Costco founder spurns a customer: Mitt Romney

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The founder of retail giant Costco is calling for the defeat of a high-profile customer: GOP White House nominee Mitt Romney, who recently talked up shopping there.

Founder Jim Sinegal bashed Republicans’ economic vision and took an apparent shot at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Romney led, during a speech endorsing President Obama.

“In Tampa last week, we heard all about job creators,” Sinegal said at the Democratic National Convention here, referring to the recent GOP gathering in Florida.

“But at our company, we recognize that job creation requires time and investment and commitment to the long term. It requires companies that plant and grow, not executives who reap and run,” added Sinegal, the company's former CEO, who is a donor to Democrats.

The “reap and run” comment echoes frequent Democratic criticisms of Bain, which Romney’s critics have sought to cast as a predatory firm that left workers in the lurch.

The Obama endorsement arrives two weeks after the GOP nominee and his wife, Ann, used a Fox News interview to discuss their fondness for the popular low-cost retail giant.

Ann Romney, during the interview taped at the family’s New Hampshire vacation home, noted that Costco is “great,” and Mitt noted a three-pack of dress shirts she bought him.

“They’re very nice shirts,” Mitt Romney said in the interview that aired Aug. 26.

Sinegal, in his speech, touted the company’s employee wages and benefits, and said the company was not built in a “vacuum.”

“We built our company in a place where anyone can make it with hard work, a little luck and a little help from their neighbors and their country. I'm here tonight because Costco's story is the American story. Because it's a story that President Obama is helping millions of dreamers and doers to write anew for themselves,” he said in his speech at the Time Warner Cable Arena.