 40K per year plus excellent benefits. You will be hard to beat that for comparable jobs elsewhere. Costco also caps their profit margins at 14-15% across the board; whereas the average retailer is 20-50% (Thompson, Strickland, & Gamble, 2010).

I will forward my suggestion to corporate anyway and hope they will consider it even though I am not a member. I like their business model and strategy and would like to see them continue their success at providing family-wage jobs in our country and abroad.

References
Costco Audit. (2010, August 30). Retrieved October 22, 2011, from Gale Database (DC321146): http://galenet.galegroup.com.www.library.oit.edu:2048/servlet/BCRC?rsic=PK&rcp=CO&vrsn=unknown&locID=s8375154&srchtp=cmp&cc=1&c=1&SW=1&mode=c&ste=60&tab=1&tbst=tsCM&ccmp=Costco+Wholesale+Corp.&tcp=costco&docNum=DC321146&bConts=1
Thompson, J. A., Strickland, I. A., & Gamble, J. E. (2010). Crafting and executing strategy. New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

More and more, I’m working on responsive sites with fluid widths. So during development I’ll temporarily center and set the width of the site to match the static mockup. Something like:
body { width: 972px; margin: 0 auto; }

so 3 years have passed since this post, I wanted to ask what your preferred method is these days? Are you still using this technique? I’d appreciate your reply.

Greets,