The great Costco vs Walmart showdown.

The average Costco sells 4,000 items.
Walmart on average sells 120,000 items.

Costco has 804 stores globally and 2020 revenue was 122 billion.
Walmart has 11,443 stores and 2020 revenue was 524 billion.

Focusing purely on the US for a moment.

Costco-569 stores
Revenue-88.3 billion
155 million per store.

Walmart-4,743
Revenue-351 billion
74 million dollars per store.

A lot of reasons can contribute to this, such as size of stores, location, impact of subscription revenue and more.

But, Costco selling just 3% as many products manages to make more per store on average.

Why is that?

750 million print copy books were sold in 2020 for the United States alone.

Over 3% were the Bible.
Over 1% of those were Harry Potter.
Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, the Bible, Harry Potter and Stephen King made up over 10% of total US book sales.

That’s in a market where books have over 5 million different books in circulation being printed regularly.

5 million different products, but under 30 titles make up over 10% of sales. Also, 90% of the book titles make up under 10% of sales.

This is literally every industry.

Soda
Candy
Hot sauce
Toilet paper
Movies

Every industry has tons of competitors, but there’s always a big winner which takes the title as the best.

Costco focuses purely on determining what’s the best ketchup, best paper towel, best ice cream and selling only that.

Why bring this up?

A lot of startups tend to want to be everything to everyone, when the power of being the best at just one thing is valuable.