Sol Price: The Retail Legend Who Taught Sam Walton, Jim Sinegal, and Jeff Bezos [Outliers]

0:00 What does it take to build an empire? For Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, it took a lot of hard work, a little genius, and one crucial ingredient, theft. Or has he preferred to call it borrowing? In his autobiography, Sam freely admitted I've stolen I prefer borrowed as many ideas from Saul Price as from anyone else in the business. He wasn't the only one.

0:21 Jim Sinegall, co founder of Costco, was even more direct when a reporter called him one day and said, Gee, you knew Saul that long since nineteen fifty-four. You must have learned a lot. Jim's response was blunt. No, that's inaccurate. I didn't learn a lot. I learned everything I know. Jeff Bezos did the same thing. So do the founders of Home Depot. The list goes on. All of these people pointed back to one man, Saul Price. A man most people have never heard of, a man who never saw it the spotlight, but whose shadow covers the entire landscape of modern retail.

0:54 A man who didn't just create a business but a school of thought. His classroom was the warehouse, and his students changed the world. Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best what other people have already figured out. This is the story of Sol Price, a man who invented the warehouse club.

1:20 pioneer membership retail and quietly revolutionized how three hundred million people plus shop today. He started Fedmart and Price Club, which sold to Jim Senegal, one of his proteges at Costco. His innovations touch everything from how workers get paid to why you can still buy a hot dog and soda for a dollar fifty. Today at Costco. But Sul Price's real genius wasn't in what he built, it was how he did it. This is the story of how a lawyer with no retail experience created an industry mentored his competition and proved that nice guys don't always finish last. It's time. To listen.

1:55 And learn. In the third grade, Sol Price dipped a girl's ponytail into his ink wall. When his mother got called to the school, the teacher delivered a prophecy that would follow him for ever. Your son is very smart, Miss Price, but he could go in one of two directions. He could become a gangster or he could become someone who does much good. Think about that for a moment. The teacher saw gangster potential in an eight year old boy. Why?

2:24 Because even then Saul didn't just break the rules. He understood them so well that he could bend them. The drooping left eyelid that other kids teased him about It had already made him an outsider who saw things differently. When Saul was eleven years old, his father Sam got tuberculosis. The doctor's prescription was simple, move to California for the dry air, so the family packed up and drove from New York to San Diego.

2:47 But here's where Saul learned his first real business lesson, though not the way you'd think. His father had somehow gotten disability insurance policy from equitable life. Five hundred dollars a month as long as you couldn't work. For the next twenty two years until he died nineteen forty nine, Sam Price never worked another day. Saul would later joke that his father lived in grave danger of getting well.

3:11 Now think about what young Sol saw. Every day. His mother Bella worked her fingers raw. With her sewing to keep food on the table. Meanwhile, his father collected those insurance checks month after month. It was all perfectly legal. But it taught Saul something important about how systems actually work versus how they're supposed to work.

3:30 Most kids would learn to game the system like their dad So he learned to build better systems. In high school, Saul met Helen Moskowitz. Her father owned a successful junk dealership, which meant real money during the depression. When Helen brought Saul home to meet her parents, they sized him up pretty quickly. They saw the drooping eyelid from the childhood paralysis. They saw the socialist parents. They saw the father who collected disability instead of working.

3:56 Their verdict came rather quickly. He's not good enough for our daughter. Now here's the thing. Saul had turned that drooping eyelid into academic rocket fuel. Sure the kids teased him about it, but it put a chip on his shoulder that made him work harder.

4:11 He skipped two grades. He beat adults at chess and cards. But Helen's parents didn't care about his grades. They saw what they wanted to see. So what did Saul do? On January first, nineteen thirty eight, he and Helen eloped to Las Vegas. The ring cost a dollar from Woolworths. When Helen's mother heard about it, she told her daughter

4:31 It's not too late to undo this. But it was too late. Saul had made up his mind. They'd stayed married for over seventy years. And while they didn't know it at the time, Saul would go on to change how people all over the world. purchased goods, he would become fabulously wealthy. And in the ultimate kicker, he'd pay his employees double what his competitors paid, including

4:52 his father in law's junk dealership. Here's what strikes me about these early years. Sol turned every single disadvantage into fuel. That physical deformity. It drove him to excel academically. His father's questionable ethics, they taught him to value honest work. In his in laws rejection, it became motivation to prove them wrong. This is a pattern we see in outliers again and again. They don't just overcome obstacles, they transform them into advantages.

5:22 Fresh out of U C L A law school in nineteen thirty eight, Saul opened his practice in San Diego. And immediately did something that would define his entire approach to business. He took every charity case for free. The Hebrew home for the age needed contracts reviewed. Free. The Jewish Welfare Society needed legal help. Free. Other lawyers said he was leaving money on the table, but watch what happened.

5:46 Those charity board were full of San Diego business owners, and Sul met them all. He helped them all. So when those business owners needed a lawyer for their pay work, who do you think they called? This is classic salt price. Give away what others would sell and watch it come back multiply.

6:04 those charity connections, they'd become his first investors when he needed capital for Fedmart in sixteen years, too. When World War Two started, Sol's drooping eyelid kept him out of combat. So he did what he always did. He found another way to contribute. Days at his law practice, nights teaching mechanics to fix bomber engines at consolidated aircraft. But here's what nobody expected. Those nights in the aircraft hangar ta saw something crucial.

6:29 He watched military teams tear down B twenty four engines Clean every component, rebuild them, and test them. Same process every time. Maximum efficiency, minimal waste. Sol was watching the military move massive amounts of material through perfect systems, and he filed it all away. The lawyer was already inadvertently gaining a unique education in logistics that no business school could provide.

