As of November 2025, Costco operates 924 warehouses worldwide.
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37 in Japan
29 in the United Kingdom
20 in South Korea
15 in Australia
14 in Taiwan
7 in China
5 in Spain
3 in France
2 in Sweden
1 in Iceland
1 in New Zealand
The company's warehouses throughout the world are all similarly designed, featuring generally identical layout, signage, and parking lot markings. A typical warehouse uses a simple loop for its main corridor from the entrance to the checkout area. Costco has contracted with architecture firm MG2 for over 800 of its locations, which are typically built within a 110-day schedule.
Food court menus are tailored for local preferences, with meat pies on offer in Australia; poutine in Canada; seafood-topped pizza in Asian locations; pastor taco-topped pizzas in Mexico; clam chowder in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; plokkfiskur in Iceland; and jacket potatoes in the United Kingdom.
In Canada, the company participates in the voluntary Scanner Price Accuracy Code managed by the Retail Council of Canada.
Warehouses in mixed-use development
In September 2024, Costco broke ground on its first-ever mixed-use development in the United States that combines a warehouse store with residential apartments above it. The project, developed in partnership with the real estate developer Thrive Living, includes 800 rental apartments above the 185,000-square-foot (17,200 m2) Costco warehouse in the Baldwin Village neighborhood of South Los Angeles, California. Of the 800 apartments, 184 (23%) will be dedicated to low-income housing, with the remainder offered as workforce and unsubsidized housing. The project is made possible by California's state law AB 2011 for affordable housing, which went into effect on July 1, 2023. On June 1, 2026, Costco announced a second mixed-use store modeled after the Los Angeles location in Waipahu, Hawaii. The store, across from the Hōʻaeʻae West Loch Skyline metro station, will knock down the currently vacant Don Quijote store and nearby Zippy's restaurant to make way for a new mixed-use Costco Business Center with a gas station. This will be the first mixed-use Costco Business Center in the United States and the first mixed-use Costco with a gas station.
Largest and smallest warehouses
In 2005, Costco's largest store (by area) was in Hillsboro, Oregon, with 148,663 sq ft (13,811.2 m2). In 2015, Costco completed an expansion in Salt Lake City, Utah, making it the new largest Costco at 235,000 sq ft (21,800 m2). The Salt Lake City store was the first to be expanded into a hybrid between the conventional Costco warehouse format and the newer Costco Business Center format, which explains its gigantic size.
In 2023, Costco had planned to build a new warehouse store in Fresno, California, with a 241,000 sq ft (22,400 m2) footprint, making it the largest store. But the city only approved 219,000 sq ft (20,300 m2). In 2019, Costco opened its biggest store in Canada, in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador; the store is 182,000 sq ft (16,900 m2).
As of 2019, the smallest Costco is in Juneau, Alaska at 76,696 sq ft (7,125.3 m2). The warehouse is the only one left from a 1993 initiative in which Costco experimented with small-format warehouses. Although the company concluded that the small format does not work for most markets, it determined that the format was acceptable for Juneau.
Costco Business Centers
Costco Business Centers are warehouses similar to regular Costco warehouses and are open to all Costco members, regardless of membership type. Their merchandise caters primarily to businesses, with a focus on small businesses. Business Centers do not carry most consumer items, such as clothing, jewelry, media, and tires, but do carry larger quantities and more options of business products. More than 70% of the items that can be acquired from a Costco Business Center are not found in a typical Costco store. Some locations have a food court, a gas station, or both. They have ample parking space for trucks and can deliver goods to businesses in bulk, with a $25 delivery charge for orders below $250. Costco Business Center operating hours are shorter than regular warehouses (usually opening at 7:00 am on Mondays to Saturdays and closed on Sundays), while discounts and coupons for Business Centers are issued separately from regular warehouses.
The first Business Center was a converted Costco warehouse in Lynnwood, Washington, which reopened in October 1996, following renovations; the change was made after a conventional Costco warehouse had opened in nearby Everett.
Costco Home Showroom
In 2022, Costco opened a Costco Home Showroom in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and then opened a second one in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2024. A third one opened in Pearl City, Hawaii, in 2024.
Unlike traditional Costco warehouses and the defunct Costco Home format, the Home Showroom format is not a cash-and-carry store. The showroom cannot sell goods on the spot to members to take home with them that same day; members must place orders to be delivered to their homes. It is merely a showroom for "expensive, large, and bulky items" like furniture and appliances. Costco had already begun to offer a broader selection of furniture and appliances through Costco.com than it could fit into its traditional warehouses, but found that it was "daunting" for many people to order those items online without having first touched, felt, and seen the goods in person.
