> Something about the whole thing always registered to me as, like, lame—too normcore, too boring, perhaps even too cheugy to an informed and taste-driven millennial ur-consumer like me. The kinds of brands I like to buy aren’t what they sell at Costco
Good example of how people can build identities through their brand choices and purchasing habits.
It’s a foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant if another company releases a better product. Yet the crossover between brands, identities, and lifestyles is deeply held by many people.
I know some will try to turn this into a criticism of Americans, but in my travels and international business experience I wouldn’t even rank Americans in the top 10 for integrating brands and identity. In some countries I had to make a conscious effort to try to wear clothes from acceptable brands and swap my functional laptop bag for something more stylish to avoid letting my purchasing habits become a point of judgment from others. It’s actually refreshing to come back to America where as long as you’ve made some effort to look more or less appropriate for the occasion few people care about the brand of your clothes, laptop bag, or car. Some people are proud of their Audi or designer bag, but I rarely run into situations where I’d be judged for arriving in a sensible Subaru instead of a Mercedes.
> In some countries I had to make a conscious effort to try to wear clothes from acceptable brands and swap my functional laptop bag for something more stylish to avoid letting my purchasing habits become a point of judgment from others.
It is kind of fascinating, having come from such a culture, to realize that in the end, Americans, at least the average of the America I met, are not nearly brand conscious as I and everyone in my place supposed them to be.
Of course, America is a fucking giant and diverse place, and I think that even native born Americans have no fucking idea of how many different Americas exist, so, take my views of America with a giant grain of salt.
> "What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” - Andy Warhol
Unfortunately I think America is starting to lose this way a bit, with the influx of newer premium brands and the fracturing of American consumers into endless lifestyle personas. But there's still some truth left in it.
> where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest
To say that "the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest" by using Coke as an example is a significant oversimplification and is cherry picking examples to prove a point. The richest consumers buy plenty of consumer goods that the poorest cannot even dream of buying or even renting.
If there was a truffle-infused Coke with edible 24k gold flakes that cost 10x as much (and actually tasted good) you can be sure pretty much only the richest consumers would be drinking it, and that everyone who couldn't afford it would be doing everything in their power to keep up with the Joneses.
What percentage of "the poorest" own their own home or go on international trips more than once a year let alone owning multiple homes, luxury cars, and private jets?
American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe.
The mantra was sell more, more, more and more, and to do that, you need to sell things to poor people to. A French enterpreneur would be happy selling phones only for the upper middle class and above. In America the idea was to install as many landlines as possible and gain with scale.
> It’s a foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant if another company releases a better product.
Perhaps those folks found certain brands regularly have decent (enought) quality and stick with them, and/or they have a personal aesthetic that they've developed that may be 'limited' to certain brands.
Some folks also don't want to go through the effort of constantly/regularly (re-)evaluating things: they've found that Brand X gives them enough quality/value, and have stopped looking.
> Some folks also don't want to go through the effort of constantly/regularly (re-)evaluating things: they've found that Brand X gives them enough quality/value, and have stopped looking
This argument stops holding water when those same people start judging other people for not also using Brand X.
It sounds like you’ve just been around toxic and superficial people in your international travels and then extrapolated from them to their whole countries.
Unfortunately, they have people like that everywhere.
South Korea is one example that I have intimate knowledge of where one's consumer habits (the clothes one wears, the car one drives, the logo on one's handbag) is the ultimate signal of status.
You're automatically pre-judged by complete strangers without having to say a single word.
There are always exceptions to the rule, but it is in fact an unspoken rule over there.
> I know some will try to turn this into a criticism of Americans, but in my travels and international business experience I wouldn’t even rank Americans in the top 10 for integrating brands and identity.
Can you give a few examples of those brand-centric cultures? Which product categories do they follow? I've never seen anything like this, so if I were to go to one of the places that has this culture, I should probably know about it in advance.
> It’s a foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant if another company releases a better product.
For those of us who grew up in the era of the "Are you a Mac or a PC" [1], many Americans are intimately familiar with the concept of brand identity.
> foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant
But you are, yourself, defining yourself partially here through your own purchasing habits. In fact you are doing it to a far more universal degree than most of the ones you criticize.
Not that I'm immune to it, but nor do I claim to be. I think it's useful signal just like anything else. Watch: My quintessential American habit is that I wear roughly the same nondescript black T shirt, black boxer briefs, black socks, and maybe an unlabeled black hoddie that I purchase off of Amazon, mostly just sorting by ratings. If at any point I reach into my closet and the stock-flow system that is my laundry habits have deemed it such that I am actually out of stock of any of these items, I immediately go to Amazon and purchase another 6- or 4- or 12-pack. If you feel you understand me better as a person after reading all that, you probably do.
> Some people are proud of their Audi or designer bag, but I rarely run into situations where I’d be judged for arriving in a sensible Subaru instead of a Mercedes.
I agree. You can go into Costco and see a store full of individuals who happen to be shopping at Costco that day, or you can go to Costco and see the same people as slaves to an imagined Costco lifestyle that you can then write about for 800 words. It says more about the author than the shoppers. This article is the worst kind of lifestyle trend engineering.
