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Retail

At Least CostCo (COST) Is OK

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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UnemplyThe first point most investors will make about CostCo’s (COST) August revenue is that it came in under expectation.

But, that would be to miss the point. A survey of analysts by FactSet Research produced a consensus estimate of $22.91 billion of sales for the quarter

What CostCo did was post comparable store sales which were up 9% and revenue which was up 12% to $5.41 billion.

For the fourth quarter ended Aug. 31, Costco reported sales of $22.6 billion, up 12% from $20.09 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

Wall St. will beat up on CostCo and take its lunch money today. By doing so, it will ignore a superb performance in a murderous retail environment where very few companies are still standing.

Analysts set expectations too high. No one is going to post insanely good numbers, but CostCo was close.

Douglas A.McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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