6:55 After the war, Saul's law practice took off. Remember those charity connections? They were paying dividends. His clients were small business owners, corner stores, local shops, family operations. And they all had the same complaint. Suppliers wouldn't give them decent prices because their orders were too small. Then Solomon Eddie K. He ran something called the seven Cs Locker Club. This was genius, and here's why.

7:20 Navy rules said sailors had to leave their ships in uniform, but the minute they hit the shore on leave. They wanted civilian clothes. So Eddie created a business that solved every problem a sailor had lockers for uniforms. Civilian clothes to buy, a barber shop, everything all in one place. Saul became Eddie's lawyer and studied the operation.

7:42 What struck him wasn't what seven C sold, it was who they sold to. They didn't try to serve everyone in San Diego. They serve sailors, period. That's it. A total focus on one customer, solve all of their problems, ignore everyone else. Something in that moment clicked for Saul. His small business clients were trying to compete with everyone.

8:05 Seven Cs competed with no one. They own their niche completely. This lesson would echo through everything Saul built. Success didn't come from serving everyone a little bit. It came from serving someone completely.

8:19 Then in nineteen forty seven something happened that would push Saul from observer to operator. All these lessons he'd been filing away, he was about to put them to use. Here's where things get interesting. It's nineteen fifty four and Sol Price is crushing it as a lawyer. He's thirty eight years old. With a very successful practice representing all these small business owners all across San Diego.

8:43 But his mother in law has this problem. She owns this warehouse on Main Street. It's just twenty one thousand square feet of nothing. It's just sitting there eating up property taxes. Now, Sol could have just said sell it. That's what any normal lawyer would advise. But Sol starts talking to his clients, these jewelry wholesalers he represents. And one of them mentions something that catches his attention. The guy says, You know, Saul, there's this weird store up in LA called Fedco. You pay two bucks to join, and then you can buy stuff at wholesale prices. I've got customers driving all the way up there just to shop.

9:18 Saul was like, Wait, what? People are driving two hours to shop in a warehouse? It turns out that Thousands of people from San Diego County were making that two hundred mile round trip to Los Angeles. Every single weekend. Think about that. Thousands of families thought it was worth four hours in the car to save money on appliances and clothes.

9:40 So Saul decides to check it out himself. He drives up to LA, finds Fedco And it's literally next to a cow pasture. The parking lot is dirt. The building looks like a barn, but the parking lot is absolutely jammed.

9:55 Saul walks inside and immediately gets it. Government employees are flashing their IDs like they're entering some sort of exclusive club. They're pushing carts loaded with cameras. Appliances, clothes, and everything else. And the prices?

10:09 They're incredible. Here's what Sol figured out that day. Fedco had found a legal loophole. At the time, there was a fair trade law that said manufacturers could set the minimum prices. Retailers couldn't sell below those prices unless you weren't technically a retailer. Unless you're a private buying club. It's all goes to Fedcoast management. He says, listen.

10:33 I've got a warehouse in San Diego. You've got five thousand members there already. Let's open a branch. They listen politely. But then they said no. That rejection would turn out to be one of the

10:44 Biggest business mistakes in history. So Saul decides he's going to build his own version of Fedco. And here's one of my favorite Saul Price quotes about this moment. Years later, he said, Fortunately, most of us had backgrounds that were alien to retailing. We didn't know what actually wouldn't work or what we couldn't do. And his ignorance turned into a superpower. Established retailers had hundreds of reasons why a warehouse membership club couldn't work.

11:13 The location's wrong people won't pay to shop. You can't sell tires next to toothpaste. But Saul he didn't know any of that. So we just built one anyway. She put in five thousand dollars of his own money, which was serious for him back then. His law firm Chiped in ten thousand. Seven friends.

11:31 Invest five thousand each. Fifty thousand dollars total. Not exactly a fortune, but enough to get started. He calls it FedMER. And in December nineteen fifty four, opening day rolls around. The warehouse is in an industrial area surrounded by tuna canneries. Inside Sol's got merchandise displayed on planks, sitting on saw horses. There's no fancy fixtures, no decorations, just products and prices. And then Sol does something that shows his character. He makes a rule that nothing in Fedmark can. Ever be sold below cost. There's no lost leaders, period.

12:06 Every other grocery store is selling milk at a loss to get customers in the door, but Sol refuses to play that game. He figures if you're losing money on milk, you have to make it up by overcharging on something else. And once customers figure that out, they'll never trust you again. The man was so committed to this principle that when grocery stores nearby would sell sugar below cost. Saul would put up signs telling his customers to go buy the sugar at the other store.

12:33 Can you imagine walking into a store and seeing a sign that says sugar is cheaper at Safeway this week? You should shop there. But that's exactly what solved it. In the first year he projected they would do a million in sales, but the Actual first year sales were three million. Here's how Sol would describe scale economics. Although we are interested in margin, it must never be done at the expense of our philosophy. Margin must be obtained by better buying.

13:02 Emphasis on selling the kind of goods we want to sell. operating efficiencies, lower markdowns, greater turnover, et cetera. Increasing the retail prices and justifying it on the basis that we are still competitive could lead to a rude awakening As it has with so many. Let us concentrate on how cheap we can bring things to the people rather than how much The traffic will bear.

13:27 And when the race is over, Fedmart will be there. Isn't that brilliant? I think that's a problem. Here's the insight. Saul wasn't trying to trick anyone, he was building trust. And when customers trust you completely, When they know you'll always look at it for their interest, they become customers for life.

13:44 That two dollar lifetime membership was starting to look like one of the best investments a San Diego family could make. After Fedmark opens, Sol's competitors are wondering how he's selling everything so cheap. The answer. was something Saul called the intelligent loss of sales, which sounds crazy until you understand how it works. Here's what every other retailer believed. You need to carry every possible item in every possible size to capture every possible customer.

