Costco annual revenue

It is a curious thing that the amount of bulk toilet paper Americans can afford to buy in industrial quantities moves in almost perfect harmony with the price of sitting in a dark room for two hours, which suggests either that we are all secretly the same organism making collective economic decisions, or that the universe enjoys a joke at our expense. The correlation is 0.983, which is to say, almost embarrassingly perfect. One begins to wonder if there is anything that does not move in lockstep with everything else.

The truth, as it usually is, belongs to a third party: inflation. Between 2010 and 2023, the US economy simply expanded in most directions simultaneously, like a balloon that nobody quite meant to blow up. Costco's revenue grew because wages rose (slightly), populations grew (measurably), and people needed to buy more of everything—from paper products to frozen salmon—while movie theatres, caught in their own spiral of rising labour costs and dwindling attendance, began charging $15 for a popcorn-adjacent experience that used to cost $8. Both were simply being swept along by the same tide of rising operational costs and inflation. To put it in perspective: the average ticket price climbed from about $7.89 to $10.65 during this period, while Costco's annual revenue went from roughly $77 billion to $242 billion. One grew modestly; the other grew dramatically. And yet they moved together, like two passengers on the same train who happen to be reading different books.

What we have witnessed here is not causation but conspiracy—the conspiracy of economic gravity, pulling most large numbers upward at roughly the same pace. The correlation between Costco revenue and movie ticket prices does not mean that bulk purchasing causes cinema prices to rise, nor the reverse; it means both are obedient to larger forces that neither of them quite understands. This is oddly comforting, in the way that discovering you are not special is sometimes comforting. We are all just riding the same escalator.