tl;dr: Costco's success—10%+ annual revenue growth, 90% membership renewal, 6% employee turnover—comes from doing the opposite of Amazon: limited SKUs (4,000 vs. Walmart's 130,000), no fancy automation, pallet-based cross-docking, and customers handling last-mile delivery themselves. This simplicity yields lower overhead (10% of sales vs. Amazon's 40% delivery costs), better supplier relationships, and higher wages. The author argues Costco offers a more socially efficient blueprint for goods distribution than Amazon's logistically complex model, and suggests NYC's proposed public grocery stores under Mamdani should adopt Costco's low-SKU, high-volume approach rather than aiming for one store per borough.