Strategic Human Resource Management

Strategic Human Resource Management

Introduction

Description of Costco

Costco Corporation established in 1976, is a whole sale retail chain that operates internationally. Costco works in the warehouse club membership system in which it carries a great assortment and a wide range of variety merchandise and brand names, on low prices. The main purpose of the company is to sell goods and merchandise to other retailers and also directly to consumers. The product categories in which Costco deals are, apparel, candies, groceries, electronic stuff, sporting goods, tires, hardware, toys, health and beauty, jewelry, wrist watch, office equipment, tobacco, books etc. Costco is known for its quality of the product and services. Costco belongs to the retail industry, which is currently; generating revenues of about $4 Trillion and a million stores, and outlets exist in USA of different categories. Considering the two major retail stores in USA, the grocery stores are concentrated while the convenience stores are fragmented. Costco is headquartered in Issaquah, Washington and as far as the size of the firm is concerned there are 626 warehouse locations in 9 different countries including UK, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Taiwan, Korea and others with more than 143,000 employees. Costco is second largest retailer in USA and is seventh largest in the world (Costco.com, 2013).

The mission statement of Costco is, “To give our customers the best value we can” (Costco.com, 2013).

The vision statement of Costco is, “We are going to be a company that is on the first name basis with everyone.” (Costco.com, 2013)

There are several different objectives of Costco that the company wants to achieve in order to complement its mission and vision statement. The first objective of Costco is to hire the right people for the right jobs, train them to make them professionals and provide them good jobs. Other important objectives include running of business for long term sustainability that is to increase the business life cycle of the firm, the opening of new stores in America and in the other world markets which complements the expansion and long term growth, Costco also wants to carry on with the internet sales, that is, online expansion. The firm wants to achieve these objectives to keep the firm in line with the mission and vision statement. There are many challenges that Costco might face in the near future. Firstly, the retail market is getting saturated that is there being millions of retailers who are direct competitors for Costco in some or the other manner. From the industry point of view, the challenge is that the retail industry depends on the health of the economy and for the industry to grow the economy has to grow for sure. Another threat is that retailers especially as large as Costco needs to take care of frauds like credit card fraud and identity theft (Lutz.A, 2013)

Discussion

Description of Strategic Planning Process

The strategic planning process of the firm totally depends on the strategic objectives which need to be achieved. In the planning of the objectives Costco ...