Kabeer Dawani

A retailer with no advertising budget. Four thousand products on the shelf. A hot dog priced the same as it was when Reagan was president. Costco shouldn't be the most powerful brand in retail. But it is. The rule is almost annoyingly simple: cap markups at 14%. Most stores are at 20% or higher. Every dollar of efficiency gets handed back to the customer as a lower price. That's the flywheel. Lower prices bring more members. More members bring better supplier deals. Better deals bring lower prices. Run it for forty years and nobody can catch you. Ninety percent of members renew. Every year. For decades. You don't get loyalty like that from coupons. You get it from making people feel, every single visit, like they got away with something. Strip away the warehouses and the hot dogs and what's left is a simple decision: the customer eats first. Almost nobody has the discipline to actually do it.

I love Cucina down but that lounge is tiny and gets cramped fast and early

Walk into any government office in India, towels are a common sight on the chairs of bureaucrats. A ubiquitous symbol of power. Such is the importance of the towel that a few years ago in Uttar Pradesh, lawmakers filed complaints, aggrieved at not being offered chairs draped in white towels during visits to government offices, while pointing out that officers were "sitting on tall, betowelled chairs." The matter was serious enough that the state's parliamentary affairs department had to issue a formal directive to officials, reminding them of the existing hierarchy. The government ordered that MPs, MLAs and MLCs be given towel-adorned chairs "of the same height and decor" at meetings across the state. In the Uttar Pradesh secretariat in Lucknow, around 1,000 towels are changed twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays😀

Interesting to me that when you see men on the global stage, beautiful Western-style tailoring is often worn by men from non-Western countries. Pictured here is Shehbaz Sharif (Pakistan), Akinwumi Adesina (Nigeria), and Naruhito (Japan).

For countries not to start crazy wars, their populations need to remember the pain that the previous wars had inflicted. And even then --as Putin's war shows-- this is often not enough. But insular countries like the US & UK that have never in the living memory (and in the UK, in the past 1.000 years) experienced a war on home grounds, crazy foreign wars are largely costless.

A great moment for Jay Sh... sorry, the Indian cricket team. (Am crying more as I write this.)