Costco Wholesale

Leaders in all industries rely more than ever on Big Tech—and appreciate the giants that deliver, at scale, without drama.

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The corporations on our annual list posted aggregate revenues of $41 trillion for the second year in a row.

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Industries included in the sector are automotive retail, general merchandisers, internet retail, and specialty retail.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Retailing

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

Fortune 500

The 26th edition of the list shows how much esteem Big Tech giants command among other business leaders.

WMA 2024-Costco

The 25th Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies list suggests that tech giants’ peers respect them as much as ever.

The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

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The retail giant, beloved for its bulk discounts and its $1.50 hot-dog-and-soda combo, continued to benefit from the return to in-person shopping. Revenue rose 16% in 2022 over the previous year, while profits rose 17%. 
<ul> 
 	<li>At the end of its fiscal second quarter in March 2023, the company claimed a 92.6% membership renewal rate.</li> 
 	<li>As of May 2023, Costco had 123 million member-cardholders, in 14 nations; 852 warehouses; and 304,000 full- and part-time employees worldwide.</li> 
</ul>

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

F500 2023-Costco

Just as it dominates our economy, Big Tech now dominates Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation.

WMAC 2022-11-Costco

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

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Costco had a smashing 2021, closing the year in record-breaking style as the pandemic eased and shoppers returned to in-person shopping at their favorite retailers. Costco's $5 billion in net income was 25% higher than in the year prior. With inflation surging to a four-decade high, the wholesaler raised its prices but still saw a 91% membership renewal rate. Like many other employers in the U.S., Costco raised its minimum wage in the fight to retain talent, upping that rate to $17 in October 2021. The warehouse supermarket giant partnered with Uber to trial a delivery service in Texas, and it collaborated with public health authorities to help get America vaccinated against COVID. Seeing more foot traffic in its stores, Costco debuted touchless condiment dispensers in its food courts, and brought back customer favorites like churros and smoothies to its menu. Costco pleased investors as well as shoppers in 2021 by delivering a 52% shareholder return for the year.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

F500 2022 Costco

Costco had a smashing 2021, closing the year in record-breaking style as the pandemic eased and shoppers returned to in-person shopping at their favorite retailers. Costco's $5 billion in net income was 25% higher than in the year prior. With inflation surging to a four-decade high, the wholesaler raised its prices but still saw a 91% membership renewal rate. Like many other employers in the U.S., Costco raised its minimum wage in the fight to retain talent, upping that rate to $17 in October 2021. The warehouse supermarket giant partnered with Uber to trial a delivery service in Texas, and it collaborated with public-health authorities to help get America vaccinated against COVID. Seeing more foot traffic in its stores, Costco debuted touchless condiment dispensers in its food courts, and brought back customer favorites like churros and smoothies to its menu. Costco pleased its investors as well as shoppers in 2021 by delivering a 52% shareholder return for the year.

After a year in which humanity leaned more heavily than ever on tech giants, see which companies topped Fortune's ranking of corporate reputation.

WMAC 2021-10-Costco

Total revenue for the world’s biggest companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year—the first decline in half a decade.

G500-2021-027-Costco

Despite the pandemic, Costco Wholesale drew throngs of shoppers to its stores, as consumers looked to buy everyday staples in bulk. The company quickly adapted to the crisis conditions, making mask-wearing mandatory and giving workers permanent raises to keep them motivated, moves that fueled a 9.2% increase in sales last fiscal year. In addition, Costco’s e-commerce apparatus finally went into high gear, allowing it to better compete against Sam’s Club, among others. Costco’s momentum has continued into 2021, with its hold on members as strong as ever.

These companies use the creative tools of capitalism—including the profit motive—to address society’s unmet needs.

CTW 2021-03-Costco

In the war for retail talent during the pandemic, Costco Wholesale put its money where its mouth is. Already a leader in incentives like paid sick days, Costco in February raised the internal minimum wage for its 200,000-plus–person workforce to $16, keeping the pressure on competitors to pay their own workers more. Not long afterward, Amazon and Walmart each gave raises to hundreds of thousands of their workers. Costco’s reward for its efforts: double-digit percentage increases in sales—long after pandemic panic-buying eased—and customers as loyal as ever.

Change the World

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-12-Costco

For an astounding 13th straight year, Apple claims the top spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation, based on a survey of almost 3,800 executives, directors, and analysts.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits.

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With 782 stores and 99 million membership-card holders worldwide, Costco had a strong 2019, posting an 8% increase in overall revenue. That reflected a 6% boost in same store sales and a 7% gain in membership revenue. Profits, meanwhile, jumped 17%. The company opened its first store in China, located in western Shanghai, last year, and had 139,000 membership sign-ups on its first day of operation there. The retailer has been pushing to expand its ecommerce offerings, including click-and-collect, as well as offering same-day grocery delivery in most of its U.S. locations. It has also begun looking at vertical integration, investing in its own poultry processing plant in Nebraska and in a California greenhouse growing organic lettuce to supply its stores.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-014-Costco

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2019 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.7 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2018 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2017 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2016 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.6 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

Business insiders have spoken: Asked which companies they most admire, more than 4,100 executives, directors, and analysts chose these top 50 All-Stars.