14:13 Saul looked at this conventional wisdom and said, that's completely backwards. The intelligent laws of sales turns conventional wisdom on its head, showing that customer demand is most sensitive to price, not selection. And low prices are only possible if there's integrity in the pricing combined with being the most efficient operator. Let me give you an example. At the time there's this product called three in one oil. You know this stuff you use to oil hinges and fix squeaky doors. And it comes in three sizes, small, medium, and large.

14:46 Every hardware store carries all three sizes because God forbid you miss a sale, right? So does the math. And he figures out the eight ounce bottle is by far the best value per ounce. So that's the only size that Fedmart carries. Though eight ounces is a lot for some customers, it's acceptable for most customers. But what about the customer who doesn't buy the eight ounce size? Well,

15:10 That's the intelligent loss of sales. You're deliberately choosing to lose those sales because the efficiency you gain makes up for it ten times over. So what does limited selection have to do with efficiency? I'm gonna let Saul's son Robert explain this because payroll and benefits represent approximately 80% of a retailer's cost of operations. Pricing advantage follows labor productivity.

15:37 Fewer items result in reduced labor hours throughout all of the product supply channels, ordering from suppliers, receiving them at the distribution center, stocking them in the store, checking out the merchandise, and paying vendor invoices. Put simply, the cost to deal with forty five hundred items is a lot less than the cost to deal With fifty thousand items. The intelligent loss of sales involves more than stocking fewer SKUs. Selling high quality merchandise is more cost effective than selling inferior merchandise. Fewer product returns is one obvious advantage.

16:13 Also selling one size, the large size of a product is another way of giving up sales to gain more sales. Large sizes almost always cost less per unit than smaller sizes, beginning with the manufacturing and packaging costs and ending with the cost to handle it at the store. For example, a cashier can check out a twenty pound box of detergent as quickly as a five pound box. At Fedmart, many products were available only in larger sizes. Fedmart members were willing to spend more to buy the large size in order to save the money on the per unit cost.

16:48 Think about what this means operationally. Instead of dealing with three different SKUs from one supplier, you're dealing with one. Your buyer spends one third of the time on the product. Your warehouse guys handle one third of the variations. Your cashiers ring up a twenty pound box of detergent just as fast as a five pound box, but you're moving four times the product on an efficiency basis. Saul realized that 80% of retailing operating costs were payroll and benefits. And by running your store with fewer people and fewer products to manage, you could pass those savings directly to customers. It was brilliant in its simplicity.

17:26 And it worked. As Saul put it, he had a professional fiduciary relationship with the members, like a lawyer has with clients. His duty was to be completely honest and fair. The best advertising, Sol would say, is the unsolicited testimonial of the satisfied customer. His golden rule was simple but profound. If you want to be successful, just put yourself in the place of a cranky, demanding customer. See your business through their eyes. And that's exactly what he did.

17:55 Every decision, every policy, every price. So looked at the world's crankiest customer. If it passed that test, it stayed. If not It was gone. Now before we move on, there are some things you should notice about what's happening here. First, Saul isn't just building a business, he's completely rethinking how business works.

18:14 Think about it. Here's a guy who tells his customers to shop at competitors when they have better prices. He pays his workers more than what everyone else is paying. And you know what happens? Turnover shrinks. Everyone wants to work at FedMER. He gets this pick of the best people.

18:30 And the bare bones warehouse, that wasn't just about saving money. Saul understood the space itself was sending a message. Every concrete floor, every exposed beam, every forklift moving pallets, it all screamed that we don't waste money on fancy stuff. So you get better prices. The medium was the message. And the timing couldn't have been better. This is nineteen fifty four, San Diego. The city's exploding. Military families from the Midwest and East Coast are pouring in, attracted by perfect weather and good jobs.

19:04 Saul's writing a demographic wave he probably didn't even fulciate at the time. And here's what gave Saul an edge. Those fair trade laws I mentioned, they were killing regular retailers. Manufacturers could legally set minimum prices and stores had to follow them. But membership clubs?

19:22 That was a loophole. Sol could price however he wanted. And finally, Saul's idea of a fiduciary relationship with the customer was similar to the golden rule. The way Saul put it. If you want to be successful in retail Just put yourself in the place of a cranky demanding customer.

19:38 In other words, see your business through the eyes of the customer. This is a guy playing by completely different rules and it's about to pay off in ways that nobody could have imagined. By nineteen fifty seven, Sol's opening stores in Texas, and he immediately shocks everyone by announcing Fedmart will pay a dollar an hour. Every other retailer in town is only paying fifty cents. His advisors think he's lost his mind, but S logic is bulletproof.

20:05 Pay double and you get your pick of the best workers. Turnover disappears. theft becomes almost non existent. People start treating your business like it's their business. But Sol's real test came with segregation. When he's negotiating a loan for his Dallas store, the bank wants a clause requiring separate bathrooms by race. So I'll tell them to remove it or forget the deal. The bank blinks first.

20:30 The San Antonio store presents a different challenge with its lunch counter. Texas law says that you need separate tables for blacks and whites. Saul finds an elegant workaround. He removes all the tables and chairs. Everyone has to stand while they eat, which means everyone can eat together. By nineteen fifty nine, Fedmart had grown to five stores doing twenty six million in sales. Here's this Jewish lawyer from California breaking every rule the Texas establishment holds sacred, paying double the wages, integrating lunch counters, and his stores are packed every day. The lesson is timeless. When you treat people right, everybody wins. Your employees work harder.

