American Express Co. and Costco Wholesale Corp. are ending their 16-year relationship, a surprise move that pummeled AmEx’s stock price and will trigger a major upheaval in the card industry. The unusual partnership, in which Costco exclusively accepted AmEx cards, had driven a significant chunk of business to the New York card company. In addition, AmEx and Costco issued a credit card together that could also be used at other...I was recently on one of my quarterly trips to Las Vegas when I decided I would hit up the Las Vegas Costco Business Center. I had been there once before, but I didn’t take any pictures so I made a special trip just for the BulkTraveler readers out there. For those unfamiliar, here is a little background on what a Costco Business Center is. If you think Costco already sells in bulk, you haven’t seen anything yet. The Business Center is there to cater to the small businesses and mega businesses. They deal with many of the Casinos on the strip. The business can write down what they need purchased, fax the purchase order over, and Costco will even deliver it to your place of business.

You always hear people saying, “I don’t need 50 pounds of onions.” Even though at a regular Costco the bag is only I believe 10 pounds, the onions here really do come in a 50 pound bag.Anybody that holds an active Costco membership can come and shop here. Don’t anticipate finding anything in small quantities though, everything, including the Cheese come in mega packs. Just ensure that you take a look at their store hours below, as they differ from those of a regular Costco. When you first approach the entrance, you will come upon one of my favorite signs that I have ever seen at a Costco. The first line starts “Thank You For.” Keeping your children with you at all time.” You would think that would always be a given when out shopping, but obviously not. If there is a sign, that means at one point someone had to really mess up to make it necessary. When you first walk in off to the right side, they have hundreds of business kitchen grade knives and utensils. As you make your way along the right side you will pass some variety pack red bull, soda bibs for your personal or business soda machine, and Costco branded copy paper.

The Costco Business Center doesn’t have a Service Deli, Food Court, Meat Department (only by the case meat), Tire Center, Pharmacy, Optical, Bakery, or One Hour Photo.In place of those departments they have a mega walk-in cooler where they even offer some nice winter jackets for you to wear if you wish to. In this cooler they have jumbo packs of cheese, butter, yogurt, etc. Where their bakery department would usually be, they have a section with tables of different brands of bread products and pastries. Whirlpool Refrigerator Ice Bucket StuckNone of the items in the room are made on location. Irish Doodle Puppies For Sale PaFor all of you out there that like cooking meat on a tick over an open fire, they sell a full frozen lamb. Salt Water Hot Tub Chlorinator

If I wasn’t flying home, maybe I would have brought one home as a gift for my parents. Well, maybe not, they would probably just look at my funny and then tell me to take it with me on my way out. When you make your way to the front of the Warehouse, they have a Print & Copy Center, where they will do all of your printing needs. They do flyers, posters, laminating, and basically anything a Copy Max or Kinko’s would do. I think the most appropriate way to end this post is to tell you that my favorite candy is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I think I started liking them so much because they are my dad’s favorite, so I was always exposed to them growing up. Anyways, this really shows you what the Costco Business Center is all about; they have a massive display of everything Reese’s. That is what you will find for everything at the Costco Business Center. They don’t just to have one type of Red Bull, they have 5 different types, and same goes for dairy products, and office supplies.

It is truly your one stop shop for everything business related.All right, boys and girls, it’s time to have some real talk about efficiency wages. I know, you’re older now. You’re starting to notice things that you never noticed before. Like the differences between Costco and Wal-Mart, differences that suddenly seem so ... intriguing. You suddenly want to explore those feelings, maybe post a few GIFs to Facebook. You hear other kids talking, and suddenly you wonder about this whole new world of labor relations that you never even knew existed. I want you to know that what you’re feeling is completely normal. Efficiency wages -- that’s the scientific term, and we’re going to use scientific terms, not that dirty talk about scabs and exploiters that you hear in the locker room -- are very exciting. It’s only natural that you want to explore. I said “explore,” not “exploit.” But you need to explore safely. You can’t just plunge straight into advocating a $15-an-hour minimum wage;

you need to know all the facts so you can make sound, educated decisions about your labor-policy activism. So let’s talk about efficiency wages and how they work. When an employer loves his workers ... Straight to the real talk. Have you heard the legend of Henry Ford’s $5-a-day wage, how he paid his workers enough to buy one of his cars, and thereby unleashed a wave of prosperity upon America, the likes of which the world had never seen? Here’s the truth about that $5 wage: Ford Motor Co. didn’t pay those wages so the workers could afford the cars, because mathematically, that could not possibly have been profitable even if employees actually spent every cent they earned on the product they made. Which they never do. Ford Motor Co. moved to a high wage because Ford Motor Co. had a turnover problem. Working on an assembly line is a fantastically awful job. Yes, I know it is fashionable to lament the decline of “good manufacturing jobs,” but what was good about those jobs was the steady, high wages.

