From cubicle to corporate icon, Costco finance chief ends 40-year run

livemint.com:

On a recent overcast Wednesday, Richard Galanti was at his cubicle by 8 a.m., as usual. What was unusual: It was his first week not being Costco Wholesale’s finance chief, a job he held for nearly four decades as the longest-serving CFO of a major U.S. public company.

The 68-year-old former finance chief influenced how Costco appealed to shoppers. Its members will find hardly any frills in the retailer’s warehouses and significantly fewer items—just 3,800 unique products—on the shelves compared with other large stores. Yet shoppers flock to Costco for everything from its popular Kirkland Signature shirts to diamond rings, the viral chocolate-peanut butter pie and occasionally gold bars.

During a recent visit in March to the wholesale retailer’s Issaquah, Wash., headquarters, Galanti, dressed in his standard Kirkland Signature dress shirt with a navy blue sweater and navy slacks, spoke of how the company’s uncomplicated model keeps customers coming back for more. The retail giant maintains a limited range of products but ensures they are of good quality, sometimes eclectic, and reasonably priced. “We keep things simple," Galanti said, referring to the company’s core tenets.

This philosophy permeates the company, from its workspaces to product selection, and is part of the secret behind Costco’s roughly 10% growth for 30 successive years. The retailer’s own brand, Kirkland Signature, alone does more than $50 billion in revenue annually, just shy of what global brands such as Nike brought in in the latest fiscal year. Galanti was named CFO of Costco at 28, nearly two decades below the average hiring age for finance chiefs among S&P 500 and Fortune 500 companies, according to executive-search firm Crist Kolder Associates.