Costco (COST) Takes Food Stamps

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 7:33PM EDT · Published Oct 29, 5:02AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

uncle sam Costco (NASDAQ:COST) is supposed to be the big-box retailer that caters to affluent shoppers and business. The recession may have got the better of the company. It will start taking Food Stamps.

A number of chains and stores that draw a large part of their customers from among the poor and lower middle classes have taken Food Stamps for years. It is a good and profitable business. Taking Food Stamps is a service of sorts to many customers. Whether the stores make extra money because shoppers buy anything beyond food is a matter of conjecture.

Costco may simply have been hit with a fit of compassion that caused it to change its Food Stamps policy. It has a number of regular customers on the financial ropes like any other large consumer-based business in America. Or, Costco may simply be looking that the math. The holidays are coming and with that the peak retail period. Costco could figure that shoppers who come through its doors to buy food will add another few items to their shopping baskets.

There is a good chance Costco will miscalculate if it motive is heavy sales beyond the food that the stamps will buy. People using Food Stamps are not likely to buy office furniture, consumer electronics, or PCs. Being a good corporate citizen is all Costco is likely to get out of accepting food stamps. That should be enough. It is the holidays. People are broke. And, they may remember that Costco gave them a hand when it counted.

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.