Costco’s secret: A Canadian expansion is coming — and this Quebec executive is leading the charge

Detailed summary

Pierre Riel started as a forklift driver. Now he’s running international operations and making Costco more Canadian.

The meeting was in its third hour when Pierre Riel stood up and tapped his knuckle on the boardroom window. It was a new window, at Costco‘s Canadian head office in Ottawa, and there were clusters of little white dots on the glass.

Riel, who started as a forklift driver and is now Costco’s head of international operations, was visiting from the U.S. for just a few days and he was already behind schedule. At least half a dozen Canadian vice-presidents were waiting to update him on the latest developments in sneakers, garbage bags, Korean beauty products, the price of ground beef.

But he wanted to know about the dots. Did they somehow make the window harder to break?

“No,” said Gino Dorico, a Montrealer who runs Costco’s Canadian business and has known Riel for 38 years. “It’s for birds.”

Opening of the article, excerpted from Toronto Star. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.