Where Does Costco Keep Its Extra Product?

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It can be overwhelming to shop in a Costco store — each one is a warehouse, after all. The high ceilings, long aisles, and tall shelving racks make it more like a confusing maze than a leisurely shopping trip. When you go to grab a pack of inexpensive beer, you may wonder where other cases are stored. Is there a storage space in the back? Is all the product out all the time? The answer is a lot closer than you may think. 

Extra products are stored on the shelves in Costco warehouses. While members can grab items off the bottom, and many, times the second level, a large amount of boxes and pallets are still wrapped up from shipping, and stored on higher shelves. Employees confirm this on Reddit, with one mentioning that the warehouse docks receiving shipments are actually pretty small, and so product is pushed onto the floor quickly to save space. Another revealed that stock rooms are few and far between, anyway. 

Having all of that space is actually pretty strategic on Costco's part. Costco warehouses are gigantic, averaging at about 146,000 square feet. The world's largest Costco is in Salt Lake City, Utah, where members can shop in a massive, 235,000 square-foot warehouse.

Other large grocery chains sell around 30,000 different products, but Costco only sells about 4,000. That doesn't mean it sells every single item stored on the warehouse shelves. Perishable goods make up so much of the store's inventory, and the potential for spoiled merchandise would be insurmountable had the chain not implemented a robust strategy to combat food waste. A page of Costco's website dedicated to sustainability includes a mission statement that reads, "Costco's aim is to continually decrease the amount of waste we send to landfills, with a goal of diverting 80% to new uses or recycling." 

In 2025, the company donated 223 million pounds of unsold food to nonprofit organizations and local food banks. On a Reddit thread discussing the fate of Costco's unsold inventory, employees shared that donation pickups occur multiple times a week. Deli and bakery items are donated or sent to farms for animal feed, produce is composted, and rotisserie chickens that aren't sold within two hours are used to make soup. One commenter said their local warehouse takes extra flowers to a cemetery to be placed on gravestones.