Why Walmart and CostCo Are So Different [View all]

[Bunnahabhain]

A Bloomberg article today examines the business model of the two chains. The long and short of it is Walmart's target customer is the bottom two quintiles while CostCo targets the top quintile. This is why CostCos are almost exclusively located in upper middle class suburbs. Poorer people do their everyday shopping at Walmart whereas affluent people tend to do occasional shopping at CostCo to make bulk or larger purchases.

The title of the article is, "Why Wal-Mart Will Never Pay Like CostCo." http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-never-pay-like-costco.html

From the article:

I wrote about this last spring in regard to Wal-Mart and Costco. Upper-middle-class people who live in urban areas -- which is to say, the sort of people who tend to write about the wage differential between the two stores -- tend to think of them as close substitutes, because they’re both giant stores where you occasionally go to buy something more cheaply than you can in a neighborhood grocery or hardware store. However, for most of Wal-Mart’s customer base, that’s where the resemblance ends. Costco really is a store where affluent, high-socioeconomic status households occasionally buy huge quantities of goods on the cheap: That’s Costco's business strategy (which is why its stores are pretty much found in affluent near-in suburbs). Wal-Mart, however, is mostly a store where low-income people do their everyday shopping.