21:10 Your customers trust you more, and somehow your profits go up too. Saul was proving you could do well by doing good. And he was about to learn what happens when you sell to someone who doesn't share your values. But first You should know something about Sol Price, he was a teacher. If you ask Jim Senegal what he learned from Sol Price

21:30 He'll tell you a story. A reporter once called him and said, You've known Saul since nineteen fifty four. You must have learned a lot. Jim's response was immediate. No, that's inaccurate. I didn't learn a lot. I learned everything. Everything I know. Think about that.

21:44 Jim Sinegal, who built Costco into three hundred billion dollar company, and he credits every little bit of his knowledge to one teacher. Sol price. So how does Saul teach? Well, first You have to understand his role in classroom. Saul bought an old Greyhound bus and converted it into a mobile office, beds, kitchen, the works.

22:06 Late afternoon he'd load up the family and executives in San Diego and they'd roll east through the desert. At the time he didn't like flying. Saul would cook his famous chili while they talk strategy. They'd sleep in the bunks and wake up in Dallas, Phoenix, or wherever they were expanding to next. Now Saul could have flown, but he still wouldn't get on airplanes after watching those B twenty four engines catch fire during the war. More importantly, though, the bus represented his philosophy perfectly. Never waste time.

22:34 Those hours rolling through the desert weren't travel time. They were teaching time. And Saul was always teaching, but not the way you'd expect. He didn't lecture. He asked questions. Jim Sinegal remember saw walking the Fedmark floors. Why is this here? What's the turn rate? How much are we making? Could we sell it for less?

22:52 People felt like he was testing them, but he wasn't testing them. He was teaching them to think. Sometimes the lessons were harsh. There's one story about Saul finding an aisle that was too narrow. He had this rule about six foot wide aisles as a minimum. So we asked the manager, how wide is this aisle?

23:12 And the manager looks at him trying to be a wise guy and shoots back What did you hire? A merchant or a surveyor? Saul takes a breath and looks at the cramped aisle, looks at the manager and says, Looks like I didn't get either. Boom. Lesson delivered.

23:28 But Saul's real genius was creating frameworks that taught people to think systematically. His big one was called the Six Rights. the right product in the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity, in the right condition, at the right price. It sounds simple, but apply it to anything and it works. Take a cashier, for example. The right person is someone cheerful. The right condition means well groomed and professional. The right price means paying them properly with good benefits.

23:58 The right quantity means having enough staff for your customer flow. Suddenly hiring isn't guesswork, it's a system. Saul had another concept he called the alter ego principle. He'd explain it like this. If a store owner could do everything himself, greet customers and stock shelves and sweep floors, he would.

24:17 But he can't do everything himself. So he has to hire people and teach them to be his alter ego to think and act like he would. And that means the owner focuses on the highest value work while trusting his alter egos with everything else. Sol refused to create training manuals. Other retailers had thick binders of procedures and Saul thought manuals were a substitute for thinking.

24:43 One of my favorite adages of his that he frequently found appropriate to repeat was You train an animal You teach a person. He wanted people who could assess a situation and make the right call, not robots following a script. Jim Senegal took this philosophy to heart.

25:01 If you're not spending ninety percent of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. And that's pure salt price. Build people who can think, not people who just follow orders. This teaching philosophy would create a generation of retail revolutionaries. Bernie Marcus would take these lessons to build Home Depot.

25:20 Sam Walton would adapt them for Walmer and Jim Sinegal would perfect them at Costco. All because Saul Price believed the most important thing a leader could do was teach. By the early nineteen seventies, Fedmart is struggling a little bit. Competition from Walmart, Kmart, and Target is fierce. Sol's approaching sixty and looking for fresh ideas. So he flies to Europe and meets Hugo Mann. A German retail magnate who owns furniture stores and hypermarkets.

25:48 Man Court Sol Hart promising capital and expertise to revitalize Fedmar. Sol's early investors also need liquidity. Man seems like the answer. Sol agrees to sell him control. The first board meeting under man reveals the real truth, though. For ninety minutes, man screams criticisms while refusing to even look Saul in the eye.

26:12 The charming businessman from Germany had morphed into a tyrant. Three months later, Mansboard fires Saul Prize from the company that he founded and built from the ground up. That very night they changed the locks on his office doors. After twenty one years of building Fedmart from nothing Into a three hundred million dollar company, soul is out.

26:34 Without Sol's vision Fedmart. Collapses fast. Man tries running it like a traditional retailer by raising prices, cutting wages, and ignoring everything that Saul had proven works. According to Saul Price, problems such as high interest rates and costly labor weren't half the story of Fedmart's downfall. In his view, it was Mann himself. He absolutely

26:57 Mm. Assume that w what he got what he did in Germany was Transferable. In detail. For this country.

27:07 The the way he treated employees in Germany could treat him here. The way he Put his merchandise on the shelf he could do here. That all of that he He is um But then he had one other Terrible failing.

27:21 That was that he was a Terribly Suspicious man. Price says Fedmart's operations took on the trappings of an atomic energy lamp, with employees muzzled and the news media unwell on the premises. He estimates Mond poured one hundred million dollars into the venture, starting with a twenty five million dollar buyout, of which Price got about thirteen percent. Certainly there were big tax write offs, but Mann once said he just wanted to get his money out of a socialist leaning German economy. I don't believe that he

27:49 That that was his real reason. No, I think he was on an ego trip. I think he was on an ego trip. I think he figured he was gonna become the retailing giant in the world. Price he has mixed feelings about the collapse, mainly because it's more of a blow to Mons pride than his pocketbook. And the unfortunate part of it is that economically I don't think Hugo Mana is gonna lose.

28:12 He's got valuable real estate. Well the people who gave their lives to that company are gonna lose. That's it. By nineteen eighty two, Fedmart is dead.

