BJ's Wholesale Club Holdings Inc. ($BJ) is set to continue its winning streak on Thursday, November 21, at its third-quarter earnings call. The bulk retailer could hit $0.40 per share, according to analysts' expectations at Zacks Investment Research. In comparison to Costco's ($COST), the rival membership warehouse operator, BJ's is doing quite well, considering it's only on the east coast.

Instead of directly contrasting the two's alternative data side-by-side, because with more locations Costco's data would look far more staggering, we wanted to just highlight how good a job BJ's is doing at expanding itself before the holidays come.

After a spike in early October, things have settled back down over the last few weeks, to just above 2,000 openings. But generally, before the holiday season starts, there will be more climbing in the number of staffers needed. We imagine this will trickle back up before December rolls around.

If you zoom in on New York City, you can see several instances of the two stores being within walking distance. While that's not typically the case elsewhere, most of the time there's a healthy several miles between stores, we do wonder if the new stores BJ's is building are meant to directly compete with Costco's.

There have been two new stores since the previous earnings call last quarter, and with that comes a need for more employees. The LinkedIn employee count is at an all-time high, as is the social media followings on Facebook and Twitter. If you want to dive deeper into that data, consider signing up for our demo and playing around in our graph makers.

About the Data: 

Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales. 

Further Reading: 

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