Costco pays well, its CEO supports raising the minimum wage—and its profits are up

Hmm, looks like the whole "keeping your workers poor is the only way to make your shareholders rich" idea so popular with the Mitt Romneys of the world doesn't necessarily hold up:

Costco reported a profit of $537 million last quarter, up from $394 million during the same period last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. The healthy earnings report comes just six days after [CEO Craig] Jelinik urged lawmakers to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. [...]

Costco is known for paying its workers wages that are generally above average for the retail industry. An average Costco worker made about $45,000 in 2011, according to Fortune. That's compared to an average of about $17,486 per year for a worker at comparable Walmart-owned Sam's Club.

That's not to say you can't make yourself, as an asshole CEO, and your shareholders wealthy by paying poverty wages and relying on public assistance to keep your workers fed. But there is another model possible and profitable, if you don't want to be a horrible person.

The thing is, though, that Costco workers are super lucky. And they shouldn't be. Workers shouldn't have to rely on having a boss who pays a living wage out of the goodness of his heart. That should be the basic idea of the minimum wage: that you can live on it if you work full-time. Which is why raising it to $10.10 and then indexing it to inflation so that it goes up along with prices, rather than workers being forced to wait years for a raise, is the right thing to do.

Tell Congress to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 and tie it to inflation.