Costco Trivia
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46 free Costco trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Costco trivia questions with answers. Costco is the store that sells more than half the world's cashews, keeps its hot dog at the same price it charged in 1985, and turns membership fees into most of its profit. This quiz covers the whole warehouse: how a lawyer's San Diego club in a Howard Hughes building became Costco, the founders and the three CEOs, the Kirkland Signature name, the mark-up rule and the 3,700-item shelves. Easy questions cover the food court, the exit greeters and the headquarters town; harder ones get into the merger years, the kosher hot dog supplier, the biggest and smallest warehouses, the poultry plant, the Icelandic food court and the Tiffany lawsuit. It suits a shopping-obsessed friend group, a work quiz or anyone who has ever bought a 48-pack of anything. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Costco, Price Club and Sol Price, and the source sentence appears under each question after you answer.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Washington city is Costco's worldwide headquarters?
Issaquah
Costco's worldwide headquarters is in Issaquah, Washington, on a campus built beside a working warehouse so buyers can walk over and see how merchandise is selling.
Q 02In which city did Costco open its very first warehouse?
Seattle
Seattle got the first Costco in September 1983, closely modelled on Price Club, the warehouse chain where co-founder Jim Sinegal had risen to vice president.
Q 03Costco's second warehouse opened a month after its first, in which city?
Portland
Portland, Oregon, got the second Costco in October 1983 and Spokane the third that December, the start of a sprint from nothing to $3 billion in sales in under six years.
Q 04What is the Kirkland Signature house brand named after?
The town where Costco's HQ used to be
The town where Costco's HQ used to be, Kirkland, Washington, named the one label that in 1995 replaced a scatter of separate house brands for soda, detergent and even dog food.
Q 05Costco's CEO confirmed in 2016 that which brand makes Kirkland Signature batteries?
Duracell
Duracell makes them: Craig Jelinek told an Atlanta TV station in 2016 that Costco simply buys the batteries and repackages them under its own label.
Q 06What did Jim Sinegal vow to do to a colleague if the hot dog price went up?
Kill him
Kill him, more or less: 'I will kill you. Figure it out,' Sinegal told Craig Jelinek, who found savings elsewhere and kept the combo at $1.50.
Q 07Until 2016, which was the only credit card brand accepted at US Costco warehouses?
American Express
American Express was the only card Costco took for 16 years; in 2016 the chain dropped it, began accepting only Visa and moved its store card to Citi.
Q 08Jim Sinegal co-founded Costco with which attorney from an old Pacific Northwest retailing family?
Jeffrey Brotman
Jeffrey Brotman took the idea from his father, a Tacoma clothing retailer who had seen a warehouse club on the West Coast and told him, 'You should do this.'
Q 09Warehouse-club pioneer Sol Price worked as what before opening his first store?
Lawyer
Lawyer: Price's clients were jewellery wholesalers, and their trade with a members-only store in Los Angeles gave him the idea for FedMart.
Q 10Price Club, Costco's future merger partner, opened its first store in 1976 in which city?
San Diego
San Diego's Morena Boulevard store was the first Price Club in 1976, and Costco, which absorbed the chain, now dates its own history from that opening.
Q 11Price Club's first store was a converted airplane hangar once owned by which famous tycoon?
Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes once owned the hangar on Morena Boulevard, and the building never left the business: shoppers can still walk its aisles today as a Costco.
Q 12Price Club's first memberships, in 1976, were sold only to which customers?
Small-business owners
Small-business owners were the only members at first, and the club lost $750,000 in its first year, so it let in credit-union members and hospital and utility workers too.
Q 13What name did the merged Costco and Price Club company use at first?
PriceCostco
Q 21Under a company rule, no regular item may be marked up more than what percentage over cost?
14%
Costco caps markups at 14% on brand-name goods and 15% on its house label, and leans on membership fees rather than fat margins for its profit.
Q 22Roughly how many distinct products does a typical Costco carry?
