Costco annual revenue

It turns out that the price of a pint in Britain and the annual revenue of a warehouse club that sells toilet paper in bulk to people who are terrified of running out have moved in perfect tandem for thirteen years, which suggests either that British drinkers are funding Costco's expansion through some mechanism neither of us understands, or that we are all just passengers on the same vast economic conveyor belt, watching the numbers tick upward together and calling it correlation.

What's actually happening here, I suspect, is that both are passengers on the same inflationary joyride. Costco's revenue depends on rising consumer spending and general economic growth, while pub prices rise with input costs—grain, energy, labour—all of which climb together during expansions and plateau during recessions. Between 2010 and 2023, we experienced precisely the kind of sustained, if uneven, economic recovery that would lift both: a pint went from about £3.50 to £5.20, a rise of nearly 50 percent, while Costco's annual revenue climbed from roughly $77 billion to $242 billion. Same inflation, same growth, same invisible hand nudging both variables northward.

The real lesson isn't that Costco is somehow dependent on British drinking habits, but rather that our appetite for pattern-finding exceeds our patience for confounding variables. Both datasets are simply riding the same economic tide, which is far less interesting than a causal connection, but vastly more true. Humans see ghosts in correlations.