Slaves to an imagined Costco lifestyle? That's not the vibe I picked up from the article at all.
I enjoyed reading about the writer realizing he's turning into his father and taking photos of things his dad used to buy to share with his mom. He spots people that may be falling in love. Clumsy people apologizing to nobody. He counts eight different languages.
I get the allure, but it's not for me and my partner.
We live in a small apartment. We drive a small car. The pantry has a good amount of dry bulk & canned food, but we largely shop one week at a time.
Sure, we could "lock in" on two or three foods, buy weeks worth of them at a time, and save some money. But like most people we like a bit of verity. It's just not possible to buy such massive quantities of things with nowhere to store them.
What I want is an anti-costco. More like a bodega. Still curated, maybe a larger mark-up, but smaller quantities of everything. Half loaves of bread, small bags of frozen veg, enough sugar or flour to bake just a couple batches.
The basic membership is $65. If all you do is get a year's worth of detergent, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies chances are that will already pay for the membership. They also have grocery items that are kinda wholesale but not really. Pantry stuff like a bag of nuts that you can go through on your own in under a week that is marked down significantly from the grocery store. Oh also olive oil is another big one for me.
The issue for many apartment-dwellers is storage. You can't store a year's worth of detergent, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies in an apartment.
Costco really incentivizes shopping in bulk, from the huge value-pack sized portions to the focus on frozen & dry goods to the super-sized carts to the anxiety-inducing shopping experience. My wife and I shoot to go no more than once a quarter, just because it's a hassle.
We found our habits (and need for Costco) changed dramatically once we moved into a home and could now put in a chest freezer and pile toilet paper rolls in a corner.
>The basic membership is $65. If all you do is get a year's worth of detergent, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies chances are that will already pay for the membership.
Maybe savings are that large if you're comparing against regular prices at retailers, but if you wait for sales, they're as cheap, if not cheaper than Costco.
If you ever visit Japan, you can buy a Costco membership there for $35 and use it in the US.
I heard you can also get someone with a membership to buy you a gift card, and use the reloadable gift card for continued access. (Or buy one for yourself and then cancel your membership.)
For the kinds of people who post on HN, the real savings of a Costco membership is that they regularly have high-end electronics, appliances, and home furnishings at $50-100 or more off retail elsewhere. Get a robot vacuum or a couch or a VR headset for $100 off and your membership's already paid for itself that year. For several years, if you need to replace a refrigerator or washing machine.
Trader Joe's is probably closest to what you want. It targets single shoppers with small quantities and low prices, and it rotates products frequently to keep things interesting.
Anecdotally I feel like a lot of TJ's shoppers shift into Costco shoppers as they age up.
The nice thing about Trader Joe's is that you can be in and out in 5-10 minutes if you're just buying weekly food items. The store is modestly sized and the checkout lines are short. I'm in there about once a week.
I go to Costco once every three months or so and buy paper towels, detergent, and other consumables that have long shelf lives. I don't feel drawn to it; it's just the warehouse for boring items to buy in bulk. Their hot dog is OK. But a lifestyle? No.
There was a point where two friends and I each lived alone in an apartment, and I was the only one who had a (2-door) car. We still occasionally did Costco runs.
We'd go in and walk the store - the whole store - aisle by aisle.
If I saw something like a 2-pound bag of tortellini, but thought two pounds was too big a quantity for me, I'd ask, "does anybody want to split two pounds or tortellini?" One might say yes, so we'd throw the tortellini in the shopping cart.
At the end, one person (the membership holder) would pay, and we'd divvy up the result of our haul into reusable containers, in the parking lot. One of us would then take point on itemizing the receipt, and we'd pay back the person with the membership.
In hindsight, I think we did this more to socialize than to save money, but we definitely did save money. Even as a single apartment-dweller, I bought my fair share of 24-packs of yogurt and 5-pound bags of frozen vegetables.
Growing up as a kid, we lived in the sticks and the small local grocery store had a limited produce section. My mom joined a little co-op where each person would put in the same amount of cash, but one person would make a trip to the downtown farmer's market. The purchase was split evenly between each member. Each trip a different person made the trip so the variety changed not only by what was available but by the person making the trip's preferences.
This was my introduction to collective buying and at the same time the fact there's a bigger world out there than where one lives.
This is what I did with 3 roommates in college. We saved a ton of money that way.
After college, I only had one roommate and Costco didn't work as well. The quantities for certain things are just a bit much. Buying 36 eggs for 4 adults made sense. Buying 36 eggs for 2 adults... not so much. I ended up going to Costco for toilet paper and gas, and that's it.
To this day, I'm still the "spouse" on one of those college roommates' costco memberships, LOL.
> What I want is an anti-costco. More like a bodega. Still curated, maybe a larger mark-up, but smaller quantities of everything. Half loaves of bread, small bags of frozen veg, enough sugar or flour to bake just a couple batches.
This is becoming even harder to achieve nowadays, there is all this variety in size of products and more and more over the years(at least in the midwest) it seems that grocery stores want to take the small product and apply minimums to deals.
there will be an 8oz offering and a 14 oz offering, the 8 oz will be on sale but only if you buy at least 2 or 3, its incredibly frustrating.