28:24 Here's what I find fascinating. Sol Price is sixty years old. He's wealthy enough to retire comfortably. Most people would have quit right there, but failure, it turns out, can be the best teacher of all. Everything Sol learned from losing Federmer would make his next venture even stronger. It's december nineteen seventy five. Sol Price has just been fired from the company he built. Not just fired, but literally locked out.

28:51 Hugo Mann's people changed the locks on his office door. He's sixty years old. He could take his money and retire to a beach somewhere. Instead Within one week, he's signing a lease on a new office in the very same building, one floor up. Think about this for a second. Every morning on his commute, Saul rides the elevator past the Fedmart offices where they locked him out. Past the company he spent.

29:14 Twenty one years building. Most people would find that torture. I think Saul saw it as fuel. He hangs exactly two things on his new office wall. A sign on the door that says the price company and a small sign above his desk with three words. Do it now.

29:32 Sol's son Robert remembers those early days. My father always needed a project. He was not a happy guy if he didn't have something to do. So they walk and they talk, and father and son pounding the San Diego pavement, dissecting twenty years of FedMER. What worked? What didn't? And they kept coming back to one division that made money when everything else struggled, the wholesale operation run by Jim Sinegal. Here's what clips.

29:58 Fedmart stores barely broke even selling to customers, but the warehouses that sold to those stores, different story. Low overhead. Minimal staff, no advertising, just pure efficiency. Then they started talking to small business owners, liquor stores, restaurants, and convenience shops. Everyone has the same complaint. We pay too much because we can't buy in volume. Saul sees it immediately. What if you created a wholesale only warehouse? No retail headache, just sell the businesses that know what they want.

30:29 But then Sol does something that changes everything. He charges an annual membership fee of twenty-five dollars. Not two dollars for a lifetime like Fedmark. Twenty five dollars. Every year. This is real money in nineteen seventy six.

30:44 He sounds crazy. Who's gonna pay twenty five dollars just to shop? But Saul understands psychology. That twenty five dollars isn't a fee, it's a commitment. Nobody pays twenty five dollars just to join a club and then shop somewhere else. You've already invested. You're gonna make it work. And Saul also understood you can use that twenty five dollars to lower prices on everything. It's March nineteen seventy six. Robert's driving around the industrial San Diego when he spots it. A hundred thousand square foot corrugated steel warehouse.

31:15 Oil stains on the floor, pigeons in the rafters, perfect. This isn't just about saving money on rent. Saul wants the building itself to make a statement. Every exposed beam, every concrete floor, every forklift beeping in the background says the exact same thing. And it's talking to your subconscious. We don't waste money on fancy. You get the savings.

31:38 July twelfth. Nineteen seventy six. It's opening day. Everyone is excited. Only it's a total disaster. The first week sales.

31:48 thirty two thousand dollars. Two hundred thousand a week to break even. We two is even worse. By month three? They're hemorrhaging cash.

32:00 So I was looking at bankruptcy before Christmas. At the morning meetings he's telling employees to park in the customer lot to make it look less empty. It was terribly slow, Saul admitted later, and it got worse from there. But here's where it Gets interesting.

32:15 He doesn't panic, he just diagnoses. They've broken their own rules. They have the wrong products for the market. They have the wrong location that nobody can find. They have the wrong hours that didn't work for the business owners. The breakthrough comes from an unexpected place. the San Diego credit union calls. They want to know if their members can shop at Price Club.

32:37 So's team resist. The business was intended for wholesale use only for businesses. But Sol's desperate enough to try something radical. So it creates a two tier system. Business members pay twenty five dollars for wholesale prices.

32:53 credit union members pay nothing upfront but add five percent at the checkout. Within days something magical happened. business memberships explode. Why? Because credit union members realize they can qualify as a business owners. That janitor who does cleaning on the side, business owner.

33:10 that teacher who tutors business owner. They'd rather pay twenty five dollars once Then five percent every time. By November, Price Club is hitting 150,000 a week, and by January, their cash flow positive. Crisis averted. Sometimes your biggest mistakes contain your biggest opportunity.

33:30 Sol thought he was building a wholesale business, but his customers showed him that he was building something bigger. Something much bigger. A membership club where the fee wasn't a barrier, but a badge to belonging. Eventually they started getting all these calls from hot dog vendors wanting to set a cart to set a price club and take advantage of all the volume and all the traffic. At first Robert ignored them, but the calls kept coming. Saul looks at this and thinks why should we let someone else profit on our customer traffic? So they contact the best hot dog company at the time, Hebrew National, who not only agrees to supply the hot dogs, but throws in a free car.

34:07 They priced it at a dollar fifty for quarter pound all beef hot dog and a soda. That's at cost, maybe even a small loss. Robert thinks his dad has lost his mind. Why I saw hot dogs for no profit. But Sol sees something bigger. That hot dog isn't about the money, it's about the message. Every time a member buys that dollar fifty combo, they're reminded that Price Club will always put value first.

34:32 And nearly fifty years later, Costco still sells that exact same combo for a dollar fifty. They lose money on every single one. When someone suggested raising the price, the current CEO famously said that if they ever raise it, he'll kill them. That hot dog isn't food. It's a promise. By nineteen seventy eight, people were noticing what Sol was building. Bernie Marcus shows up. He was just fired from handy dance.

34:57 He's angry. He's talking about lawsuits and revenge and Saul gives him a little bit of advice. It's pure salt price. Don't waste time suing. Build something better. He walks Bernie through the warehouse and shows him everything, the membership model, the concrete floors, the Four Cliff Ballet.

