HOW BREAKING ALL THE RETAIL RULES WORKS FOR COSTCO IN CANADA,

Not far from a table stacked high with men’s blue jeans at one of Canada’s busiest Costco Wholesale Corp. stores is a standalone display for the InstaShiatsu, a cordless neck and back massager that bears all the hallmarks of a juicy impulse buy.

Priced at $134.99, the InstaShiatsu gives off a quirky, as-seen-on-TV vibe that would not help its cause if it were inside Hudson’s Bay or Best Buy.

But this is Costco, so the InstaShiatsu is flying out the store even though it’s likely nobody who bought one came looking for a neck massaging apparatus.

“We put it on the floor to test it and … explosion,” said Andrée Brien, senior vicepresident of national merchandising at Costco Wholesale Canada Ltd., on a recent tour of a warehouse in eastern Toronto.

The product’s apparent success is just another example of how Costco paradoxically breaks all of the Retail 101 rules and wins.

With a perpetually crowded parking lot, an aesthetically uninspiring and often difficult-to-navigate shopping area, and a highly limited choice of products within each category, Costco sells items in quantities that would be more suitable for an army squadron than a household of four. It also doesn’t bag customers’ items. And, just for the privilege of shopping there, Costco charges an annual fee starting at $55.

But its contrarian ways are the key to its staggering success in Canada, where Costco has 94 warehouses, more than 10 million members and steadily increasing sales that hit about $22 billion last year. It turns out that its flouting of basic retail commandments actually taps into consumers’ deepest psychological impulses about security, scarcity, clarity and fear.