It has incidentally made my junk food habits better though, If i see 2 for 5$ for a package of cookies with no minimum purchase, I'll likely grab a box. As soon as they apply that minimum, i am gonna be thinking "do i really wanna eat all those cookies?" instead i end up with 0.
> the 8 oz will be on sale but only if you buy at least 2 or 3, its incredibly frustrating.
Have you tested this by buying just one, and checking the price on the receipt?
I ask because someone once told me this was illegal in the US; that a shop was allowed to display the sale price only for a larger quantity, but they had to honor the same price per unit if you only bought one. (I think we were discussing produce at the time, in case that matters.) I've long wondered if that was true or just an urban legend.
The thing is you can save a ton of money on a few non-food items to make it worth it. Just over-the-counter medicines save me a huge chunk of the membership fee. Then there are just random household goods: paper products, trash bags, dishwasher detergent, etc.
sounds like you just want to live in europe (or probably anywhere outside of the US?). You can typically go buy a half (or quarter) loaf of bread from a baker, and street markets let you buy all the small quantities you want by the kilo
I have a really mixed feeling about Costco. I hate it, I going there, I hate the crowds, the parking, the people, being hawked a credit card, a cell phone, whatever the vendors are selling. It makes me feel like a pig in a slaughterhouse waiting to get out of the store, I feel like it's the platonic form of consumption. We all go to the nice little consumption center like good piggies to get our sustenance and to get milked further (maybe I should buy some electronics!)
Yet, I keep going. I like the cranberry bread, the cheap chicken, the granola, I like not thinking about what to buy so much. I like that it's of an acceptable quality at an acceptable price. I like that I can return stuff easily without getting shit for it. I like "scoring" deals on stuff that seems like a good value.
Costco's gimmick is relieving you of choice and price shopping. They find the best stuff and don't mark it up. If Consumer is your identity yet you fear executing its labors, let Costco step in and become your denomination of consumerism, complete with tithe, proscribed usury, and communion hot dog.
I wouldn't call it a gimmick when the business has been so successful for so many years. They target educated shoppers who want to buy quality at minimum markup and not think too hard about it. If I want a TV, I know Costco will have good ones at a good price. If I need socks, same. Their food is cheaper and better than Kroger. It's just a win-win for shoppers and Costco. The only tradeoff is selection and dealing with the crowds.
What you wrote sounds intelligent but belies an ignorance of the business model.
Parallel to that, I have to imagine Costco makes a lot of money off of impulse purchases, which are induced by uncertainty in the specific items they will have available, plus mutable store layouts.
Long ago in undergrad I took a retail marketing class and we did a field trip to Costco; the GM told us it was part of their policy to rearrange parts of the store occasionally so that you had to browse the entire place to check off your shopping list. This increases the likelihood that you stumble across new products. So it’s this combination of “best price/quality without decision fatigue” plus some impulse buying that works for them. The fact that they are figuring out the price/quality trade off for you up front probably also makes it easier to impulse buy with fewer regrets.
Yeah, this right here. I don't want to sift through thousands of options. Sometimes I just want a widget that is good quality and I don't want to get ripped off.
Identifying as a rabid consumer is not a requirement of appreciating Costco. The end result of that gimmick is that it feels like they're looking out for their customers and offering them a valuable service as opposed to trying to suck them dry. Buy this blender; don't buy this blender; they don't care, just know that this is probably the one that will best meet your needs, it's the best deal you're going to find on it anywhere, and if you're unhappy with it for any reason they'll take it back.
It's a gimmick only for those who get sucked into buying things that they don't need. I've been a Costco shopper for decades, and sure have succumbed to some useless stuff, but my Costco list is 90% the same month to month. I get appalled when I see the same items on my list, that are smaller and in a pack of 1 instead of 2-4, for more money at other stores. If electronics were just like food, it would be like seeing a Macbook Pro for $2000 everywhere but it was $799 at Costco.
Some companies serve the people and some companies want people to serve them.
The sabbath was always meant for man and that makes a lot of people very angry because whatever ideological or religious lip service someone gives their behavior demonstrate they hate man, or more subtly, love mankind like dollars in their pocket, stripping humans of their humanity.
This mendacious attitude is also a major driver of enshitification.
The internet and executive social distancing has made a huge swath of people lose touch with how unique individuals are, so they treat humanity with the bigotry and coldness that the law of large numbers has lead them to, which is ultimately very mean.
> If Consumer is your identity yet you fear executing its labors
This is an interesting take. Spending hours min-maxxing the "best" combination of product/price in every given category has always been peak consumerism as an identity to me. Subreddits filled with tens of thousands of posts and strongly held groupthink opinions about why knife brand x is the best option for you to open your amazon packages, or how much you need to try the new mechanical keyboard switch collaboration, deep dives on wirecutter, waiting for the right sale, etc.
I go to costco because I don't want to do any of that for my groceries and basic home needs. I need oil for my car this weekend, and beer and burgers to hang out after I'm done with it. I don't want to spend 10 hours reading about the best 5w30 oil (or should I get 0w20?), I want a high-quality option at a fair price.
