Costco annual revenue

It turns out that as Americans have grown collectively wealthier—demonstrated by their willingness to buy industrial quantities of rotisserie chicken and paper towels in bulk—they have also, mysteriously, become more likely to be killed by dogs. One might have expected these two phenomena to move in opposite directions, the way one expects gravity to work, but the universe prefers irony to logic. The correlation sits at 0.905, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians nervous and pattern-seekers insufferable.

Both trends likely ride the coattails of a single, rather mundane third variable: population growth and urbanization. More Americans means more dogs, more dog-owning households, and more fatal encounters—the tragic arithmetic of larger crowds. Meanwhile, Costco's revenue has climbed steadily alongside GDP growth and disposable income, particularly in suburban and exurban areas where people keep more pets and buy things in alarming bulk. Between 2010 and 2023, the US population grew by roughly 8 percent, which feels small until you realize it represents about 26 million additional people, many of whom now live in the exact neighborhoods where both Costco warehouses and unvaccinated pit bulls flourish.

This is what happens when you plot any two things that both trend upward over fourteen years: they will inevitably appear to be dancing together, even when one is about membership discounts and the other is about preventable tragedy. We are creatures who see the fox's face in the frost, and this correlation is just the modern equivalent, dressed in revenue reports and veterinary records. The real scandal isn't that Costco and dog fatalities correlate. It's that we're genuinely surprised when they do.