Barron’s headline: Costco’s Cheap Gas Prices Are a Big Hit
By Andrew BaryFollow
June 12, 2022 7:00 am ET
Costco COST –1.85% Wholesale is doing a booming business in gasoline by offering its members material savings that one Wall Street analyst has put at 37 cents a gallon. This comes at a time when prices have soared to a record of $5 a gallon.
Costco Wholesale (ticker: COST) could sell $30 billion of gasoline in its fiscal year ending in August, with about $25 billion in the U.S., according to Richard Galanti, the company’s longtime chief financial officer. The company sold a total of $17 billion of gas in fiscal 2021. Outside the U.S., Costco’s largest gas market is in Canada.
This year’s sharply higher gasoline sales reflect higher prices and volumes. The company is one of the largest gasoline sellers in the country, at about 17 million gallons a day, or roughly 5% of the U.S. market.