Costco annual revenue

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Americans spend more money on bulk mayonnaise and rotisserie chickens, they become proportionally more interested in people in tights punching each other. This is almost certainly not true, yet here we are: Costco revenue and the US comic book market, moving together through the 2010s like two dancers who have never met but are reading the same instruction manual. One involves wholesale toilet paper, the other involves Batman. The universe appears to have a sense of humor that operates at the level of a tired middle manager.

What's actually happening here, and what kept me awake longer than I'd like to admit, is that both markets are riding the same economic wave. When consumer confidence ticks up, people have more discretionary income to spend on graphic novels about sad billionaires, and they also feel emboldened to commit to a Costco membership. Population growth adds another layer—America added roughly 30 million people between 2010 and 2022, all of them theoretically capable of needing bulk cheese and superhero content. The real confounding variable is probably underlying economic growth itself, a rising tide that lifts all boats, whether those boats are transporting frozen shrimp or pristine first editions of Ms. Marvel. Both markets also benefited from cultural legitimacy: as comic culture became less niche and more mainstream, and as Costco became less discount warehouse and more middle-class pilgrimage site, they simply grew together because the same people were becoming wealthier and more comfortable with both purchases.

We are pattern-matching creatures in a universe that contains roughly infinite patterns, which means we will find correlations between Costco and comics the way we find faces in clouds. What's genuinely odd is not that these numbers moved in tandem, but that we find this surprising at all. The real question is not whether one caused the other, but what this says about how tightly braided consumer behavior has become in an economy this complex. We may never know why. We probably shouldn't need to.