> this is a wild fantasy when dealing with any commercial entity with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. "Fiduciary duty" is less strict than you'd e

> this is a wild fantasy when dealing with any commercial entity with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. "Fiduciary duty" is less strict than you'd expect. Courts generally recognize a "business judgment rule," where executives are offered broad discretion in strategy subject to some basic reasonability tests. This would allow Costco to say "in order to cultivate goodwill and maintain our reputation, after we receive refunds we will distribute them to our customers based on purchased goods with refunded tariffs." It would also allow the directors to book the refund as profits, or use it for later incentives or marketing, or a variety of other actions. The 'fiduciary duty' aspect here is mostly a myth. Directors do indeed have a fiduciary duty, but that duty is towards the corporation as a whole – including its long-term interests – rather than strictly towards short-term profit maximization. The fiduciary duty doctrine exists more to prevent graft and self-dealing, where managers and directors 'loot' the company by smuggling out profits in ways that benefit themselves personally rather than the company as a whole.