Project Proposal – Strategic Management of Costco Wholesale Corporation
Group –
Rajkaran Kamboj
Akershit Sharma
Amandeep Singh

BUS 403 | School of Business | September 25, 2014 | Mark Lee

GROUP MEMBERS
S No
Name
Positions
E-mail
1.
Kamboj, Rajkaran
Front End
Rajkaran.Kamboj@student.ufv.ca
2.
Sharma, Akershit
Front End
Akershit.Sharma@student.ufv.ca
3.
Singh, Amandeep
Front End
Amandeep.Singh3@sudent.ufv.ca

All three group members are students at the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford pursuing Bachelors of Business Administration with concentration in Financial Management and minor in Economics. We work at Costco Abbotsford in Front End Department as Cashiers and Assistants.
NAME OF THE COMPANY
We have chosen Costco Wholesale as the company for our major project. Costco is an international chain of Warehouse Clubs providing quality merchandise at reasonable prices and exclusive member services; designed to help individuals to meet their personal needs; to help small-to-medium sized businesses reduce their money expenditure, spent to buy products which are meant for resale. Costco allows shopping to those customers who purchase their membership, three in particular: Gold star ($55 for basic individual users), Business ($55 for business users) and Executive ($110 for premium users).1
Costco was founded by James Sinegal and Jeffrey H. Brotman 1976 in San Diego and opened its first warehouse in 1983 in Seattle.2 Since then Costco has extended its reach to different international locations including Asia, Australia and Europe. Costco operates a total of 663 warehouses with a total of 71.2 million cardholders serving 39.0 million households worldwide (Costco Wholesale, 2010).3
REASONS FOR CHOOSING THIS ORGANIZATION
All three members of the group being employees at Costco Abbotsford, we thought of assessing Costco’s long-term career prospects for its stakeholders (Government, Members, Employees, Suppliers and Shareholders), which is also clearly stated in Costco’s Mission Statement (Costco Mission Statement and Code of Ethics, 2010).
Being business students, studying Costco’s organizational running would give us a good insight into real world corporate business tactics and strategies. Moreover, because of the open-door policy at Costco, we can have easy access to the valuable information about the Pros and Cons of Costco. We can analyse Costco from each and every single point of view, let it be the member services, employee satisfaction, vendor credibility, Costco’s ability to meet all legal requirements and hence, paying off its shareholders.

CAREER LONG TERM GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
Developing the strategic plan for Costco Wholesale is valuable to us both in terms of personal and career long term perspectives. Primarily, all of the group members are final year students of business and doing concentration in the field of financial management. Hence, the relevance of developing a strategic plan and understanding the current activities and methods a big corporation adopt increases.
By applying our theoretical knowledge using the concepts learned through the in-class activities and from previous courses, we will put them into practice and make the proposal look more professional and fact based.
Moreover, the apparent reason for conducting an analysis on Costco wholesale was based on the fact that all of the group members are part-time Costco employees. We want to seize the opportunity to look more closely at the areas in which the company is performing well and all the minor issues the company could improve upon. Looking from the personal long term perspective, we want to know whether we can see ourselves working with Costco on a full- time basis after completing our graduation.
By the time we do an organizational analysis, perform market and financial assessments, and make a five year budget plan, we will have a good estimate of where the company stands at present and where we see it in the next five years