2026-08-19
17 分钟That's the voice of Tony Barzar, at work as a cashier at Costco.
Tony is 60, and he's been working at one particular Costco store in Tucson, Arizona, for 40 years.
He started working there in the 1980s.
He started at Costco really almost as a kid.
At first, you know, he was pushing carts in the parking lot.
A few years later, Tony became a cashier, and he's been doing that ever since.
In retail, it's incredibly rare for workers
like Tony to stick with the same job and the same company for such a long time.
But our colleague Sarah Nassauer says that at Costco,
there are thousands of employees like him who've been working at the company for years and years.
So she went to Tucson to meet Tony and to find out why he stayed.
Over the course of those four decades, even though he hasn't been promoted, right, he's not a manager.
He's remained, you know, a rank and file hourly employee.
He has earned over a million dollars in his 401k account.
He has really good health insurance.
He earns about $3 an hour.
And for him, it has felt like a really gratifying career.
Part of why that was interesting to us is because that doesn't happen
that often at American companies or companies in general these days.
The conventional wisdom in much of corporate America is that labor is an expense that's best kept as low as possible.