Also the reason that small specialty shops, and mom-and-pop grocery, fruit, dairy, bakeries and butcher shops are largely gone. They just cannot compete with Costco and Sam's Club/Walmart's buying power.
A specialty shop can probably survive Costco much more easily than they can survive Walmart or any other conventional (American) grocery store. The grocery store carries 20 or 30 different olive oils, to select one example. Odds are all the snobbiest will find something they like... odds are even decent that in a blind taste test even the snobbiest would find something that they would be horrified to discover came from a normal grocery store.
Costco carries one or two options for a given thing, and are outright missing many things you might want. As nice as Costco is for buying things on a budget when you're going to use them up fully, I think it would be a bit of a challenge to make them your only grocery source. Doable as a sort of self-imposed challenge, no problem, there's certainly enough for that, but you'd be missing a lot of things, and/or wasting money on huge quantities of things you won't use. The quality is generally pretty decent (I may have more brand loyalty for "Kirkland" than almost any other brand) but not necessarily the most premium options. If you are the type to even consider the specialty shop in the first place you're more likely to be unsatisfied by Costco than a grocery store.
Actual specialty shops survive just fine. There's plenty of value in real expertise. Run-of-the-mill stores selling the same commodity at a higher price are simply inefficient.
The idealized small mom-and-pop shops were largely put out of business by WWII and rationing more than anything. Supermarkets and department stores have more or less been the norm in the US since long before Wal-Mart began spreading across the country.
There are still plenty of produce stands, bakeries, and butcher shops in the country. Most of what was driven out of business were small bodega-style corner stores.
One area where I'd say Costco -is- a let down is electronics. Yes, you don't always need the latest and greatest, but in my area Costco was selling 2 and 3 year old model TVs that have been superseded by the manufacturer at their (low but still retail) same prices.
The author's view is alien to me. It paints Costco as some sort of cultural retirement home. A boring place for boring people, not just a big store in a warehouse. I know that displaying brand affinity towards some companies is seen as tasteful and praiseworthy in our cultures, but I didn't realize many people extended this view to something as basic and pragmatic as the place they go to buy flour or whatever.
Costco is a store... where coffee, usually gas and most food + home goods are reliable in quality and priced well comparatively. Comparing the price of salmon fillets at Costco to Whole Foods or elsewhere is eye-opening. Would I buy clothes or furniture from Costco? No - because both are bland. The end.
If the writer wants to make it anything more than that... They are a bit too obsessed with self-image vs wasting money and, dare I say, a loser for judging others over something as classist as personal finances. Feels like the write-up is just a statement piece meant to either rattle people for engagement or make the writer feel more hip than they actually are.
Careful - even Gen-Z is looking at Kirkland clothing for certain pieces, and some furniture (like the Murphy bed I bought from them) is better when it's bland and greige
> Would I buy clothes or furniture from Costco? No - because both are bland. The end.
But they're like the gas and food at Costco - reliable in quality and comparatively well-priced. I'd buy clothes from other places if I knew where they were. Online shopping is a crapshoot and I mean that (almost) literally: they shoot crap into your mailbox. Department stores and clothes stores at the mall are overpriced for average quality. Ditto for IRL furniture stores.
It's interesting how Millennials seem to be embracing boring practicality as they get older. Brands like Costco, Toyota, Ikea, minivans, etc are all staging a comeback as middle-aged Millennials decide they don't have time to deal with hassles or money to pay for overpriced status symbols.
Indeed Costco is a very practical store. You can trust most of the food to taste good because they test it first, vs a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach to a standard grocery store. Trader Joe's is is probably the best in this regard.
The return policy also takes away a lot of concern. If you don't like it you can easily just take it back without any hassle.
> I will never buy Costco coffee—I know too much about coffee, and my allegiance to a coterie of indie micro roasters (Yes Plz subscription for life) and esoteric brewing methods has ruined me for life from enjoying the simple pleasures of a Kirkland Signature K-Cup pod.
You can pry the 2-lb bags of Mayorga Cafe Cubano dark roast coffee from my cold, dead hands.
Always found Costco's largest source of profits interesting:
> Revenue from membership fees accounts for the majority of the company's profits, accounting for over 72% of the company's net operating income in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, and 65.5% in fiscal year 2024.[115][a]
The claim could be true even if every customer is exactly like you. The implication is that Costco doesn't really make money selling stuff, they just need to roughly break even. And "breaking even" here includes paying rewards on purchases. The fact that you earn a lot of rewards doesn't stop your membership dues from contributing to Costco's bottom line.
If you have an executive membership they guarantee that you make back your membership dues. If you fall short you can just ask them to give you the difference (and then they will downgrade you to the regular membership).
But also remember regular members don't get cash back. The ratio is about 50/50. So about 40 million people pay for membership and don't get cash back.
That's yet another thinly disguised case of punching down: the author wants you to know that they are not the type of person who lives close to a Costco, typically in the suburbs. This author's attitude is so tiresome.
