Tony Barzar has worked the same Costco in Tucson for almost 40 years…
Not a particularly unique story in itself…
However Tony happens to have become a millionaire while doing so…
He started in 1986, gathering shopping carts in the parking lot for $5.85 an hour — a raise from the $3 an hour he'd been making at a local grocery store. He moved inside a few years later to escape the Arizona heat, unloading trucks and stamping boxes with a label gun.
Today, at 60, Barzar still works the self-checkout line.
He's been offered a promotion to supervisor more than once.
He's turned it down every time. He likes talking to customers too much, and he says he's more useful as a mentor to newer cashiers than as their boss.
His pay tells the rest of the story.
Barzar now earns $32.90 an hour (the top of Costco's hourly pay scale)
More impressively… the money sitting in his 401(k) has grown to over $1 million.
And he isn't the only one.
Costco's own CFO has said "many thousands" of the company's hourly workers now have over $1 million in their 401(k)s.
Because while Barzar was scanning groceries, Costco's stock was compounding.
In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, Costco shares traded as low as around $40. This week, they closed around $953, a gain of more than 2,000%.
Not-so-coincidentally… Costco keeps annual staff turnover at roughly 7%, a fraction of the retail industry average… because it pays more and treats hourly workers like career employees, not placeholders.
That combination of customers who don't leave and employees who don't leave… combined with business model competitors have spent thirty years failing to copy — is what investors call a moat.
And it's the reason a company can keep growing, keep raising prices slightly, and keep fending off competitors for decades instead of years.
Tony Barzar has never picked a stock. Instead he just spent four decades attached to a business with a moat wide enough to carry him there anyway.
It walks through the seven different types of economic moats… and the specific traits that let a handful of companies fend off competition for decades while everyone else gets squeezed.
More importantly for you… how to spot one before the rest of the market catches on.
If you'd rather find the next Costco than hope you already own it, this is where to start.
Oliver