35:14 Britney takes note. And one year later, Home Depot Opa. It's Price Club for Hammers. Then in nineteen eighty two, Sam Walton returns. He wanted to see price cloud.

35:25 Saul invites in for lunch, but this time Sam's not subtle. He comes back later with a tape recorder, walking the aisles dictating notes. Security confiscates it. And when Sam calls to get it back, Sul could have erased the tape or not given it to him. Instead he mails a bag intact. He never even listened to it. Within a year, Sam's Club opens. It's Price Club, period. The exact same model, same membership fee, same concrete employers. A reporter once asked Sol how it felt to be the father of the warehouse club industry, and Saul's response becomes legendary.

35:59 I should have worn a condom. Saul wasn't just building a business. He was building an industry by teaching everyone else how to compete with him. He understood that when you're that far ahead, when your principles are that sound, copy guides just validate your model. They expand the market, they train your customers, and they make your innovation normal. But they also can't copy everything, which we'll get to in a second. By the late nineteen eighties, Sul Price found himself in a strange position. He was watching his ideas beat him at his own game. Remember that quote about wearing a condom? It was starting to feel less like a joke.

36:33 Costco and Sam's Club, both born in nineteen eighty three, both direct copies of Price Club were expanding like wildfire, while Price Club hesitated. Saul would later tell his son, Robert, something revealing. We're good at creating businesses. But we weren't really good at running the business. Think about that admission for a second. Here's a guy who's revolutionized retail twice. And he's saying he's not good at running a business.

36:59 But he wasn't wrong. Saul was a creator, an innovator. The dated a grind of optimization and expansion That was never his strength. The irony was painful.

37:09 Jim Sinegal, who worked for Sol since he was an eighteen year old beggar at Fedmart, was now out executing the master using his own ideas. Senegal was a great operator. Costco added fresh food departments while Price Club debated whether perishables fit the warehouse concept. Costco expanded nationally while Price Club stayed cautious. Costco innovated constantly while Price Club protected what works. By nineteen ninety two the writing was on the wall.

37:37 Price Club had pioneered the industry, but was losing the war. Saul and Robert started exploring options. The only buyers that made sense were Sam's Club or Costco. Sam's Club had Walmart's deeper pockets, but Saul could never merge with them. The Walden family's anti union stance went against everything Saul believed about treating workers well. Costco was different. Jim Sinegal didn't just learn the business from Saul. He absorbed the entire philosophy.

38:05 When they announced the merger in June nineteen ninety three, they called it a marriage of equals. A hundred and ninety five stores, sixteen billion in sales. They even called it price cost. But here's the thing about mergers of equals. They never stay equal. Within fourteen months, it kinda fell apart. Two founding families, each used to calling their own shots, couldn't really share power easily. So all engineered and elegant exit. The price name disappeared from warehouses, absorbed fully into Costco. But Saul, even at seventy eight, wasn't done.

38:38 Sol took the real estate from the separation and built price enterprises. His son Robert ran Price Smart bringing warehouse clubs to Latin America. For a while it worked. Then The aftermath of the two thousand and one crisis hit. Price Mart was drowning, suppliers demanding cash up front. Audit started questioning if the company could survive. Three thousand employees were about to lose their job. Saul at the time was eighty-seven years old. He could have let it fail. Instead, he did what he always did. He fixed it.

39:08 First with an emergency loan. Then with an elegant restructuring where the price family actually paid more per share than other investors to show they were all in. Think about that. eighty seven, when most people can't remember the grandchildren's name, Sol Price was engineering complex financial rescues. And he was doing it in a way where he treated everybody with respect and dignity.

39:31 And he was committing, he was going all in. The man who got locked out at sixty was still fighting at eighty seven. Sol Price died in December of two thousand and nine at ninety three. The obituaries called him the father of warehouse clubs, but I think they missed the real story. Walk into any Costco today and that hot dog combo is still a dollar fifty, just like Saul priced it.

39:55 Costco pays wages that make Wall Street analysts cry. they cap their markup at fourteen to fifteen percent when they could charge more. They treat suppliers fairly when they could squeeze them. And they do all of this because Jim Sinegal learned it from Saul Price. And he built it so deep into Costco's DNA that it survives without either of them.

40:17 But Saul's influence goes way beyond just warehouse clubs. What's Amazon Prime? It's a membership program that creates loyalty through value. Where'd Jeff Bezos get that idea, do you think? Of course, from studying Sol Price. What's Home Depot? It's Price Club for hammers. It doesn't have the membership fee, but they copied everything else. It's built by Bernie Marcus after Sol told them to stop whining and start building.

40:41 At Sol's Memorial Service, Jim Sinegal revealed something. Four years before Sol died, he'd written Jim a letter. Авто декадс о вудим празд. Sol finally wrote. You've been very generous about giving me credit for influencing you. I suspect that's true.

40:57 But you would have been a great achiever under any circumstance. Jim's reaction I've been waiting fifty fucking years for this letter. Even at the end, Saul was teaching. This time the lesson, don't wait fifty years to tell people. They really matter. Solprice gave away

41:14 every advantage he had. He taught competitors all of his secrets. He helped rivals succeed. By every rule of business that should have destroyed him. Instead, it immortalized him. Why? Because the real competitive advantage isn't in your tactics or your systems. It's in your principles. And principles, unlike tactics, Get stronger when you share them.

41:36 Today when hundreds of millions of people flash their membership cards at warehouse clubs worldwide, they're walking through salt prices cluster. When someone signs up for Amazon Prime, they're using his model. When employees earn middle class wages in retail, they're benefiting from these principles. Soul Price didn't just create competitors, he created disciples. And disciples don't diminish the teacher, they multiply the teaching. The man who'd wished he'd worn a condom didn't just father an industry, he fathered a philosophy, and unlike companies, philosophies don't die when founders do. They just keep teaching.

