GeekMBA360

I’m a happy customer of this retailer. In fact, I’m very proud of them. 🙂

We had several severe snow storms for a week until Christmas day. The entire city was paralyzed. In fact, we couldn’t do any Christmas shopping until the afternoon of December 24, 2008 (Christmas eve) when snow finally took a break.

We visited several shopping plazas. All of their parking lots except one were a mix of snow and ice. It’s quite an adventure to navigate the parking lots on thin ice. 🙂

To our surprise and delight, when we drove to Costco, the entire parking lot has been cleaned — on the drive ways, there was absolutely NO snow. It was incredible given how much snow we’ve been getting and how messy other parking lots were.

At the door, I asked the "Front End" checker:

"It’s pretty impressive that you guys cleaned up all of the snows on the parking lot".

"Oh, it has been like this for the past few days".

"Wow. Who did it? It must take a lot of effort."

"Yeah. We had a lot of people spending a lot time to clean it up. It was a lot of effort".

As the checker was talking to me, she pushed a shopping cart to me — they had manually cleaned and dried the cart handles for customers.

No matter how big or small your business is, I think you can learn something from this story and Costco. Their focus on customer is amazing, and they went out of their way to make shopping easier for their customers. In this economy, to stay competitive, it’s absolutely crucial for companies to focus on customers. Costco just set a great example.

It’s not about having fancy PRs; it’s about spending the time and effort to really help customers. I’ve no doubt Costco will survive the current economic downturn and come out stronger — they’re a winner because they care about their customers.