Costco
American multinational chain of membership-only stores
Costco Wholesale Corporation is an American multinational corporation that operates a chain of membership-only big-box warehouse club retail stores. As of 2025, Costco is the third-largest retailer in the world, and as of August 2024, the world's largest retailer of beef, poultry, organic produce, and wine, with just under a third of American consumers regularly shopping at Costco warehouses. As of 2026, Costco is ranked 12th on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
Costco's worldwide headquarters are in Issaquah, Washington, an eastern suburb of Seattle. Its Kirkland Signature house label is named after its former location in Kirkland, another eastern Seattle suburb. The company opened its first warehouse (the chain's term for its retail outlets) in Seattle in 1983. Through mergers, Costco's corporate history dates back to 1976, when its former competitor Price Club was founded in San Diego, California.
Costco originally began with a wholesale business model aimed at enrolling businesses as members, and later began enrolling individual consumers and selling products intended for them, including its own private-label brand. As of March 2026, Costco operates 924 warehouses worldwide, with 85% of them being in North America (United States, Canada, and Mexico).
History
Price Club
Costco's earliest predecessor, Price Club, opened its first store on July 12, 1976, on Morena Boulevard in San Diego, California.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Costco” as american multinational chain of membership-only stores. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american multinational chain of membership-only stores. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q715583. VIAF identifies the subject as 131298278. The Library of Congress control number is no97003813. 5 of 21 selected statements include explicit references; 18 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2024, 2026 and 1983.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Costco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.