I just got (at 38) a Costco membership this year, thanks to my in-laws gifting us a membership. There's another huge discount retailer here in Boston (BJs) that I have gone to for years, but Costco is another 10+ min drive away so I've resisted thus far. I will say... I'm still adjusting.
- No aisle signs or labels anywhere. I understand the retail strategy here but the lack of efficiency in MY experience kills me. Clearly they can't move the bakery, or meat department. But after ~5 visits I still have no idea where some basic products can be found.
- Who is buying a kayak, or shed while shopping for groceries?
- I continually make the mistake of going during the weekend when it is the most packed store on Earth. There were no less than 3 Cybertrucks in the parking lot.
I don't have the "must-buy" item yet, but every time I go, I feel like I need to take a nap after.
I have talked my wife out of us both nearly impulse-buying a mini greenhouse at Costco multiple times.
And the worst part is, I regret it. We need a greenhouse now and greenhouse prices are through the roof! I can't afford NOT to impulse buy a greenhouse at Costco 18 months ago now! I'll never make that mistake again.
> No aisle signs or labels anywhere. I understand the retail strategy here but the lack of efficiency in MY experience kills me. Clearly they can't move the bakery, or meat department. But after ~5 visits I still have no idea where some basic products can be found.
What are you having trouble finding, out of curiosity? In my Costco everything is pretty much in the same general area. They might move stuff a little bit, but it's pretty consistent.
> Who is buying a kayak, or shed while shopping for groceries?
I see this as separate trips for the larger items. Nobody is buying appliances either when you buy meat or paper towels. Also, Costco never fully replaces a full grocery store in my experience. You just don't need things in the sizes they sell them for many goods. Certain foodstuffs are really designed for restaurants and not people. Like, who is buying the 40 lb bags of flour besides people VERY into baking or restaurants?
I do agree that Costco's can be laid out pretty differently and I get confused. My home Costco flows in a circle where you first see:
1. appliances/bedding/toothbrushes
2. alcohol
3. refrigerated foods with the bakery/meat department
4. cleaning products and flats of drinks
5. dry foods
when this cycle is broken or changed in a different Costco I am visiting, I feel VERY lost
Long ago we found that we saved more money shopping at Costco than the membership cost by a long shot. We even get the executive membership because they will refund the difference of you don’t get at least that back rewards (we always have).
For things that are acceptable, it’s usually hard to beat Costco. You have to give up variety, possibly brand choice, and maybe even buy more than you’ll use, but it works out to be significantly cheaper. There are categories, however, where Costco is never the cheapest (soft drinks) or where the commodity store brand is significantly worse than alternatives (batteries).
> where the commodity store brand is significantly worse than alternatives (batteries).
Kirkland batteries actually last longer than Duracell. They're some of the best alkaline batteries you can get, especially considering the price. Sure, lithium batteries will last longer, but the mAh per dollar is lower, so they'll still cost more.
I think I've gotten the hang of it fairly well. Coffee is over by the coolers but not in them, cat little is on the back wall, specialty cheese is near the meat, Kirland cheese is near the end of one of the coolers, cheap winter jackets are somewhere in the middle between the pants and the tortilla chips, motor oil is at the far right, bread on the left near the old people, and the big expensive life-optional stuff is at the front.
Everything else is either on the way between those points, or it doesn't exist today (because even if it is there, I'll never find it).
I saw someone leaving buc-ees at 10:30pm who just purchased a huge fire pit and was franticly trying to jam it in the back of a large chevy. I can only imagine they went for stacks due to the poor planning
The #1 thing for me at Costco is the gas. I have the credit card, so I get 5% cash back on the first $7,000 of gas I purchase in a year. Being as that, as of now I am spending ~$70/week on fuel, I will not hit the max for the year.
But 5% cash back on ($70*52=)$3640 means I get $182/yr by default back to cover the $130 annual cost of the executive membership. Doesn't sound like a good deal until you also factor in that their fuel is typically 10 cents a gallon or more cheaper than the next least expensive fuel place, which means that for my roughly 650 gallons of fuel a year baseline costco gas saves me an additional $65.
So yeah, nothing really amazing, but the fact that having the membership lets me pocket something in the neighborhood of $120/yr on top of the occasional shopping trip and access is nice.
There are so many people like you (who only use it for gas) that they are now building Costco gas stations not attached to a warehouse. Massive stations like the ones near the warehouses.
I hate going there. It's so crowded, the lines are massive, and all so you can save like $200 at the end of the year on some groceries. The other problem is that you end up impulse buying well over $200 worth of stuff you wouldn't have purchased if you just went to the regular grocery store. Oh but you have to go to the grocery store anyways after your 2 hour long Costco trip, because the shit they had last week is gone now. But hey at least you waited in line for another 40 minutes to save $3.00 on your tank of gas you bought while you were there.
I have friends who have membership to Costco, Sam's and BJs. And when they need to buy stuff they go to nearest market from home (none of above 3). Despite working from home forever, they just don't have time to go to these warehouse stores.
My takeaway is at certain income level and lifestyle, one can have all memberships but don't find use of any.
I'm 43, own a home, live in Seattle, and feel attacked by this article.