3,700
A typical Costco carries about 3,700 distinct products, a sliver of an ordinary big-box range, because it stocks only one or two versions of each item and sells far more of them.
Q 23In the early 2020s, which organisation's two titles outranked Costco Connection in US magazine circulation?
AARP
Only AARP The Magazine and the AARP Bulletin print more copies; Costco Connection mails about 15 million a month, reach enough that celebrities now line up for its cover.
PriceCostco was the merged company's name from 1993, but the partnership soon frayed: within a year the Price family had left to run a spin-off of their own.
Q 14Before merging with Costco, Price Club turned down a merger offer from which retail giant?
Walmart
Price Club rejected a merger approach from Walmart and chose Costco instead; Walmart's own warehouse chain, Sam's Club, went on to become Costco's chief US rival.
Q 15What is Costco's standard household membership called?
Gold Star
Gold Star is the card for ordinary households, a group the early warehouse clubs let in once they saw how much buying clout the extra members would bring.
Q 16Alongside groceries and televisions, Costco sells which funeral item to its members?
Caskets
Caskets are sold with the price shown up front, which Costco pitches as sparing families surprise costs at an emotional time; it even offers military designs for each service branch.
Q 17Jim Sinegal began his retail career in what job?
Grocery bagger
Grocery bagger was Jim Sinegal's first retail job, taken as a student in the mid-1950s at a discount store whose founder became his mentor; he later ran Costco for nearly three decades.
Q 18Which city's Costco became the world's largest warehouse after a 2015 expansion?
Salt Lake City
Salt Lake City's store took the title by bolting a business centre onto an ordinary warehouse, a first-of-its-kind hybrid of about 235,000 square feet.
Q 19As of 2019, the smallest Costco, at under 77,000 sq ft, was in which city?
Juneau
Juneau's store survives from a 1990s test of half-size warehouses; Costco decided the small format does not work elsewhere, but it suits Alaska's isolated capital.
Q 20In 2011, Costco's highest-volume store in the world was in which city?
Seoul
Seoul's store was the chain's top seller, Jim Sinegal said in 2011, crediting a dense city whose shoppers love American goods, about a third of what it sold.
Q 24Costco began selling rotisserie chickens in 1994 amid the rising popularity of which restaurant chain?
Boston Market
Boston Market's rotisserie craze in the early 1990s inspired Costco to add its own rotisserie chicken in 1994; the birds became such a traffic driver that Costco later built its own poultry plant.
Q 25In 2019 Costco opened its own vertically integrated poultry factory in which state?
Nebraska
The Lincoln Premium Poultry plant in Fremont, Nebraska, opened in 2019 to process around two million chickens a week and keep the rotisserie chicken price steady.
Q 26Sinegal described Costco's constantly rotating stock as what kind of atmosphere?
Treasure-hunt
Treasure-hunt is the term Costco uses for its rotating stock of limited-time items; the idea is urgency, buy the deal now because it may be gone on the next visit.
Q 27Before Costco began making its own, which brand supplied its food-court hot dogs?
Hebrew National
Hebrew National's kosher franks were dropped when suppliers could not keep up with demand, so Costco began making its own Kirkland Signature dogs to hold the combo price.
Q 28In 2013 US Costco food courts dropped Coca-Cola fountain drinks in favour of which company's products?
Pepsi
Costco's US food courts switched to Pepsi in 2013 after Coca-Cola raised its prices, helping hold the hot-dog combo price; Coca-Cola products returned to the food courts in 2025.
Q 29Which food-court item replaced the pretzel in 2009 because of slow sales?
Churro
The Churro took the pretzel's food-court slot in 2009 and lasted fifteen years before a double chocolate chunk cookie replaced it in 2024.
Q 30Which precious metal did Costco start selling online in one-ounce bars in 2023?
Gold
Gold bars went on sale in 2023 and were typically gone within hours of each restock; a Wells Fargo analysis reckoned Costco was soon moving up to $200 million of bullion a month.