All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.-- Warren Buffett Costco Wholesale (NASDAQ: COST) is one of the "good" companies. Co-founded by James Sinegal with one warehouse store in Seattle in 1976, Costco has grown mightily over the years based on a simple set of tenets: Sell quality merchandise at low prices, invest generously in your employees, and treat people (including suppliers) with fairness, dignity, and respect. Of course, selling at low prices is an understatement for Costco. The company operates on razor-thin margins. Last year, it earned $3.13 billion on $138 billion in sales. That's a profit margin of 2.3%, a major improvement from where it was 10 years ago. And keep in mind that virtually all of Costco's profit is derived from membership fees, which means it's selling everything at just enough of a gross profit to cover operating expenses. Image source: Getty Images. You'd have nearly $900,000 So, if you had dropped $5,000 on the stock at its initial public offering and stuck with it over all these years, how much money would you have? Costco Wholesale went public on Dec. 5, 1985. The initial price per share was $10, so a $5,000 investment would have purchased 500 shares. However, the stock has split four times, so you would own 3,000 shares today. When a stock splits, you receive more shares but the stock price is adjusted proportionally so the value of your investment stays the same. Currently, Costco trades just under $300 per share, so your investment would be worth approximately $900,000. If you're curious what that translates to in terms of an annual percentage, that's a compound annual return rate of 16.5% per year. You wouldn't quite be a Costco millionaire yet, but we haven't considered dividends. Dividends matter Costco paid its first dividend in 2004 at the rate of $0.10 per share quarterly. The company has continued to grow, and the dividends, too. The current quarterly payout is $0.65 per share. Those 3,000 shares would be earning you $1,950 per quarter, or $7,800 per year in dividend income. That's quite a chunk of cash to grow the cash balance in your brokerage account. But it gets better. Costco sometimes pays out a special dividend, which is much higher than the regular quarterly rate. For example, the last special dividend paid out was in 2017, when Costco returned $7 per share in cash to shareholders on top of the quarterly dividend at the time of $0.50 per share. When including dividends, the total returns would be worth over $1 million by now, especially if you had been reinvesting those dividends along the way. 10 stocks we like better than Costco WholesaleWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has quadrupled the market.* David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Costco Wholesale wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys. See the 10 stocks *Stock Advisor returns as of June 1, 2019 John Ballard has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Costco Wholesale and recommends the following options: long January 2020 $115 calls on Costco Wholesale and short January 2020 $180 calls on Costco Wholesale. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.Source