The world's 500 largest companies generated $31.2 trillion in revenues and $1.7 trillion in profits in 2014. Together, this year's Fortune Global 500 employ 65 million people worldwide and are represented by 36 countries.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Nike, Cisco, MasterCard, SABMiller, Vodafone, Google—and 45 other companies that are doing well by doing good.

Global business is back. After limping through a worldwide financial crisis and economic slowdown, the 500 largest companies ranked by revenues shattered all sorts of performance records in 2013: They racked up combined revenues of $31.1 trillion, up 2.5% from 2012, and profits soared 27% to nearly $2 trillion. China’s 95 companies (up from 89 last year) posted $5.8 trillion in revenues. The U.S. has four fewer companies on the list than last year but remains (for now) the country leader, with 128 corporations on the list—including No. 1 Wal-Mart Stores—reporting $8.6 trillion in revenues. 

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

Change The World

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Costco Wholesale is known for its operation of membership warehouses globally, along with its e-commerce websites. The retailer offers branded and private-label products in a range of merchandise categories, including groceries, and is also responsible for gas sales, pharmaceutics, hearing-aid centers, and tire installation centers, among various online services. Costco was founded in 1976.

Q1 2025

AGM 2025

Costco Wholesale (COST): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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costco wholesale

Costco Wholesale is known for its operation of membership warehouses globally, along with its e-commerce websites. The retailer offers branded and private-label products in a range of merchandise categories, including groceries, and is also responsible for gas sales, pharmaceutics, hearing-aid centers, and tire installation centers, among various online services. Costco was founded in 1976.

Costco Wholesale (COST): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

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Bloomberg

Costco switched its Kirkland diapers and parents aren’t happy

/article/costco-kirkland-diapers-thinner-parents-outraged/

Retail Brew

Costco workers now officially make $31 an hour—and can expect raises for the next two years

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A new Ikea location received a record-breaking 3,730 applications for just 150 open roles. Inside the pay and perks luring talent back to retail

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Trump’s tariff war has turned into an egg war at Costco

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Costco switched its Kirkland diapers and parents aren't happy

https://fortune.com/article/costco-kirkland-diapers-thinner-parents-outraged/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2025/03/11/costco-workers-make-31-an-hour-raises-for-next-two-years/?itm_source=parsely-api

The Associated Press

Costco defies Trump's DEI order and embraces diversity as other companies scale back

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The cult of Costco: How one of America's biggest retailers methodically turns casual shoppers into fanatics

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From billions to bankruptcy: How the party died for Party City, and why other retailers could face the same fate

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Arizona Iced Tea founder explains why it still costs less than $1 a can, in a move straight out of Costco's playbook

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Alicia Adamczyk

Costco keeps selling out of gold bars. Experts warn rush is more 'mob mentality' than sound investment decision

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Lila MacLellan

Major players in the anti-DEI movement: Here's who's pressuring Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, IBM, and other Fortune 500 companies to drop their policies

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Irina Ivanova

Costco CFO promises the hot dog and drink combo will never cost more than $1.50

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https://fortune.com/2025/02/28/costco-apple-john-deere-anti-dei-shareholder-proposals-voted-down-trend/?itm_source=parsely-api

How the coronavirus pandemic exposed U.S. supply chain flaws.

The Case of the Missing Toilet Paper

Magazine

How the 2020 pandemic exposed U.S. supply chain flaws.

