There is an orthodox view in American business that a cashier is a disposable input, a peg on the scheduling board—plug in, pull out, replace—and that paying them enough to retire comfortably would bankrupt the company. Tony Barzar just broke the orthodoxy by cashing out a million-dollar 401(k) after forty years of scanning bulk cookies for Costco. He makes nearly thirty-three dollars an hour. His co-pay for a specialist visit is twenty-five bucks. He declined a promotion to supervisor because he prefers the register. Sarah Nassauer at the Wall Street Journal treats him as evidence that Costco is a model employer—which it is. The piece is also evidence of something she almost asks and doesn’t quite answer: that the cost of treating a worker like a human being isn’t the obstacle. The obstacle is that most American workers don’t get to be Tony Barzar.
I will concede that retail is a brutally thin-margin business, and that not every employer is Costco. Independent grocers operate on margins of 1 to 2 percent, which doesn’t leave room for the kind of benefits a Fortune 500 giant can spread across hundreds of thousands of workers. Telling the average corner store to act like Costco is asking it to be a different company. But the claim that the industry standard of hiring, burning out, and replacing is an economic necessity, rather than a choice, is the half-truth.
Let me start with the receipts, because they earn the argument. The omitted cost on the standard retail ledger is the ten thousand dollars it takes to replace a burned-out worker, plus the invisible tax of miserable service that makes consumers want to hurl their carts into the sun. McKinsey’s 2023 study of online reviews across more than 100 retailers found that the top quarter of employee-satisfaction scores were more than twice as likely to land in the top quarter of customer-satisfaction scores. Costco’s turnover after one year is about 7 percent, a fraction of industry averages, while its stock has climbed roughly 2,000 percent since 2008. The rest of the industry isn’t trapped by the laws of physics. It is trapped by a specific model of extraction, one that pushes the cost of doing business onto the nervous systems of its workers.
When you pay people enough to stay, you do not just buy their time; you buy their attention, their memory, and their grace. You get a worker who knows how to walk a confused shopper to member services to refund a double-scanned cookie. You get a mentor who trains the new kid without needing a title. The fastest experienced cashiers ring up roughly seventy shoppers an hour; the store average is fifty-seven. That gap is not magic. It is the compound interest of keeping someone at the same register for decades.
This is what happens when a company decides to keep its people. It isn’t magic. It’s a budget.
But here is what treating Barzar’s life as a story about a great employer obscures. His healthcare covered his wife’s three brain surgeries because he happened to work at Costco for thirty-nine years and was still on the plan when she got sick. A grocery worker with the same history at a different employer would have hit a network exclusion or a prior-authorization delay. The fact that Barzar didn’t experience any of these isn’t a feature of American healthcare. It’s a feature of working at Costco.
His 401(k) crossed a million dollars because Costco matched contributions, the market cooperated for four decades, and he stayed at one employer. A worker who switched jobs to care for a parent or follow a partner would have started over. The fact that Barzar’s savings held isn’t a feature of American retirement security. It’s a feature of not having moved.
His paid leave covered almost a year when his son-in-law died and his wife got cancer. A worker at a smaller employer would have run out of leave, lost their job, lost their insurance, and joined the population of Americans who can’t afford to be sick. The fact that Barzar didn’t experience any of this isn’t a feature of American labor law. It’s a feature of working for a giant with a generous mood.
You see the pattern. Every one of Barzar’s safety nets was an employer benefit, not a public right. He was lucky. He was lucky in the most American way possible: he got what every other rich country guarantees, but he got it as a perk.
The structural-cost objection to the high-road model doesn’t defeat the welfare-state case; it makes it. The argument for a public floor isn’t that every private employer becomes Costco. It’s that the floor exists regardless of which private employer you’ve got.
The Nordic countries pay for healthcare out of general taxation. Paid leave is a statutory right, not an employer gift. Denmark layers this with “flexicurity”—easy hiring and firing paired with generous unemployment replacement and aggressive retraining, so employers aren’t punished for letting workers go and workers aren’t punished for losing their job. Germany has co-determination, with workers shaping capital allocation from inside the boardroom. Mondragon, the Basque cooperative federation, employs 70,000 people and pays its top executive roughly five times what it pays its lowest-paid worker. American CEOs make roughly 280 times as much. Two markets, two numbers. The ratio is a choice.
What if the floor didn’t depend on the employer’s mood? What if healthcare, paid leave, retirement security, and a wage you can live on were guaranteed by law, by collective bargaining, or by the structure of ownership? That’s not socialism. That’s what every other developed economy has figured out. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit is the closest America has come in my lifetime; child poverty fell by 46 percent in a single year, lifting 2.9 million kids out of poverty, and then we let it lapse and watched it bounce right back. We ran a controlled experiment on ourselves.
Costco proves the math. A ruthless machine is just a machine built by someone who decided not to weld the trap doors shut. Barzar could retire tomorrow. He stays because the work was built to be worth staying for.
There are roughly 16 million retail workers in the United States. A small fraction of them work at Costco. The rest depend on whichever employer will have them, for whatever wage that employer decides to pay, with whatever benefits that employer decides to offer, for as long as the employer decides to keep them. That’s not a welfare state. That’s a lottery—and most of the tickets are blank, and Barzar’s the one who got to keep his.