What Blockchain Investors Can Learn from Costco’s Price Strategy

Jeff Bezos's 2001 meeting with Costco co-founder Jim Sinegal reshaped Amazon's pricing philosophy, drawing parallels to how blockchain projects might approach value creation. "There are two kinds of companies," Bezos later told executives, "those that work to charge more and those that work to charge less." Costco's model—where scale efficiencies are shared as lower prices—mirrors crypto networks that prioritize user incentives over short-term profit extraction.

Charlie Munger likened Costco's price discipline to a "religious duty," a mindset echoed by decentralized protocols like Bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH), where transaction efficiency benefits accrue to participants. Nick Sleep's "scale efficiencies shared" concept finds its crypto equivalent in tokenomics models that redistribute network effects, as seen with Solana (SOL) and Polygon (MATIC).