In the first year it was open, Sol Price’s FedMart lost $750,000. By the time he died at 93, in 2009, Mr. Price had a net worth of $500 million.Credit...San Diego History Center
ソル・プライス氏が経営するフェドマートは、開店1年目で75万ドルの赤字でした。
2009年に93歳で亡くなるまでに、プライス氏の純資産は5億ドルに達しました。
Sol Price, born in 1916, was the son of garment （衣類）workers from Minsk, and belonged to the generation of displaced （故郷を離れた）Jews and other Europeans who thrived in New York’s small businesses — the delis, candy shops and pawnshops （質屋）of the Depression and postwar years. In the 1920s, the family moved to San Diego, where he went to high school.
After law school at the University of Southern California, Mr. Price started his career representing grocers （食糧雑貨商）and other merchants. With the temperament （気質）of a shopkeeper who obsesses（こだわる）over his customers andfusses over （気を配る）the smallest of details, in the 1950s Mr. Price began converting empty San Diego warehouses into members-only bazaars where for a small fee, shoppers could get everything from hosiery （靴下）to cigarettes at wholesale prices. The key to the business, called FedMart, was simple: keep members renewing year after year.
In 2003, Mr. Price described his philosophy to Fortune magazine as “How do we sell stuff at the lowest markup（利幅）?” Theoverriding（最も重要な）goal, he said, was “to look at everything from the standpoint of, is it really being honest with the customer?”
Mr. Price had a gift for connecting with shoppers at a time of exploding prosperity and social change, but paradoxically（逆説的に）, one of his rules was not making too much money.
“He grew up in a family of socialists. He was a capitalist. He liked to make money, but he was pro-union, pro-labor, pro-little guy,” said David Schwartz, who co-wrote “The Joy of Costco” with his wife, Susan. “Everything was about trust. He would rather lose your business than your trust.”
Through a series of mergers （合併）over the years, Sol Price’s FedMart became what we know as Costco in the 1990s. To an uncanny （尋常ではない）degree for a modern corporation, the company, nowheadquartered（本社を置いた） in Issaquah, Wash(ワシントン州イサクア)., has remained true to Mr. Price’s vision. It is still relationship-minded, and members seem satisfied, renewing at a rate of 93 percent. Last quarter, the membership fees accounted for $1.12 billion, about two-thirds of Costco’s $1.68 billion total net income. The dependence, in other words, remains mutual (相互関係のある）.
Wall Street also likes what Costco does, especially thedependable （信頼できる） cash flow that comes from membership. Occasionally, shareholders feel neglected （放っておかれている）— in 2004, an analyst with Deutsche Bank complained that Costco was “overly generous（寛大過ぎる）” with its employee benefits, saying, “Public companies need to care for shareholders （株主） first.” But few complain about the returns.
“I did the calculation once,” Mr. Schwartz said. “The stock price has grown 17 percent annually since the founding.”
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