Craig Jelinek, CEO of Costco, said that the company’s physical stores are critical to its growth going forward, even though it saw a surge in e-commerce sales during the pandemic, reports CNBC.
“Our overall online business will continue to grow. Will we get tricky? No, we won’t,” he said on CNBC’s show Closing Bell. “We’ll just continue to bring value on high-end goods and quality merchandise, and deliver either through the warehouses, brick-and-mortar, or through e-commerce.”
However, “It’s still important to get people physically in the stores. I still think brick-and-mortar is not going to go away. We want to continue to get people in the stores,” he said.
When asked about if stockpiling behavior has begun again, Jelinek said that it has, but “not quite to the same degree” as this spring.
“They’re still buying extra toilet paper, sanitary-type items and things like that to continue to make sure that they have because some of these items … are going to continue being a long-term need,” he said, saying that some buying patterns may continue into “probably the middle of next year, if I had to guess.