Much of the work Ford offered was unbearably tedious -- tightening the same bolt, over and over, for the majority of your waking hours. It’s about as entertaining as watching paint dry, only with a foreman yelling at you to watch faster, dammit. If hell were designed by industrial engineers, this is what it would look like. Understandably, turnover was high. And turnover is expensive. You have to train a new person to tighten that bolt and get him used to the rhythm of the line. While he’s learning, he’s slower than other workers and more prone to accidents. The $5-a-day wage may have owed something to Ford’s rather, um, unique ideas about labor relations: It came with strings attached, including having the company’s Socialization Organization pry into your personal life. But mostly, it was about reducing turnover and thereby speeding up the line. This is what economists call an efficiency wage. Paying workers more than the going market rate for their skill level can bring a lot of benefits to your company.

You get lower turnover and, arguably, better on-the-job performance. This springs from four sources: As you can see, this concept is very exciting. But that excitement can get out of control; it frequently leads hot-blooded young progressives to conclude that if we just paid everyone more, all the companies would be more profitable! This is folk wisdom akin to believing that everyone should buy a lottery ticket because your cousin won $1 million that day. Here’s what they are missing: Efficiency wages only work because the workers are getting more than they could make elsewhere. If everyone was paying the same wages, all the benefits to the employer would disappear. To see what I mean, imagine if we could go back to 1913, the year before the $5-a-day revolution, and we offer those workers a chance to work for $8.50 an hour at Wal-Mart, 40 hours a week. Adjusted for inflation, that would be a 25 percent raise, a shorter workweek, and instead of tightening a bolt for nine hours in a dark and dangerous auto plant, they’d get to spend their time walking around a nice, air-conditioned, well-lit store.

And the chance to buy health insurance! You might well be able to skim the cream of the crop from Ford’s workforce with such an offer. Those men might be so intensely grateful for the opportunity to be inside, in a comfortable climate-controlled environment, that they’d work their butts off to be employee of the year, every year. You would obviously not have the same impact if you made the same offer today. You’d get, well, the folks who are working for Wal-Mart right now. The point is not that Wal-Mart employees should be grateful for what they’re paid; the point is that an efficiency wage is determined by the overall wage level in the marketplace. A wage is generous or stingy not by some naturally ordained scale, but in comparison to your alternatives. That’s one reason why labor agreements in the 1950s through 1970s emphasized compensation arrangements -- such as pensions and seniority raises -- that made it costly to switch firms. Turnover was still a problem for manufacturers even when they were paying higher wages than ever, because some people just can’t hack the monotony of an assembly line.

So they gladly acquiesced to pay structures that rewarded longevity. Eventually all that back-loaded compensation became a huge problem for manufacturers, as their markets and their workforces shrank and their legacy costs rendered them uncompetitive. But at the time, it made sense, because with the general wage level high, they could no longer rely on the efficiency-wage effect to deliver a more reliable workforce. In other words: A strategy of paying efficiency wages to attract, and retain, a higher-quality labor force is by definition a business model that cannot be followed by everyone in the market. If all the employers of minimum-wage labor followed Costco’s lead and paid higher wages and benefits, Costco would be less profitable, because the quality of its labor force would revert to the mean. And Costco’s loss would not necessarily be a gain to any other employer; they’d be paying higher wages but still enjoying the same average workforce quality. Of course, they might attract better-skilled workers from other industries, which could raise productivity.

But that’s not a good progressive argument for efficiency wages, because what happens to the workers who used to have those jobs? When you’ve got some laudable goal in mind, it’s easy to forget that you really can have too much of a good thing. If the Kennedy tax cuts were a good idea, then we should just keep cutting to zero and really unleash some economic growth. If you liked an $8-an-hour minimum wage, why not $15? If it works for Costco, why not for every retailer in the country? Analysts end up acting like teenage boys with a can of Axe body spray: If some is good, more must be even better. But even good things have natural stopping points, and efficiency wages are one of them. Costco indeed shows that it is possible to pay wages like Costco's -- if you are running a Costco. It does not follow that every company could profitably do the same. In fact, it demonstrates that they couldn’t. Does that mean that you shouldn’t advocate for higher wages? you can make an argument that companies should pay higher wages, and just too bad for the shareholders and consumers who have to take a haircut.