Costco annual revenue

It appears that somewhere around 2010, the universe decided that bulk warehouse membership and audio soliloquising would expand in perfect synchronisation, as though some cosmic accountant had decreed that for every additional pallet of rotisserie chicken sold, exactly one more person needed to record themselves discussing the Mandela Effect. One wonders whether the correlation actually runs deeper than we think, or whether we're simply witnessing two entirely unrelated phenomena that have both benefitted from the same underlying force—which is to say, humanity's seemingly infinite appetite for more of everything, all at once.

The real culprit here is almost certainly economic expansion itself, the great rising tide that lifted both membership-based retail and digital content creation between 2010 and 2023. As disposable income grew, so did people's ability to afford Costco memberships and the leisure time required to listen to 47-minute discussions about ergonomic keyboards. Meanwhile, the infrastructure that powered streaming—broadband penetration, smartphone ubiquity, cloud storage dropping from expensive to laughably cheap—created the conditions for podcast proliferation the way a warm, wet summer creates conditions for mushrooms. To give you a sense of scale: in 2010 there were roughly 10,000 podcasts; by 2023 there were over 2 million, which is roughly equivalent to saying that if podcasts were actual people, an entire country the size of Jamaica would have appeared, all of them speaking directly into USB microphones.

What we're witnessing is not causation but rather two swimmers caught in the same current, each convinced the other is pulling them along. The data suggests that Costco's fortunes and the podcast explosion were bound together by invisible threads of economic circumstance and technology adoption, not by any logical connection whatsoever. Sometimes the universe really is just that weird. Two things happened together. That's all.