Costco annual revenue

The annual revenue of Costco has tracked Stack Overflow's question count with worrying precision, as though the warehouse club were somehow underwriting global software development. The bulk packs of paper towels, it turns out, do not generate React errors. They merely accompany them.

Two of the great compounding curves of the 2010s. Costco's revenue has grown almost monotonically as it added stores, expanded e-commerce, and benefited from inflation, while Stack Overflow's question volume rose with the global developer population through the 2010s before plateauing and then dipping as ChatGPT absorbed the easy questions. Two industries scaling on the same decade's tailwinds.

So the correlation is two membership economies growing together, one in groceries and one in code. Both peaked before they thought they would. Both are still recovering from being too big.