42:14 Sol Price never wrote a memoir. This entire episode is based on the book Sol Price Retail Revolutionary and Social Innovator. When people asked about his proudest accomplishments, he'd redirect. He didn't want to talk about revenue. He wanted to talk about Jim Sinegal and Bernie Marcus. The employees who understood why you treat customers like clients and not targets. Because Saul knew that brilliant ideas mean nothing without believers. The warehouse club concept, it was brilliant, but without people who understood why you cap margins at 14%, without a culture that chose integrity over quarterly earnings, it would all collapse.

42:52 Just look at Fedmart after Hugo Mann took over. Do it now. These three words that sat above Saul's desk explained everything. Locked out of fifty nine. Start over in seven months. Near bankruptcy, pivot immediately. That wasn't impatience, it was a philosophy. Why wait when you can do it now? His son Robert captured the paradox. All was a tough negotiator who paid more than required. He was a fierce competitor who helped rivals succeed. He was a pragmatist who made decisions on principle.

43:22 Most people think those are contradictions and it's all proved that they're all the same thing. Today when you walk into any warehouse club worldwide, anywhere in the world, or you see a dollar fifty hot dog at Costco, You're walking into Soul Price's classroom. It's still in session and it's still teaching the lessons that he started in nineteen fifty four. The price is right when everybody wins.

43:45 That's not just good business. That's a good life. Wow, okay. Let's talk about some of my reflections from that episode. I I this book is phenomenal. I just want to show you. Some of the highlights that I've made in this book, like you can see. How much of this book I loved and highlighted. And we'll make the highlights available for our members if you go to FS.blog slash membership.

44:11 So there's some things that didn't make it into this episode that I thought were really interesting. One of them was a comment by Charlie Munger, which uh he said, Sol price used to say success in business came from deciding which business you could intelligently do without He had a list of business he didn't want. He didn't want business from people who wrote bad checks. He didn't want business from people who shoplifted. He didn't want business from people who clogged up his parking lot without buying very much. He carefully invented a system where he kept those people out and succeeded. By deciding what he would be better off without and avoiding it. This is a very good way to think, and it is not all that common. Isn't that such a brilliant insight? One of the reasons that Costco charges the membership fee, even to this day, is this very reason it keeps people out who are just gonna go in and buy one thing. It keeps people out who are going to shoplift. It selects for the right type of customer.

45:10 Another thing that was really interesting that never sort of made it in is a little bit about Saul the person. He was always reading, he was always learning. He was a voracious reader. Uh he loved to ask questions and understand things. He also didn't waste words. What he said was always worth close attention. Sol's business philosophy was quite simple. It consisted of four points. One provide the best possible value to the customers. Excellent quality products at the lowest possible prices. Two, pay good wages and provide good benefits, including health insurance to employees.

45:45 Three, maintain honest business practices. And four, make money for your investors. Sol also insisted on testing ideas and proving them before rolling them out. Each individual store is a bit of a laboratory testing. And this is what happens today in a lot of stores. They'll test in one market. And if it's successful, they'll roll out into others. He had a quote that I liked that I couldn't quite work into the episode, but he said, Our first duty, our second

46:15 is to our employees, and our third duty is to our stockholders in that order. I thought that was really interesting. He put customers first. That was the fiduciary relationship he had with them. And the second was employees, because you have no customers without employees. Employees make everything tick. And third and finally the stockholders. A good example of the application of how Sol managed uh occurred in nineteen sixty at Fedmark's flagship store.

46:42 Rick Libinson, the store manager at the time, described an encounter he had with Saul. Soul comes in one night and we're exceptionally busy. The sales floor was shut and it was a mess. And I'm out there pulling cardboard. turning the egg rock, making sure the milk case is is full. Just trying to keep our heads above water. We're drowning. It was so busy that day. And Saul finally grabs me by the shoulder and yanks me back to the warehouse off the sales floor. He drags me, he literally grabs me and drags me. He's got me by the shoulder and he looks me in the eye and he says,

47:13 You're not running this place that's running you. And I mean he was yelling and on me. The main message has stuck with me my entire life. It made me change everything I did. After that day, I just stayed ahead of the business. His point was that all I was doing was reacting to what was happening.

47:33 You have to take charge, you have to run the place, you have to stay ahead of it. And here's another point that I really like. When they made a purchasing mistake and they paid too much for the product, they wouldn't price it as a loss, but they wouldn't add the customary sort of 10 to 15% margin. They would price it as if they had bought it at the right price. And one thing that's really interesting here is you you think that Saul doesn't make a lot of mistakes. He actually makes a ton of mistakes that you can read about in the book or in my highlights. His instincts weren't always right. He believed, for example, that Fedmart sales would increase when they opened to the public. But they didn't. They barely budged at all.

48:10 They opened a store in a very run down area once as Saul believed that the local community would be thrilled to have a new store with high quality products, low prices, and a staff made up entirely from the community earning great wages. But sales were poor from day one and it had to be shut down. When he asked a vendor to lower the price on pantyhose and he promised them significantly more volume.

48:34 But he refunded the vendor when the volume never materialized. I find it shocking today looking at the success of Price Glove and the success of Costco, that it almost failed. that they opened with the wrong idea. It was only the immediate Pivoting An iteration on that idea that kept them alive.

48:53 Another innovation they had at the time was sampling. And they realized that not only did it increase sales, both because members like the products, but also because of the reciprocity rule and that people subconsciously desire to reciprocate when receiving something for free. Okay, I want to get into ten lessons that you can take away from this if you remember anything about this show. So one is bet on yourself. At thirty eight, Sol put five thousand dollars into Fettermur for a small town lawyer in nineteen fifty four, that was serious money. When he got fired at sixty, most people would retire to a golf course, not salt.