"every Costco shopper has a certain item or two they’re compelled to purchase on each visit"
Organic, single-serving guacamole and Magic Spoon cereal for me.
My toddler is obsessed with their mammoth two dollar slices of cheese pizza and talks constantly about wanting to go to Costco to have pizza with his little bestie.
Costco is such a family friendly place. My kids love going there.
They've made some deliberate decisions to make it family friendly:
1. The aisles are wide so the whole family can walk through the store together.
2. The kids love free samples
3. The food court is a great place to have an inexepensive dinner.
4. The store is designed so there's nothing really to grab at ground level if you're a little kid. Everything is up higher.
Contrast this with a standard grocery store: small aisles and tons of little things on the shelf at ground level (including random toys) that can get grabbed or knocked over. Every time I take my family to Albertsons I have to pick a dozen things off the ground that we accidentally knocked off.
Once or twice a year I have a chance to go to costco in the middle of a work day and I'm absolutely blown away at how busy the place is at that time. People everywhere young and old, even kids! Long lines and nobody is rushed.
I want to live like Costco people because apparently they don't work in the middle of the day!
I'm from East Asia, where every supermarket brand is basically the same aside from a few different products.
When I moved to North America, this whole concept of tiered supermarkets felt really weird and exotic to me. Like, this is the most basic stuff you need, and you still need to tier it down?
I'm kinda used to it now, but it still feels very American to me.
China at least has this. The stuff you get at the Ole Supermarket inside a shopping mall is different from the stuff you get from the little store facing the street on the ground floor of your apartment building.
I grew up in a post soviet country. To me Costco, has perfected the soviet ideal of shopping more than any soviet economy ever could.
In a Costco, we are all equal. I could be shopping for the same set of beige slacks right next to the CEO of a multi-million dollar company and never know it. We'll own the same Waterpik. Identical towels. Our lawn furniture will look the same.
Everything is purchased at a fair price. And we know it's a fair price because it's Costco. The workers are happy because they are given a fair wage and respect by an executive team that doesn't think they're better than them.
Yes, you have to admit to yourself that a certain part of shopping at Costco is rejecting iconoclasm. You must be okay being part of a crowd. But the other side of that - are you able to surrender? Can you deny yourself when you find something that is legitimately good? Must you be different to the point of self-detrimental?
So yes, I will go to a store that has better olive oil or coffee or oranges. But how can you not love Costco?
Interestingly, my local subreddit loves to describe Costco as a late stage capitalist dystopia.
- fighting for space everywhere: fighting for a parking lot, avoiding people seeming to ram you with their shopping cart, waiting for the extended family of seven in front of you to pick a cereal so you can leave the aisle, waiting for traffic to clear so you can _leave_ the costco
- you have to pay to get in
- and then you have to pay extra to jump to the head of the line
It's wild that you can look at a physical testament of the sheer abundance and affordability that capitalism has created for almost every consumer good, and people will call it a dystopia because they experience traffic or fight over the right to buy cardboard childrens toys
Good comment, but IMHO the main reason to not love it so much is the annual membership fee. It sits well with cult cultivation. Other stores don't require it and they don't form a cult around them.
Costco derives the majority of their revenue from the membership fee, followed by services. They actually make very little on the products themselves as they have a hard cap on markups at like 11% or something around there.
The membership is the whole reason they can offer the deals they do.
But the fee isn't an initiation ritual. It's what partially subsidizes the low prices, often at the expense of people who buy the membership and underutilize it, spending more money upfront than they save on later purchases.
The yearly fee is $65. If you save $5/month on what you buy you break even. Personally I save over $5/month just buying butter there vs buying from my local supermarket.
I like Costco, but it also helps there's one around the corner from my house. That said, I prefer the shopping experience at Sam's, with their mobile checkout. Of course, they're currently building one just a mile from my house. :-)
I think the most extreme hoi polloi, kings and paupers experience I've had in the U.S is at the DMV. No matter how rich you are, you have to show up in person with everyone else, from the poorest mentally ill welfare/SSDI recipient who has to get someone to help them because they can't read the forms in any language, to the extremely wealthy. Everyone has to sit there and wait on those generic plastic chairs.
I shop at Costco not because of the price or the bulk formats. It's not always a good deal vs other places. The value to me is not having to worry about quality. Any product that is not satisfactory gets returned with no hassle.
Part of growing up is realizing that the places where a person eats or shops, what music and entertainment they consume, what clothes they wear - are entirely uncorrelated with their personality and character and worth. And cringing hard at your own past teenage past self who confused such superficial identity markers with personality.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the article's author is only on their first step of this realization.
Of course, one can overgeneralize the correlations between consumption preferences and personality (character is vague and worth practically undefined) but it seems absurd to claim they are entirely uncorrelated. Take the Big Five traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, extroversion. Each has numerous obvious implications for consumer preferences. Do you mean something else by "personality" or perhaps "growing up"?
Right, I noped out of this article when I realized it felt like a guy making up a whole population he could do some elevated punching down at to offset some ostensible self deprecation. What a chore.
I'm quite curious what initially instills this juvenile idea in us. I expect it's advertising which actively seeks to foment this nonsense by implying that if you buy this or that you will become this or that.