Costco Standalone Gas Stations
In 2026, Costco opened its first standalone gas station in Mission Viejo, California. A second one will be opening up in Honolulu, Hawaii, with full development expected to be completed in 2027.
Business model
Costco is a membership-only warehouse where customers must purchase a membership to access the warehouse and make purchases. Revenue from membership fees accounts for the majority of the company's profits, accounting for over 72% of the company's net operating income in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, and 65.5% in fiscal year 2024.
Costco divides its business into three segments for reporting revenue and operating income. The segments, ordered by size, are:
United States Operations (72.4% of total revenue)
Other International Operations (13.9% of total revenue)
Canadian Operations (13.7% of total revenue)
Sales model
One company rule states that no regular item may be marked up more than 14% over cost, and no Kirkland Signature item may be marked up more than 15% over cost. The company runs very lean, with overhead costs at about 10% of revenue and profit margins at 2%. For example, Costco has no public relations department and buys no outside advertising.
Costco's sales model focuses on limited selection over variety. Although consumer products often come in wide different varieties, Costco will not carry most of those variants, but instead will carry only one or two examples of what is essentially the same product and try to sell a higher volume of units at a lower price. Thus, a typical Costco warehouse carries only 3,700 distinct products, while a typical Walmart Supercenter carries approximately 140,000 products. If the wholesale price of any individual product is too high, they will refuse to stock the product. For example, in November 2009, Costco announced it would stop selling Coca-Cola products because the soft drink maker refused to lower its wholesale prices. Costco resumed selling Coca-Cola products the following month. Finally, Costco insists that manufacturers must package their products in large sizes and properly arrange them on pallets suitable for deployment to its warehouses. However, unlike most chain stores, Costco does not sell shelf space to manufacturers.
Due to its size and its selective approach to buying products, Costco has become an "arbiter" between manufacturers and consumers. To some small manufacturers, the reward for jumping through numerous hoops to sell products to Costco opens the possibility of obtaining international distribution through the company's warehouses in other countries. If a manufacturer's product is popular at warehouses in its home country, Costco may look into whether members in other countries might also be interested in that product.
Although the company engages in visible efforts to reduce costs, the stores themselves are expensive. In 2013, Costco spent approximately $80 million on each of the new stores it opened.
The cost is partly driven by real estate, as each new store requires enough space to support a building approximately 150,000 square feet (14,000 m2) in size, a large parking lot, and often a gas station. Lighting costs are reduced on sunny days because most Costco locations have several skylights. During the day, electronic light meters measure how much light is coming in the skylights and turn off an appropriate percentage of the interior lights. During an average sunny day, it is normal for the center section of the warehouse not to have interior lights in use.
Rotisserie chickens are a major driver of customer traffic and sales for Costco, which has sold them since 1994 amid the then-rising popularity of Boston Market. In response to the annual growth of per-capita chicken consumption in the United States, Costco opened a factory in Nebraska in 2019 that implemented vertical integration across all aspects of poultry production in a bid to keep its pricing intact while maintaining consistent quality control of them. In some international markets, Costco also offers sushi that is made in-house; the Issaquah warehouse became the first US store to have in-house sushi in 2023.
Costco is known for its "exit greeters", who briefly compare receipts against shopping cart contents as customers exit. They are trained to quickly count cart contents and serve as customer service to verify that customers were charged correctly, have redeemed any voucher-based items (e.g., tickets), and have not missed items in the lower racks of their cart. Costco has used exit greeters since its first store opened in Seattle in 1983.
Management model
Costco is known for a strong corporate culture which encourages and rewards loyalty and promotes from within. As of 2024, Costco claims to have a retention rate over 90% for new employees who make it to one year. Many of its senior executives started as front-line employees in its warehouses and spent many years rising through the ranks to reach their current positions. For example, Ron Vachris started in 1982 as a forklift driver at a Price Club in Arizona and became only the third chief executive officer in Costco's history in 2024. Since 95% of the company's workforce is in its warehouses, and so many of its executives started their careers there, the company's culture is tightly focused on supporting the warehouse experience.
At Costco headquarters in Issaquah, all 7,000 headquarters employees sit in cubicles, including the chief executive officer. However, the CEO does get to have a slightly larger cubicle. All Costco executives are expected to get out of the office regularly and spend the majority of their time in the field visiting warehouses and solving problems. The CEO attempts to visit as many warehouses as possible around the world in a cycle every 18 to 24 months, while executives responsible for smaller geographical areas are expected to visit all the warehouses under their supervision much more often.
Online shopping
Costco primarily focuses on getting members to come in to a warehouse for purchases, instead of ordering products online. In November 1998, the company launched Costco Online, its online shopping site. The site expanded to incorporate B2B e-commerce on April 17, 2001. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Costco's online sales increased dramatically, with more online sales growth in 2020 than the previous five years combined.
