The Costco Packaging Space
Costco Terms and Meanings
D93: OTC - This is the area where you will find your vitamins and supplements. This department has specific handling requirements when building out pallets.
D12: Candy and Snacks
D13: Dry Grocery: there is a an A and B in this category. The A and B are more driven by the buying group who will drive the rotation. From a merchandising standpoint there aren’t and special handling requirements.
Clamping: This is a process that occurs in Costco’s supply chain when products arrive to the depots. A truck uses flat plates to apply pressure to a layer of product and lifts it from your inbound pallet and places onto a new separate pallet. This individual layers get distributed on a “mixed loads” pallet to the warehouse level. Clamping allows Costco to manage low volume SKUs or those SKUs that have challenges with expiration versus sell through.
False Bottom: This is a type of execution for pallet skirts that’s allowed only in D93 (OTC). This process involves building up fillers in an assembled skirt on displays that ship fully assembled. When approaching this way, 26” skirts are utilized and the pallet should be marked to indicate not to double stack.
Butterfly Skirt: This is a type of execution for a pallet skirts where the skirt itself flips up in transit, hugging your product. At the warehouse, your pallet of product will be stacked on 4-5 additional pallets to elevate it off the floor and the skirt flips down and locks into place around the pallet stack. Execution is typically messy. Utilize a 22” skirt for this process.
Voucher Card: A physical card that is used to take to the register to purchase products. Once the receipt is initiated from the purchase the goods are retrieved from “the cage” or merchandise pick up.
The Cage: This is another term for the merchandise pick up are. High value items are stored here’s that are not kept on the warehouse floor.
The Fence: This is an are when you walk into the warehouse that has product ready to shop. These are products are on MVM and have slightly different merchandising requirements that typical pallets in the category.
