Costco Benefits and Compensation Analysis

Introduction

The Costco Wholesale Corporation is an international membership-only warehouse club that provides limited house brands but with a wide range of merchandise categories. With a target market of primarily large families and businesses, Costco focuses on selling products at low prices and at high volume. The corporation was founded in 1976 in San Diego, CA, with its first warehouse opening in Seattle. As one of the most visibly representative retail stores in the world today, Costco operates in the US, Puerto Rico, Canada, the UK, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Mexico, and Australia, with a total of 634 locations around the world (Costco Wholesale Corporation SWOT Analysis, 2013).

As with its many locations, Costco's customers are widely spread. However, its major customer demographic is women in large households with incomes of $50,000 or above (Coriolis Research Ltd., 2004). Regarding employment numbers, as of September 2012, Costco had about 174,000 employees worldwide, of whom 78,000 were part-time workers (Costco Wholesale Corporation SWOT Analysis, 2013). The overall revenue of the company, meanwhile, is about $99,137 million with more than 1.4 million transactions per day having taken place by the end of September 2012 (Costco Wholesale Corporation SWOT Analysis, 2013). With some of Costco's history and background in mind, this paper will analyze the corporation's compensation and employee benefits' standards as set forth by its human resource department.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

· Low price positioning

· Strong human resource management

· High rate of membership renewal and high customer loyalty Weaknesses

· Limited product choice

· Cannibalization

· Sales heavily dependent on US and Canadian markets

Opportunities

· Expansion in