Costco Wholesale Corporation is an American warehouse and retail store club developed all over the world. It occupies the fifth place in the USA in the sale volume. It is impossible to enter Costco as a usual store, entrance and shopping are available only to club card holders. The cards are purchased for a year; their cost is about $100 for a gold one allowing to return certain percentage of purchase costs once a year (at the end of the year the holders receive a check) and about $55 for an ordinary card. In other countries, the cards have the same price paid with local currency. A distinctive feature of Costco shopping is large volume of packs, cans and bags. It allows making the prices lower, which is important for a big family. Costco provides possibility of online purchasing. For this, one should live in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom and may have no club card, but the prices will be a little higher in this case. The store arrangement is very carefully planned, though may seem chaotic at first. Company’s managers often move necessary things to other departments turning the shopping process into an adventure and thus increasing the sales.
Costco is headquartered in Issaquah, Washington.
The first Costco store was opened by James D. Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman on September 15, 1983 in Seattle, Washington.
In 1993, Costco announced its merging with Price Club located in Quebec, Canada. Due to the business model similarity, the integration was fast and doubled the business size in fact.
As of November, 2016, the company had 723 warehouses in such countries as the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Spain.
In addition to selling foodstuffs, Costco is the United States second car seller regularly uniting and carrying out joint actions with car brands.