Costco operates online stores in only some of the countries in which it has warehouses: the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. Instacart offers Costco delivery in a select number of states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia. In Canada, Costco uses Instacart for online grocery delivery for non–dry goods, pantry staples, and household essentials.
Similarly, in March 2017, Costco initiated a partnership with Shipt, an online grocery delivery service. Unlike Instacart, Shipt charges its own membership fee, $99 a year or $14 a month, in exchange for free delivery on orders over $35. As of November 2018, Shipt offers Costco delivery in select Florida markets. In October 2017, Costco launched same-day and two-day grocery delivery options for members. In Iceland, Costco began in June 2023 to allow individuals over the age of 20 to purchase alcoholic beverages online and pick them up at the warehouse stores. The "click and collect" arrangement was previously only available to businesses with a liquor license.
Products
Costco frequently rotates its inventory, often stocking items temporarily or seasonally. In 2017, Sinegal described this as a "treasure-hunt atmosphere". This model creates a "sense of urgency" in shoppers to impulsively buy a good deal as soon as they spot one because it may not be available at the next visit.
Over the years, Costco has significantly expanded its product range. While initially focusing on bulk, boxed items easily displayed in store by removing the stretch wrap from a pallet, Costco's offerings now include a diverse array of items of all shapes and sizes. These range from art, books, caskets, and clothing, to computer software, fine wine, furniture, home appliances, electronics, hot tubs, jewelry, and various perishable goods like dairy, baked items, flowers, produce, meat, and seafood. Other items, such as solar panels, tires, and vacuum cleaners, have also found their way into Costco's product lineup. Its growth has led it to become a dominant purchaser for some goods. As of 2025, Costco sold more than half of the world's cashews, for example, with direct implications for over a million cashew farmers in Africa.
Beyond products, many Costco warehouses feature additional services including gas stations, pharmacies, hearing aid centers, optometry and eyewear departments, and tire installation garages.
Alcohol
Alcohol sales at Costco vary by location due to differing regulations. In some places, separate liquor stores exist to comply with licensing laws, whereas in others, alcohol is available in the main warehouse alongside general merchandise. In certain states, like Texas, liquor sales must be conducted by a separate business entity with its own staff.
Costco's desire to alter its alcohol sales structure in its home state faced a setback in 2006 when it lost its court battle against the state of Washington's requirement for retailers to buy wine through the state-controlled system. The company then changed strategies. Costco spent over $22 million to support Initiative 1183, compared with $11.75 million from opponents, making it "the most expensive initiative fight" in Washington's history. In the November 8, 2011, election, Initiative 1183 passed with 60 percent of the vote and led to the demolition of Washington's government's monopoly on the distribution of liquor and spirits for retail sale through state-owned and state-licensed liquor stores.
The Costco warehouses with the largest wine departments have a "wine steward" who roams the department and advises Costco customers on which wines best suit their needs. As of October 2024, Costco employed about 30 wine stewards at its US warehouses. In the 21st century, Costco has made its store openings into special events by featuring special selections of whiskey, wine, and other alcoholic beverages that are extremely rare and not normally sold at its warehouses, or extremely cheap, or both. For the October 2024 opening of Costco's first warehouse in Napa, California, die-hard whiskey fans began camping out on the sidewalk six days in advance.
International operations must navigate regional laws as well. For example, Costco's first store in Victoria, Australia, operates under the country's relatively liberal alcohol licensing laws, allowing sales directly off the shelf as is common in most European countries. However, in New Zealand, Costco's sole warehouse in West Auckland is restricted from selling alcohol due to a local monopoly on liquor retail.
Books
For its first four decades, Costco was a major American bookseller in its own right, in an era in which e-commerce giant Amazon and big-box bookstore chain Barnes & Noble were wiping out traditional bookstores. Costco became one of the few American brick-and-mortar retail outlets where many shoppers who rarely visited bookstores could easily detour to the book section to browse hard-copy books, discover books they might not have otherwise noticed, and buy them right away. When Costco chose to buy any particular book, it usually acquired tens of thousands of copies, which was important to a publishing industry where a print run of 50,000 copies is a big deal.
In the 2020s, Costco management reportedly began considering discontinuing books as a year-round product category because they are extremely labor intensive. New books must be unpacked and laid out by hand on tables when released each Tuesday, while books that failed to sell must be manually collected and returned to their publishers.
In 2022, Costco quietly closed the year-round book sections in its Alaska and Hawaii warehouses. In June 2024, several publishing executives warned that in January 2025, Costco was planning to do the same across its 600 warehouses in the contiguous United States. In other words, books would become just one more rotating inventory item for eight months each year and would reappear as a full section only during the holiday shopping season in the last four months of each year. This was deeply alarming to a publishing industry already facing stagnating book sales. In November 2024, Costco agreed to keep year-round book sections for the time being in 100 of its 600 mainland US warehouses.