Sent me to the shelf, but one has to appreciate the word choice. Evokes the peanut oil spilling everywhere, the reach for geologic terminology captures the lithic aspects of the peanut butter underneath.
I have a Costco that is walking distance from my office. If I need to decompress, I walk to Costco for lunch solo, get a hot dog and a slice of pizza, sit down, and watch both the people and what's in their cart. It's so diverse and pretty fascinating.
Jarvis Cocker wrote Common People about a girl he did actually know, who was "identified" as Danae Stratou, daughter of a Greek textile magnate, and while she said "the only person who knows for sure is Cocker himself", emails between her and her husband indicated that she saw herself saying and doing several of the things he references, "yeah, I'm rather ashamed to admit it, that -does- sound like me and things I'd say then".
And then Disco 2000 was written about Deborah Bone, childhood friend who was a mental health nurse (who helped form Step2 and created the Brainbox), and said the only thing inaccurate about the song was that her home did not have "woodchips on the wall". She said, shortly before she died of myeloma, that she "did grow up and sleep with Jarvis Cocker, somebody had to, and it was perfectly innocent" (I think the implication is that they fell asleep together).
Not of any great relevance. I just see myself as a collector of information that might only be useful for music trivia nights...
I wanna live like Costco people
I wanna do whatever Costco people do
Wanna sleep with Costco people
I wanna sleep with Costco people like you.
Well, what else could I do?
I said, "I'll... I'll see what I can do.
"And she just laughed and said 'Oh, you're so funny.' And I said 'Yeah, well, I can't see anyone else smiling in here'."
... which often mirrors my feelings in Costco, particularly near the registers, where oftentimes in my local stores it feels more akin to the Thunderdome.
I've become a Costco person in recent years. At least in my perception, inflation has affected grocery stores unevenly:
Whole Foods: eye-bogglingly expensive (and no, I don't think it always was)
Wegmans: substantially more expensive than a few years ago, and a noticeable decline in produce quality
Trader Joes: incredible value on many prepared foods, but not the best source for staples like rice or paper products.
Costco is not inflation-proof by any means but they have pretty much 0 margins and they're reliably the best value on just about whatever they sell. The selection can be limited in some ways compared to a supermarket, and they can be a bad place to be health conscious (as it can be hard to resist massive containers of ultra cheap and delicious treats of various kinds) or to try to try to be an ethical consumer (and please spare me the HN cynical line on this, I get it, I have no real agency and I'm pathetically guilt-ridden): I've read bad things about their meat sourcing, they rarely have coffee with bona fides like fair trade or shade grown, I see controversial products like bird's nest soup, etc.
My local Costco carries the fair trade artisanal coffee brand that is roasted in my city, just in a 3 pound bag of beans instead of a 1 pound bag of beans like at the bougie grocery store. I can understand not wanting the Kirkland brand coffee, but that is far from the only coffee brand for sale at Costco. I am a coffee snob of the highest order and I buy my beans at Costco.
It's probably very store specific. If you know the Market Basket in Somerville, MA, it's got a legendary produce section. I've been to locations in NH with crap.
IMO H-Mart is the safest bet in the Boston area for high quality produce (outside of farmers markets, natch)
If I’m being honest I find a lot of this kind of stuff pretentiously performative. It’s a wholesale market with a membership fee. The food is nutritious and cheap and there are economies of scale to be had.
There are no Costco people. There are no Whole Foods people. There are no Gus’s people. In San Francisco, I live a block from Whole Foods, a block from Safeway and a block past that is Gus’s. Costco is six blocks away. We go to all of these places at various times. My gym is near Gus’s. Whole Foods has the biggest selection. Safeway has Envy apples. Costco is where we get the base load of stuff when we do weekly shopping.
As commentary on consumerism has filtered down from philosophy to the masses it really has become incredibly middle-brow. Copy-paste opinions about shopping substitute for any intellectual examination of food availability. Like LLM text the language is sound but the ideas are incredibly shallow shadows of the ultimate concept.
It really brings home the idea that if you can’t appreciate living in an era of abundance where fruit of high quality is available throughout the year and it has been bred to high perfection and eggs, milk, and rice are practically costless compared to the past, that perhaps there is nothing that can bring you joy. All the “this is late stage capitalism where you consume consume consume without thought and reason” takes have the shape of meaning but carry nothing. They’re some kind of cargo cult mimicry of some concept.
We have solved food. Costco is the solved form. $2.99/lb of chicken.
This article seemed mildly interesting to perhaps kill 5 minutes. I clicked through only to be slapped by a cookie consent and a newsletter signup pop up, together they entirely obscure the content on mobile. Too much friction, so I decided to just close it, this saved me from wasting 5 minutes of my life reading, which I instead proceeded to use cleaning a toilet. All in all, a good outcome I would say.
The nearest costco to me is an hour and half away. I've been in costco only once, and I guess I got it, but I also was like: do i need this? This year they're opening one nearby (~10mins). I have this nagging growing feeling of fear I will be joining.
But yes, you can buy many different items there. Many come in large packages. The public can be found there shopping too. You are not required to purchase every item. Welcome to the 90s and holy shit thanks for the journalism.
