Costco annual revenue

There is something deeply, cosmically wrong with a universe in which the number of Americans killed by vehicles correlates almost perfectly with the number of Americans buying bulk mayonnaise, yet here we are, watching both climb in perfect synchronisation from 2010 to 2022 as though governed by a single invisible hand. One might assume the universe operates according to some meaningful principle, but it turns out the universe simply enjoys watching us squirm. The real miracle is that we noticed this at all.

The real culprit is almost certainly economic growth itself, which is a tide that lifts all boats and also, regrettably, all vehicles. When the economy expands, people buy more goods (hence Costco's swelling revenue), but they also spend more time on roads, drive longer distances, and populate parking lots where pedestrians and vehicles negotiate their complicated relationship with all the grace of shoppers reaching for the same rotisserie chicken. Overlay this with vehicle miles travelled—which rose steadily over the same period—and you have your explanation, though it's admittedly less fun than imagining that bulk-buying and road deaths are somehow mysteriously linked. The correlation is real; the causation is just boringly mundane: both are passengers in the same economic vehicle.

We are a species genuinely skilled at spotting patterns even when the patterns are just two unrelated phenomena riding the same wave of underlying economic expansion. Costco's revenue and pedestrian fatalities climbed together not because one caused the other but because they both responded to the same broad social and economic currents that move through a growing, increasingly mobile society. Which is somehow less reassuring than if they were actually connected.