What Makes Costco A Great Place To Work?

In 2018, Indeed ran a survey on the best company to work for and found, based on over 100 million reviews, that one company stood as a clear winner. It wasn’t some popular brand or some hot new tech start-up -- it was Costco. And to this day, Costco continues to be voted as one of the best companies to work for.

But what exactly is this retail giant doing to win the affection of its employees?

Using Revelio Labs workforce data to track growth rates of top retail companies over the last five years, we can see that Costco sees steady growth with very little workforce attrition, an extremely uncommon phenomenon:

When we dive deeper we observe two factors that keep Costco ahead of its peers. The first, Costco’s unique corporate hierarchy, which has a high ratio of junior to senior employees:

The second, the type of employees Costco appears to hire. Head to head with Target, Costco has one of the greatest shares of college educated employees in retail:

Takeaways:

• For years Costco has maintained an extremely low workforce attrition rate while growing, demonstrating the capability to retain talent in a steady environment.
• Costco’s uniquely flat corporate structure appears to be a large contributor to employees favoring the company.
• For decades, Costco has continued to hire college graduates at a steady rate, while their competitors have interestingly seen a decrease on this premium talent pool.

If you have any ideas of other metrics to track or would like to hear more about Revelio workforce data, please reach out. Also, feel free to check out our article Employee Turnover and Firm Performance from earlier this year.