• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 3, 2017

Jeff Brotman, an attorney by training and retailer by heritage who launched Costco Wholesale Corp. with Jim Sinegal in Seattle in 1983, died unexpectedly in his home in Medina, Wash., early Tuesday. He was 74, and had been chairman of the company since 1994.

Sinegal says “over 35 years, he became not just a business partner but a confidante, a great friend. I’m not exaggerating for a second when I say I loved the guy,” Janet I. Tu writes in the Seattle Times. 

He was not alone. “Friends … reacted to news of his death with shock, disbelief and sadness,” Patti Payne reports in the Puget Sound Business Journal.

On Monday, “Brotman had attended a dinner for about 2,000 Costco warehouse managers from around the world who are gathered this week at the Washington State Convention Center,” Tu reports.

“You couldn’t not like Jeff. He would say things like: ‘I’m not going to let you get mad at me.’ ” They had their disagreements, but Brotman’s attitude was a key to their not staying angry at each other for longer than a day when they fought,” Sinegal tells Tu.

Brotman died in his sleep, according to his brother, Michael Brotman, who added, “we assume his heart just stopped working.” 

“He had been a reluctant retailer at first. After working in his family’s chain of 18 men’s stores during college, Mr. Brotman sought to escape a retail career by applying for law school. But his business acumen proved too compelling,” Sam Roberts writes for the New York Times.

“After his father suggested that he replicate Price Club, a pioneering San Diego-based chain of warehouse stores for small businesses, Brotman teamed up with Sinegal, a protégé of Sol Price, the chain’s founder and a retailing genius himself.”

“The guy was just a first-rate human being,” LeRoy Jewelers co-owner Steph Farber, whose parents’ downtown storefront was next door to Brotman’s parents’ shop in Tacoma, tells the [Tacoma] News Tribune’s Kenny Ocker. “I don’t think he ever lost the sense of who he was, even as he achieved immense success in business.”

“Brotman had a ‘sixth sense’ for finding new Costco locations, balancing the need to be visible without overwhelming a community with traffic, said board member John Meisenbach, president of Seattle-based insurance firm MCM,” writeBloomberg’s Nick Turner and Spencer Soper.

“When he and Jim Sinegal started it, everyone thought it was a tough sale because so many warehouse clubs had failed,” Meisenbach tells them. “They stuck to their guns in not trying to be a fancy place, and they took care of their employees.”

Costco had about $120 billion in sales last year, although Amazon recently passed it as the No. 2 retailer to Walmart. With 50 million members, Ronald Holden writes for Forbes, “it's the nation's largest seller of organic produce; a major supplier of fresh meat, seafood and poultry; it has a massive private-label (Kirkland) business for its clothing lines, canned goods and liquor. It sells $4 billion a year worth of wine.”

Brotman, who was born in Tacoma, studied political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a law degree there in 1967. He was “an early investor in Starbucks, and he was a major supporter of Democratic political campaigns,” according to a Washington Post obit.

In addition to his brother, Brotman is survived by his wife of 41 years, the former Susan Thrailkill, a former Nordstrom executive, children Amanda and Justin, and two grandchildren.

“The names ‘Jeff and Susan Brotman’ are (discreetly) displayed on doorways and walls of major cultural institutions around Seattle (symphony, art museum, etc.), but he will be remembered as much for his insistence on the common touch: Costco's $1.50 hotdog,” Holden, who wroteForking Seattle, concludes.

“Brotman credited his upbringing to his local ties and philanthropy, the SeattlePI’s Zosha Millman writes for SFGate, pointing to an article in HistoryLink that quotes him as saying: “Helping the disadvantaged, encouraging diversity, fostering a community that treats its people well — these were values I learned from my parents, as well as in Sunday school, values from Rabbi Richard Rosenthal, my rabbi at Temple Beth El, and my grandfather, who helped with the movement to plant trees in Israel. When I see some of the fundamental unfairness built into the system for people who are less fortunate, and couple that with my family's tradition of helping others, I am compelled to act, compelled to give what I can to help.”