Our attitude has always been that if you hire good people and provide good wages and good jobs and more than that - if you provide careers - that good things will happen to your company. I think we can say that that has been proved by the quality of people that we have and how they have built our organization.

I say at our management conferences that the amount Wal-Mart grows in just one year is the equivalent of Costco's size.

We've always been in favor of improved wages for workers. When you have a strong middle class, they want to buy more stuff at Costco.

It doesn't do much good to have a quality image, whether it's with the facility or whether it's with the merchandise, if you don't have real quality people taking care of your customers.

Driving stock up from one day to the next is not what we are about. We are about building a good company and performing for the long term. I know everyone says that, that sounds trite when I repeat it that way, but that is and has always been our attitude about our business. If we do the right things, the stock price will take care of itself, and our shareholders will be rewarded.

Technology helps us become more efficient and productive but our business still has a lot of art as opposed to strictly science.

You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.