How Much Does The Average Person Spend Per Minute At Costco?

Time is money. The saying is true for most modern activities, especially in the two most obvious contexts: working and shopping. Natural or not, spending money is as central to our lives as breathing. After all, the things we need to survive — food and water, for instance — are rarely free, let alone important creature comforts like electronics and clothes. If you'd like to buy all of those things at Costco, you'll have to pay just for the privilege of shopping there, too. And while the membership cost at the wholesale club is fixed, the amount that you spend after wandering throughout the massive warehouse certainly isn't.

Outside of online retailers and similar membership stores like Sam's Club, Costco is probably one of the easiest places to drop a few grand on the contents of a shopping cart alone. After all, where else can you buy gold bars and a wheel's worth of Costco's Kirkland Parmigiano Reggiano cheese at the same time? If you've ever been startled by the total listed at the bottom of your Costco receipt, you might have felt a morbid, albeit somewhat silly, curiosity as to how much you spent per minute. Fortunately, you don't have to do any complex calculations yourself. Maxinomics, a Morning Brew brand dedicated to breaking down economics in digestible ways, crunched the numbers and concluded that the average customer spends $1.75 a minute at Costco. Wondering where that number came from and if it's accurate? We'll explain how the math adds up.

Breaking down the money-per-minute math for Costco members comes down to a couple of factors: time spent in the store, also known as dwell time, and amount spent during the average shopping trip. According to data from Placer.ai, the average customer at Costco spends just over 37 minutes inside the warehouse on a standard visit. Using Maxinomics' proposed $1.75 per minute, that means that the average member is shelling out $64.75 on each Costco trip.

If you frequently shop at the wholesale club, you might think that total sounds surprisingly low. Business Insider suggests that the typical shopping trip is costlier at about $100, noting that the average Costco customer shops at the retailer every two weeks. With the same dwell time of 37 minutes, that works out to $2.70 per minute — almost $1 more than the amount reported by Morning Brew.

Clearly, the difference between these two numbers could be explained by how often people go to Costco. Perhaps "atypical" members who visit the store weekly spend less money during each trip, breaking up bigger purchases by stocking up on several items at a time. Others might not go as often, spend longer browsing, and fill up their carts more. Figuring out the best time to shop at Costco to avoid crowds also matters, as weekend traffic drives up dwell time without affecting what you buy. Ultimately, the number that most accurately reflects your spending depends on one question: What kind of Costco customer are you?