Gold and platinum bullion products
Costco began selling one-ounce, 24-karat gold bars in October 2023. While typically selling for about 2% above the spot price, Costco offers 2% cash back for executive members and another 2% for users of certain credit cards. Thus, it is seen as a low-profit venture for Costco and a loss leader for increasing store memberships.
In 2024, following the success of gold bar products, Costco began selling platinum.9995 fine bars as a direct-to-consumer product eligible for purchase on its website.
Kirkland Signature
Kirkland Signature is Costco's private label brand, featured on a wide array of products sold across Costco's warehouses and its website. Launched in 1995, the brand takes its name from the original location of Costco's corporate headquarters in Kirkland, Washington. It accounts for nearly one-third of the company's sales and outpaces the growth of Costco's overall sales. In 2024, the Kirkland Signature brand recorded $86 billion in revenue. The Kirkland Signature brand aimed to offer products with name-brand quality at discounted prices. Costco has adopted a strategy of co-branding certain items with well-known manufacturers to bolster consumer trust. Notable co-branded products include those from Chinet, Jelly Belly, Keurig Green Mountain, Ocean Spray, Stearns & Foster, Walker's Shortbread and Starbucks. Additionally, while some Kirkland Signature products maintain a generic label, they are produced in partnership with other companies. From the perspective of manufacturers, one advantage of entering into a Kirkland Signature private label deal is that it frees them from the burden of sales and marketing campaigns to establish brand awareness among consumers.
Services
Concierge service
Costco offers a free "concierge" service to members who purchase electronics to help answer questions about setup and use, and to avoid potential returns due to not understanding how to use the products.
Costco Auto and Home Insurance
Costco has an agreement with CONNECT, powered by American Family Insurance, for auto insurance, home insurance, and umbrella insurance.
Costco Optical
Costco Optical ranks as the fifth-largest optical company in the US, as of 2015. Optometrists working at Costco locations will see patients without Costco memberships, although a membership is required to fill a prescription at the optical department.
Costco Travel
Costco Travel is a wholly owned subsidiary of Costco Wholesale and offers leisure travel to Costco members of the United States and Canada. The program offers vacation packages to the Caribbean, Europe, Florida, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Mexico, and the South Pacific.
Food service
In 1985, Costco began to sell food through a hot dog cart at its original Seattle warehouse. Most Costco locations now have a food court. They can be indoors or outdoors, but the menu is essentially the same: hot dog with drink (one of the most popular items), pizza, frozen yogurt/ice cream, Coca-Cola beverages, baked items, and sandwiches. Costco offers its signature quarter-pound 100% beef hot dog and 20 US fluid ounces (590 ml) drink (with refills) for US$1.50, the same price since 1985. Some US locations also offer Polish sausage or bratwurst in addition to hot dogs, at the same $1.50 price.
In a July 2024 interview, CEO Ron Vachris reiterated Costco's commitment to the US$1.50 price point for the hot dog combo and promised that the price would not rise on his watch.
In 2009, due to slow sales, the pretzel was replaced by the churro. In April 2013, Pepsi replaced all Coca-Cola fountain drinks sold at US locations because Coke had raised its prices; this helped keep the hot dog combo with soda at its original US$1.50 price; however, in late 2024, it was reported that Costco would be reverting to Coca-Cola products in early 2025. Warehouses began the transition in July 2025.
Costco credit card
On April 1, 2016, in the US, Citigroup became the exclusive issuer of Costco's branded credit cards. Before that, Costco credit cards had been issued by American Express since 2001, and Costco accepted only American Express cards for credit transactions. After switching its co-branded cards to Citi, Costco ceased accepting AmEx and began accepting Visa exclusively. AmEx cited Costco's request for lower transaction fees than AmEx was willing to grant as the reason for the split. In Canada, Costco ended its AmEx relationship in 2014, and starting in 2015, it partnered with Capital One Mastercard for branded credit cards. In 2020, Capital One announced it would be ending the partnership in late 2021. It was announced that beginning in March 2022, Costco will begin a partnership with CIBC Mastercard. Costco branded credit cards from both issuers also serve as alternate Costco membership cards, with a customized reverse side containing membership info.
Costco Audiobook App
In March 2021, Costco started selling audiobooks and launched a corresponding iOS and Android app to listen to purchases. The app is free; however, the books are exclusive to Costco members. The retailer sells audiobooks in bundles grouped by genre or author, with prices ranging from $5 to $50. Audiobooks are currently only available in the US.
