[OC] Costco Locations Per 1,000,000 people in North America

    by mapstream1

    11 Comments

    1. DIRTY_KUMQUAT_NIPPLE on

      Damn I’m from Vermont and we have 1 Costco, but still have a higher “score” than any of the surrounding states.

    2. Something doesn’t seem quite right here. Manitoba’s population is approx 1.5 million and there’s 5 Costcos in Winnipeg alone. 

      5/1.5 = 3.33

      Unless I’m missing something?

    3. this is really cool, but I’d like to see a map of the distances between two nearest Costcos.

      Some are just a few miles apart, others must be hundreds of miles apart. Or km, because Canada and Mexico. Maybe weigh the distance by population density…

    4. RegulatoryCapture on

      It is pretty interesting that the highest costco per capita rates occur in Montana, Alaska, and Hawaii.

      Montana and Hawaii kind of make sense to me. They have chunks of population that are split up. Montana by distance and mountain passes, Hawaii by literal water.

      Kauai has a Costco even though it only has like 75k people who live there (although tourists buy a LOT of stuff there too) because you can’t just hop over to Oahu. Once you are going through the logistics effort of stocking your locations on Oahu, it isn’t that much more of a heavy lift to hit the other islands and each one is a literally captive audience, so you aren’t cannibalizing from nearby stores.

      Montana’s 5 costcos sit roughly in the 5 largest metros/counties (skipping Great Falls)…but each of those towns are at least a couple hour drive from each other. The population is fairly spread out . I live near Kalispell which just built a brand new even bigger costco because I guess they felt the old one wasn’t cutting it. It gets a ton of traffic down from canada in search of cheaper prices as well as rural customers loading up whole truckloads of stuff to drive far away.

      But even though they wanted a bigger one, I never felt the old Kalispell costco was anywhere near as crazy as big city/suburban costcos because it just doesn’t serve as many people.

      Alaska I’m not familiar with but I assume it is sort of the same way. Fairbanks and Juneau are too isolated so they get their own.

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