So at the beginning of the pandemic, toilet paper is suddenly starting to be sold out everywhere. People are buying as much as they can get their hands on because they're worried they're going to be stuck inside for a long time and not be able to go outside because it's not safe. So they need toilet paper and they're not going to work. They're working from home. So all the toilet paper that they might otherwise using at their offices, at restaurants, wherever they go there now using it at home. But everyone says no, there is no real shortage. America is not running out of toilet paper. Um, it will be back in stock in a few weeks. People just need to stop buying quite so much and stop supporting it. But so here we are, two months later into the pandemic, and toilet paper is still really, really hard to find. This is a problem. How are they going to fix it? And so I did a deep dive into the toilet paper industry. Okay, so let's go back to March 12. If you think about it. The day before March 11th is when the WHO declares the coronavirus pandemic, and that is the day that everything changes for everyone. Almost everyone is preparing to work from home, and that's when you start to see people descend on the stores. And that day, toilet paper actually becomes the number one best selling item at grocery stores. Pictures are showing up on social media of fair shelf empty of paper products. That's a scary thing for a lot of people to see, because usually when you go to the grocery store, you can expect to find something as simple as toilet paper. It's not something that's really ever sold out, and all of a sudden it's this hot commodity item that you can't find anywhere. You can find it online. Think Amazon was probably the first place it was sold out and then soon after Walmart Costco, its Kroger's Albertson's. In some parts of the country, they're calling 911 because they can't find toilet paper, and it just shows you that, you know, as people started to panic a little bit, this kind of fuels their panic even more, and so any time they even see a roll of toilet paper there grabbing it because they don't know when they're going to see another one. And so sales actually surged 734% on March 12 for toilet paper. And that's when it becomes the number one best selling item in grocery stores. And it sold out for most of the country. You know, as much as companies and experts try to deny it at first, when everyone starts to perceive there is a shortage, they by going for the stock up on it and therefore perception becomes reality. And that's what's happened here. So even if there wasn't a shortage at the beginning, the perception that there was a shortage has now become reality. So the reason that toilet paper is such a uniquely complex challenge is because of the nature of what it is. I mean, think about it. You know they're bulky white rolls. You can't store a lot of it without investing huge amounts of money, so it's very expensive to make very expensive to store. And so it's become, you know, the kind of poster child of the trend in manufacturing over the past decade called just in time manufacturing. And what it basically means is you're producing just enough to meet demand at the time that it's needed the right amount at the right time delivered to the stores the customer buys it. Nobody's ever storing huge amounts of toilet paper for too long. That makes it a very lean operation. You don't have more than a couple of weeks of toilet paper on hand. I mean, just think about it for Walmart to store that much toilet paper. You're talking extra warehouses. Amazon extremely efficient company does not want to be, you know, having a warehouse full of toilet paper when it could be storing, you know, maybe six times, 10 times as much as something else. Like so for shampoo. Toilet paper is uniquely costly and uniquely capital intensive, and therefore you can't keep a lot of it around at one time. And so here you have the pandemic when it sells out, all at the same time very quickly, and suddenly the supply chain has no chance of catching up. So think about the investment that would be required for companies to produce more toilet paper and have more in hand. So you say you want to produce more tied to church If you want to fill up those bottles. You can open another assembly line for relatively cheap, probably under $10 million to do that with paper. These are huge machines. I mean, like two stories high in terms of machines, huge factories just because of the scale of the rolls of paper and what it takes to do that, you need to invest about 300 million. That's something that no company is going to do. Not to mention the time that it would take to do that. Maybe 18 months when we're not even in the pandemic anymore. Nobody wants to be stuck with mounds and mounds of toilet paper. You have three big players in the toilet paper industry. Um, the first one being Procter and Gamble. They move Charman, Um, and then you have Kimberly Clark, which makes Cotton l and Scott. And the third one is Georgia Pacific, which is not in the Fortune 500. But so, you know, I'm talking to PNG and Kimberly Clark, and what they're telling me is there, you know, doing everything they can to make toilet paper to meet demand. And so what they do is basically all of the down time all the time that it would take every time they want to make, you know, ultra strong versus ultra soft. They would have to stop machines, change at all the packaging, change out all the kinds of paper, and it's a significant amount of downtime. So they said, You know what? We're not gonna do that. We're gonna make fewer kinds of toilet paper, and we're going to keep the machines running. You know, we might take a break for an hour or two times a day. We're gonna have three shifts, maybe some even went from two shifts to three shifts. We're gonna run 24 hours a day, Um, and make as much toilet paper as we possibly can. PNG even says that some of their workers who would normally be in the office and could be working from home are now coming in and working on the floor of the plant just to make sure there's enough toilet paper for America there. Actually, as we speak, collecting all the lessons that they learned and having this huge internal meeting about how can we implement these lessons forward? How can we make sure that we know when there's a demand shock coming. That's something that all of a sudden is going to be selling out and increase production if they need to. But also importantly, at the same time, they don't want to be stuck making too much toilet paper when demand drops off. And as soon as people go back to work, you know demand could drop off a cliff. So importantly, they want to make sure that they can also take production down quickly when they start to get those signals That demand has fallen, and similarly with Kimberly Clark, which has said they've significantly reduced their toilet paper. You know, if you're seeing more kinds of cotton mills through often seeing them rather than the 12 packs, you're seeing them in more four paths and six packs, because that way they can spread the supply across more customers. So whereas one customer might be able to get a 12 pack now, you can have two customers buying six pack three, buying four packs. It's a little bit more fair. It keeps people happy. They're not freaking out. As much as they won't be able to find any toilet paper. They've also realized that Hey, you know, it's much more efficient and consumers don't mind. In fact, they actually like the choices that we're giving them. Maybe we don't quite need as many choices after the pandemic. And so when this all ends, you probably won't see as many different kinds of different toilet paper as you did before. The The industry has been so concerned over the last 10 years about just being so efficient. How do we cut every single cost? How do we beat? Make make sure we're lean, that it doesn't allow for really any of the protection that you could build in If you say, had, you know, a month's worth of toilet paper on hand just in case something happened, the supply chain was disrupted by a hurricane or a snowstorm. They do that to a certain extent when there's some weather, but only regionally. You could never really do that across the whole country. I don't think that I've ever thought before about weird is my toilet paper come from. It's something that we all really take for granted, and so it's really exposed how the modern supply chain that has brought us so much efficiency and made shareholders very happy in terms of cost cutting. Uh, and profits also doesn't really have a lot of buffer, A lot of protection, you know, where a lot of givin it in the case of a huge crisis like this one, where suddenly people need something very, very crucially and just want to buy it all at the same time.

Costco Wholesale

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