Seven years in warehousing, one recent IQ test, and a retail mystery nobody at head office seems interested in solving.
I have spent seven years of my life inside warehouses. I have operated Raymond reach trucks thirty feet in the air with a harness on. I have run cycle counts at Fastenal, managed computerized inventory control at Visions Electronics, received RFID freight at Ashley Furniture, and put ceramic tile away in a five-stage racking system where I could locate one specific box out of ten thousand in under a minute. I also recently took an IQ test, and the results came back near genius. I mention this not to brag — fine, partly to brag — but to establish credentials, because what follows is the professional opinion of an organized, methodical, and now formally documented superior thinker, and it concerns a question I cannot stop asking:
Why is Costco so stupid?
Here is the experience of a paying Costco member in 2026. You search for an item on the website. If it is sold in the building rather than shipped from some distant fulfillment centre, you are rewarded with the least useful sentence in Canadian retail: the item may be available in your local warehouse. May. A company doing roughly a quarter-trillion dollars a year in revenue, running some of the most sophisticated logistics on the continent, looks a paying member in the eye and offers a horoscope. On a good day the app will now grudgingly admit an item is somewhere in the building. It still will not tell you where. No aisle. No section. Drive over and find out.
So you drive over. The aisles are numbered — the numbers are right there on the steel — but nothing tells you what lives in them. No directory, no category signage, no map. The official wayfinding system is a human being with a handheld scanner. You flag down an employee, they punch in your item, and the handheld tells them the exact location instantly, because the building has known where that pallet was since the second receiving scanned it into the slot. Every warehouse I ever worked in knew where everything was at all times. That is not an achievement. That is the entire job. Costco knows too. Costco simply refuses to tell you.
Why is Costco so stupid?
Compare Canadian Tire, a company that sells hockey tape, house paint, and lawnmower blades out of the same building. Search a hitch pin on their website and you get the aisle number and a live stock count at your specific store — “Aisle 51, 6 in stock” — before you leave the couch. Walk in and the aisles wear signs you can read from the far end of the store. You are in and out in four minutes, and Canadian Tire still gets its impulse sales, because you walked past four hundred products on the way to Aisle 51. Home Depot does it. Lowe’s does it. The hardware sector, not historically famous for cutting-edge software, solved retail wayfinding years ago, while the membership warehouse with the legendary supply chain plays hide-and-seek with the peanut butter.
I know what you are thinking: the treasure hunt is deliberate. Costco rotates stock on purpose so you wander the entire floor and leave with a kayak you did not come for. I understand the theory, and the theory was brilliant in 1995. In 2026 it has a flaw the size of a smartphone: the member who cannot find the item does not wander into a kayak. He walks out, sits in his car, and orders the item from Amazon before he has left your parking lot. And here is the detail that elevates it from questionable to genuinely dumb — Costco already charged him a membership fee. The customer acquisition is finished. The wandering happens regardless; nobody in recorded history has walked directly to anything in a Costco. Telling me the peanut butter is in Aisle 121 does not stop me from leaving with a flat of croissants and a four-pack of smoke detectors. It stops me from leaving with nothing.
And leaving with nothing is real money. I will not pretend to know Costco’s exact number, and Costco is certainly not publishing it, but the math does not require a near genius: some fraction of millions of members leaving empty-handed or short-basketed every week because they could not locate an item, multiplied across hundreds of warehouses, multiplied by Costco-sized baskets. Millions of dollars a year is the conservative reading. Now add the payroll spent on employees working as human GPS units, answering all day long a question a free database query answers instantly.
The fixes are not exotic. As someone who has actually run inventory systems, here is the menu:
- Expose the slot data. Every pallet is already scanned to a steel location at receiving. Pipe it into the app: search the item, get “Aisle 121, left side, ground level.” This is a user-interface project, not an infrastructure project. The data exists tonight.
- Real-time, per-warehouse stock counts on the website, exactly like Canadian Tire. “May be available” is not inventory information.
- Item-locator kiosks at the entrance for members who do not use the app.
- Category signage on the aisle ends. The numbers already exist. Give them nouns.
- Publish the rotation. You move stock weekly on purpose — fine, keep the treasure hunt, but post a “moved this week” list in the app. A treasure hunt with a map is still fun. A treasure hunt without one is just losing your keys in a 150,000-square-foot building.
- Out-of-stock flags, so nobody drives forty-five minutes for dog food that sold out Tuesday. On Vancouver Island this is not hypothetical. It is a lifestyle.
None of this is difficult, which is exactly what makes the question so persistent. Being organized is not a personality trait; it is a revenue strategy. If Costco were smarter, Costco would make more money — that is the entire relationship between intelligence and profit, and I say this as a man with recent paperwork on the subject. Fastenal, a fastener company operating on a microscopic fraction of Costco’s budget, could tell me the bin location of a single zinc washer in Campbell River. Costco cannot tell me the aisle of a forty-pound bag of dog food.
Why is Costco so stupid?
I genuinely do not know. But I know the answer is sitting in their own handhelds, filed under the exact steel location where they left it. My consulting rates are reasonable, my references are near genius, and unlike Costco’s inventory, my contact page is clearly labelled.
Why is Costco so stupid? Ask me after they hire me. I will know the aisle.