Meet the typical Costco shopper, a 39-year-old Asian American woman earning more than $125,000 a year

Costco shoppers outside one of its stores.
Noam Galai/Getty Images

Costco has more than 813 warehouses around the world and makes more than $163 billion in sales.
The wholesale club has similar customer loyalty as other big box stores, and it adds more new customers than it loses.
The average Costco customer is a 39-year-old Asian American woman who's married and earns $125,000, Numerator found.
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Costco is the fifth-largest retailer in the world, pulling in more than $163 billion in sales last year. The store operates as a wholesale club, with nearly 110 million cardholders representing households and small and midsized businesses.

The company has more than 813 warehouse stores around the world, including 562 in the US, and it employs nearly 275,000 people.

Roughly one-third of US shoppers are Costco customers, according to data from the analytics firm Numerator prepared for Insider.

More than 71% of those who shopped in 2020 visited the store in 2021, per Numerator – roughly on par with other big box retailers, but well behind Walmart's 95% customer loyalty percentage. Costco also added about three new customers for every two that it lost last year, indicating that the brand is expanding its customer base.

Numerator found that Costco's typical shopper in the US is an Asian American woman between 35 and 44 years old who is married and living in a city in the Pacific Northwest. (Costco was founded in Seattle and is based in Washington.)

She typically has a four-year degree or higher level of education and earns more than $125,000 a year.

The typical customer visits Costco on a weekend day every two to three weeks — about 23 trips per year — and picks up nine products for a total cost of about $114 a trip. The company stocks only 4,000 products (stock-keeping units, or SKUs), compared with 30,000 at many other retailers.

About 11% of the average Costco shopper's spending is at the wholesale club, similar to what she spends with Amazon, and her top shopping categories in the store are groceries and personal-care items. She also buys a lot of Duracell batteries and Adidas apparel.