[15] Costco's earliest predecessor, Price Club, opened its first store on July 12, 1976, on Morena Boulevard in San Diego, California.

[32] They had originally planned to move by December 1993 to Redmond, another Eastside city, but delays in road construction near the warehouse site caused the company to reconsider.

The largest shareholders as of September 2024 are:[102] Costco is a membership-only warehouse which generates a majority of its profits from membership fees and a small percentage from retail sales.

For example, in November 2009, Costco announced that it would stop selling Coca-Cola products because the soft-drink maker refused to lower its wholesale prices.

[109][110] Finally, Costco insists that manufacturers must package their products in large sizes and properly arrange them on pallets suitable for deployment to its warehouses.

[7] From the perspective of small manufacturers, the reward for jumping through all these hoops to sell products to Costco is the possibility of obtaining international distribution through the company's warehouses in other countries.

[114] Rotisserie chickens are a major driver of customer traffic and sales for Costco, which has sold them since 1994 amid the then-rising popularity of Boston Market.

[115][116] In response to the annual growth of per-capita chicken consumption in the United States,[117] Costco opened a factory in Nebraska in 2019 that implemented vertical integration across all aspects of poultry production in a bid to keep their pricing intact while maintaining consistent quality control of them.

[7] For example, Ron Vachris started in 1982 as a forklift driver at a Price Club in Arizona and became only the third chief executive officer in Costco's history in 2024.

[126][127] Instacart offers Costco delivery in a select number of states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

[133] While initially focusing on bulk, boxed items easily displayed in store by removing the stretch wrap from a pallet, Costco's offerings now[when?]

[citation needed] These range from art, books, caskets,[134][135] and clothing, to computer software, fine wine, furniture, home appliances, electronics, hot tubs, jewelry, and various perishable goods like dairy, baked items, flowers, produce, meat, and seafood.

[citation needed] Beyond products, many Costco warehouses feature additional services including gas stations, pharmacies,[136] hearing aid centers, optometry and eyewear departments, and tire installation garages.

In some places, separate liquor stores exist to adhere to licensing laws, whereas in others, alcohol is available within the main warehouse alongside general merchandise.

[143][144] For the October 2024 opening of Costco's first warehouse in Napa, California, die-hard whiskey fans began camping out on the sidewalk six days in advance.

[citation needed] However, in New Zealand, Costco's sole warehouse in West Auckland is restricted from selling alcohol due to a local monopoly on liquor retail.

[158] Notable co-branded products include those from Chinet, Jelly Belly, Keurig Green Mountain, Ocean Spray, Stearns & Foster, and Starbucks.

[159] Additionally, while some Kirkland Signature products maintain a generic label, they are produced in partnership with recognized companies such as Duracell and Niagara Bottling.

"[164] Costco offers a free "concierge" service to members who purchase electronics, to help answer questions regarding setup and use and avoid potential returns due to not understanding how to use the products.

[189] Costco started selling a cheeseburger with a 1⁄3-pound (150 g) patty at select stores across Western Washington and Southern California in mid-2017 as a test item, with comparisons drawn to those of Shake Shack.

The Costco Home warehouses sold furniture, housewares, kitchen products and accessories from higher-end brands such as Lexington, Ralph Lauren and Waterford[223] in a warehouse-club setting.

[228] The concept was dropped the following year, but the company retained interest in building a normal Costco store at the Bellevue site until 2008, when they abandoned the plans due to zoning regulations that would have required daylighting an underground creek.

[233] In 2012, Mercy for Animals conducted another undercover investigation of a pork supplier to major retailers such as Costco, Walmart, Safeway, Kroger, and Kmart.

[242] An undercover worker at Hillandale Farms, a major egg supplier to Costco, filmed conditions in which egg-laying hens lived in tiny wire cages.

[244] Following efforts by animal protection nonprofits including The Humane League,[245] Costco released an updated commitment to source exclusively cage-free eggs in its operations.

[248][249] Costco denied the allegations, but the video sparked a discussion about animal welfare problems continuing to exist at cage-free egg farms.

[248] Writing in The Huffington Post, DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung argued that the new investigation, rather than suggesting that Costco should keep birds in cages, indicated that hens should have the right not to be raised for food or kept on farms at all.

[255][256] Costco was criticized in 2019 by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and SumOfUs for using virgin Canadian boreal forest to make its toilet paper.

[265][266] In June 2023, an employee named Kim Dong Ho in Hanam, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea who was assigned to organize shopping carts, died of heatstroke while at work.

[270] In August 2023, the Environment Agency of Iceland fined Costco ISK 20 million for a diesel spill originating from a gas station in Garðabær, which contaminated the Hafnarfjörður sewage system.