49:28 He dumped eight hundred thousand of his own cash, which was a significant portion of his net worth at the time. Into price cloud. There was no backup plan, no safety net, just a conviction that he could figure it out. The first company became a three hundred million dollar giant. The second one spawned a trillion dollar industry.

49:47 When you believe in what you're building, go all in. Hal measures guarantee half results. Two the intelligent loss of sales. Sol stocked exactly one size of everything. Every competitor carried three small, medium, and large. And sure, we lost the customer who wants the small sales, all said.

50:06 That's the intelligent loss of sales. But here's what happened in practice, carrying four thousand items instead of fifty thousand meant a lot less time ordering Stocking shelves, checking out Labor costs crashed every save penny it

50:22 went to customers as lower prices. It created this Flywheel, this positive loop where every advantage just became more and more, as they got more buying power, they would give it to customers. Price club hit one thousand dollars per square foot. Competitors with The complete selection, we're struggling with three hundred. It turns out that customers prefer low prices to endless choices.

50:45 Three. Think like a fiduciary, not a merchant. When Safeway sold sugar below cost, Saul did something insane. He put up signs in FedMark saying sugar is cheaper at Safeway this week. Go buy it there. His managers thought he'd lost his mind, but Sol's view was I have a duty my members, like a lawyer to his clients. And that radical honesty created something very powerful. People drove hundreds of miles round trip from San Diego to shop at his LA store. When you treat customers like clients and not targets, trust becomes your greatest asset.

51:19 Four win win, the math of success. Most businesses think someone has to lose for them to win. We have to find a sucker, we have to sell at a higher price, we have to deceive somebody, but Saul flipped that entire equation. The San Antonio retailers paid fifty cents an hour in nineteen fifty seven. Sol paid a dollar. Let's look at what happened. Employees could afford health care and dignity. Communities got stable families, not desperate workers. Fedmart attracted the best people with near zero turnover. There was no constant hiring, no training costs, no theft.

51:53 All of those savings went straight to customers with lower prices. Higher wages created lower costs. Sol didn't split the pie differently, he just baked a bigger pie where everybody could win. And I just wanna do a brief aside here. I love this idea of win win because it's the only sustainable relationship with anybody in your life. be it your customers, your suppliers, your employees, your investors, everybody has to win. The only sustainable relationship is win win. Think about compounding. What we know about compounding is that all the advantages from compounding.

52:26 go to the end. They come at the end. And the only way to get to the end, the only way to extend your timeline in anything that you're doing is win win. Five, ignorance is superpower. Sol had never worked retail when he started FedMER. Fortunately, we didn't know what would work or what we couldn't do. Retail experts knew you couldn't sell tires next to toothpaste, but Saul did it anyway. Experts knew that stores needed elaborate displays, and Saul used saw horses and plywood. Experts knew that warehouse locations were dot.

52:56 It's all thribed there. Revenue went from zero to three hundred billion. Sometimes the most dangerous thing you can know is why something won't work. Six bounce don't break. Helen's parents said Saul wasn't good enough. He had socialist parents, he had a lazy father, he had a drooping eye. He married her anyway.

53:15 With a dollar ring for more. Fedco rejected his partnership and he built Fedmart and crushed them. Hugo Man locked him out of Fedmart at sixty, and within a week Sul had signed a lease one floor up. Every morning and rode the elevator past the company that had fired. Seven months later, Price Club opened.

53:33 And at eighty seven when Price Smart tanked. He rescued it with his own money. Three knockdowns, three comebacks, each one bigger. Success isn't avoiding failure. It's what you do after it. Seven, be a teacher. Saul believed that you train animals but teach people. He bought a greyhound bus, he installed beds and a kitchen. He turned an eight hour drive into rolling universities, teaching executives while cooking chili at seventy miles an hour.

54:00 When Bernie Marcus got fired, so I'll walk him through every price club detail. Home Depot was born. Sam Walton showed up with a tape recorder. Saul mailed it back to him intact. Sam's Club was born. His secret you can copy warehouses and membership keys, but you can't copy principals. That's why Costco dominates while Sam's Club survives. A the dollar fifty promise.

54:23 Price Club sold a hot dog in soda for a dollar fifty in nineteen seventy six. Today, nearly fifty years later, Costco still charges a dollar fifty. They lose money on every single one. When someone suggested raising the price, Costco's CEO said, If you raise the price of the fucking hot dog, I will kill you. He was joking, of course. That hot dog isn't food. It's a promise to customers. It says that some promises matter more than profit margins. What you refuse to change reveals who you are. Number nine, turn problems into principles.

54:54 There's almost always another way. Texas law in nineteen fifty seven required the blacks and whites couldn't eat at the same table. So his solution, remove the tables and chairs and everybody can lunch at the counter. If everyone had to stand, then everyone could eat together. When a Dallas bank demanded segregation clauses for his loan, Sol said to remove it or no deal. The bank blinked first.

55:16 He didn't fight the system, he just worked around it. Number ten, do it now. Finally, Saul understood that tomorrow was where dreams go to die. If there's something in front of you and it's obvious, you should do it. Right now. And that's it. That is Sol Price in a nutshell. What a fascinating character. What a fascinating man. Thank you for listening and learning with us. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did researching it.

55:39 Thanks and learning with us. Be sure to sign up for my free weekly newsletter at fs.blog slash newsletter. The Farnum Street website is also where you can get more info on our membership program. which includes access to episode transcripts, my repository, ad free episodes, and more. Follow myself and Farnum Street on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop.

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