Costco annual revenue

Costco's revenue and Alibaba's Singles Day totals have grown together with such precision that one suspects a single shopper darting between continents. There is, of course, no such shopper. The bulk packs and the flash sales merely happen to be popular on the same planet.

Two separate growth stories tied to the same global retail expansion. Costco's revenue climbed as it added stores, expanded e-commerce, and benefited from inflation, while Alibaba's Singles Day grew into the world's largest shopping event as Chinese e-commerce matured. Two of the dominant retail engines of the 2010s, both compounding on the same decade's tailwinds.

So the correlation is two retail giants on opposite sides of the Pacific, both getting larger. Neither needed the other. Both kept ringing up.