Costco annual revenue

Costco's annual revenue and the number of self-published books in the US tracked each other with a 0.97 correlation between 2010 and 2023, which raises the possibility that somewhere in a Costco warehouse there is a pallet of memoirs about the experience of buying things at Costco. Both institutions share a certain democratic ethos: anyone can publish a book, anyone can buy a 48-pack of paper towels, and in both cases the sheer volume on offer creates the comfortable illusion that abundance equals quality. The data does not confirm this. The data merely notes the parallel.

Costco's revenue grew from roughly $88 billion in 2010 to over $238 billion by 2023, driven by membership growth, expansion into new markets, and the consistent appeal of its warehouse model during inflationary periods. US self-published titles grew from around 130,000 per year in 2010 to over 2 million by the early 2020s, fueled by Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform lowering barriers to entry. Both trends reflect the same underlying shift: digital platforms and scale economics democratizing access to distribution, whether for retail goods or creative content, across the same period of platform economy expansion.

Democratization of distribution tends to happen in waves across industries at the same time, leaving correlations in its wake. The warehouse and the e-book platform are both symptoms of the same structural revolution.