Costco (COST), ever keen to swell its membership ranks, is grudgingly turning to the Internet in search of more millennials.
The big-box shopping club is adding more categories of products to its Web store and has a trial partnership with Google (GOOG) to offer same-day deliveries of Costco wares in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Costco said it has also started selling memberships via discount and flash-sales sites, such as Living Social and Zulilly (ZU). “We’re not going crazy here,” Richard Galanti, Costco’s chief financial officer, said on Thursday’s conference call. “We’re taking baby steps, but some of this stuff works.”
Indeed, Costco posted $561 million in membership fees for the most recent quarter, 6 percent more than in the year-earlier period. The Web push is as much about defense against such e-commerce giants as Amazon (AMZN) as it is an exercise in business development.
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