Costco Wholesale, audited.
11 of ~24 facilities (US scope)1,685 dock doors5,302 trailer spots0 rail-served
We core-sampled 11 of ~24 DCs, We mapped 11 US cross-dock depots spanning dry and refrigerated wet docks, biggest to smallest; the yard pattern held across all of them.
Network size: Costco FY2019 Form 10-K, Item 2 Properties (last published depot count): 24 depots worldwide (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/909832/000090983219000019/cost10k9119.htm) (FY2019 10-K (worldwide))
Public audit. Not affiliated with Costco Wholesale. Data from satellite imagery + public records.
We audited Costco Wholesale’s yards from satellite.
Click any site for its gate, docks, and drop yards. No badge, no NDA, just what a driver sees.
Costco Wholesale’s stack is connected. The yards never were.
Your TMS runs the road. Your WMS runs the building. The yards are the tier between them, and they were never on the network.
Every truck gets re-keyed, re-queued, and re-found at each step. The lost time lives between the steps, which is why no single tool ever fixed it. The audit below is that gap, measured on your real yards.
A real audited site, played gate→dock→exit on the true yard geometry. Switch sites with the picker.
Costco Depot, Monrovia MD
Truck queues at the gate. Guard checks paper BOL, runs the plate, types data into a screen, prints a gate pass.
Movement durations are honest floors set by yard geometry; the uplift lands on the wait fields (queue + dispatch + secondary checkpoints). “Today” timings reflect the radios-and-clipboards world; “With YardFlow” reflects the protocol acting end-to-end. We may be wrong about parts of this, your actual numbers will tell us where.
What the handoffs cost across your network, and what removing them is worth
Read from satellite + Street View across all 11 facilities. At a comparable network, Primo Brands cut drop-and-hook turns from ~48 to ~24 min. Set your real volumes and margins in the calculator to put a number on it.
What surprised us reading Costco Wholesale’s network
Three patterns held across the sites we sampled. None of them show up on a facility list. All of them change how the yard runs.
- 01
Monrovia MD packs about 260 dock doors onto a single 84-acre cross-dock, a building sized so a trailer never has to sit.
- 02
Across 11 depots we counted room for more than 5,300 trailers and zero rail. Every load in or out moves by truck through the gate.
- 03
Costco's Monroe NJ site splits wet and dry into two separate gated depots 600m apart, so one store order clears two gate queues.
Turn what you saw into a number for finance
This audit is the evidence. The model is the math. Open the calculator seeded with Costco Wholesale’s audited yards, set your real volumes and margins, and it sizes the opportunity to the dollar.
This deep-dive is the evidence behind the /for/costco memo.
Are these your yards?
Tell us where we got it wrong, or see what 15 minutes of orchestration looks like on your worst site.
We are not asking for a pilot. We are asking for a conversation.
A 30-minute call, direct with Casey. We show you what we found across your yards, you tell us straight where it fits and where it does not. If the call goes well, we talk pilot. If not, you keep the analysis.
None of these times work? Email me at casey@freightroll.com or call or text me at 410-236-7434, and we’ll find one.
Casey Larkin, YardFlow. Jake, our founder, joins when it helps.