I let my Costco membership lapse because it's cheaper, healthier and more pleasant to buy 1) small quantities, of 2) fresh foods, in a 3) nice store, that is preferably 4) nearby, and 5) quietly forget to buy all the other crap you don't need.
Frasier, at a free sample station: I do thank you, but I'm afraid I'm rather particular about the provenance of my shellfish. To subject a scampi to the radiation of a microwave is not cooking, madam, it's an execution! My god, Niles, is that a '98 Chateau Latour in your cart?
Niles: I've already secured six cases! They're over there, just between the Kirkland Signature Leaf Blowers and the 5 pound bags of "Kickin' Queso Jalapeño Poppers"!
I've only been to Costco a handful of times in my life. It seems like each time, there were hordes of people standing lifelessly in a huge line waiting to check themselves out(sometimes with help from an employee), which took longer than it should. Then, once that task was accomplished, they'd then stand in another huge line waiting to leave. Is this the typical experience or did I just happen to pick the worst times/locations?
I happily pay more at places like Publix to -not- have to do that.
This was my experience, too. I have tried going at noon on weekdays, as soon as the store opens, and every other time folks on the internet have recommended. Every single time, it was an absolute slog to get through aisles full of oblivious people blocking areas with their carts and (hilariously) getting mad at you for asking them to move their cart.
Also, this may be my own bias coloring my perception but there was a palpable undertone among some of the shoppers of “at least we’re not Walmart customers”.
I’m sure quite a few Costco members enjoy the treasure hunt model they offer but I’d much rather have an option to order online and go pick up what I need or, failing that, labeled aisles.
To Costco’s credit, though, they refunded my membership fee in full as soon as I asked to cancel. And their return policy the one time I had to use it was exceptional as well. It’s a shame the rest of the experience has to be such a sensory overload.
In my experience, get there as early as possible and it's not bad. But that's the standard for these membership stores, although Sam's Club has the edge being able to use their app to scan your items and pay without having to stop anywhere (other than the line to get out.)
I have a Sam's Club membership primarily because it is much closer to me than Costco. I hate the crowds but it baffles me there are lines when the scan & go app exists! And I swear last time I went they weren't even scanning receipts, but you walked through some sort of gateway?
Costco actually has a better checkout experience than most places IMO. They always have basically all lanes open, and the employees are efficient at moving people through.
I love Wegmans for most groceries but their checkouts seem to be getting worse.
That's the takeaway - that people are supposed to be bored in line? I wasn't insulting the people, I was describing what to me is the awful human experience of shopping at Costco.
I deliberately take my time in self-checkout lines. If they are going to cheap out by not having cashiers, I'm not going to hustle to make their lines move faster.
I will brave the downvotes and say: I don’t like Costco.
It’s not out of snobbishness, their quality is excellent at excellent prices.
My problem is that I find I spend more at Costco than at conventional grocery stores like Trader Joe’s.
The paradox is, it’s cheaper, but I spend more. I buy things I wouldn’t normally buy, and ant higher quantities. Even worse, I somehow eat it all quite quickly.
I spend more and eat more when I shop at Costco.
Unfortunately that’s neither healthy for my wallet nor for my waistline.
We didn’t have Costco in our area when I was a kid, but iirc that’s why my parents stopped going to Sam’s Club: any money they saved on buying cheaper bulk things went into buying random extras.
I love Costco, but I get it. My wife and I always joke about how we can't leave without spending at least $100, and how that's only like 7 items sometimes.
I've been to Costco (UK) a couple of times. It mostly seems to be: 4x the quantity for 4x the price (i.e. same price as any other store). I don't get it? I honestly think a large majority of people think it being in bulk MUST equal a saving?
Is it just for like catering companies or families of 20 where the bigger size is kind of helpful?
They do some nice discounts on Macs online though (can't say I'm a fan of their customer service either though based on my experience returning a Macbook)
This could possibly be the most cringe piece of coastal elite content I've ever read.
Aesthetically-minded hipster writes a think piece on reluctantly aging out of high school fears of being "uncool," finally grows up and has a family, but 15 years too late.
Discovers the concept of economies of scale and also that families who live in the center of the country who don't spend their weekends marching at pride events might not be nazis after all...and actually it's kind of convenient to go to a big warehouse full of curated bulk items and buy shit when you have kids.
I imagine its exactly the type of thing boomer hippies (the hipsters of their generation) wrote about in the 80s/90s after they realized dropping acid in nudist drum circles gets old after a while and that communes don't actually work. Just rewrite the title to "I want to live like Kmart people," and voila, you've got a New Yorker thinkpiece from 1986.
I've been a costco member for more than 10 years now since it's about a 7 minute drive from my home. It's really fun to discover new things they bring in, like a flea market kind of vibe.
These past 2 years it has gotten significantly worse. Too crowded. Too many people who have no common decency of not blocking the lane. And way way way too many instacart delivery people FLOORING IT to get their next item pickup and leave. Looking at their phone and bumping into people/stuff. I don't like the vibes.
The one cool thing they have now is the 9am executive hours where you can go in earlier than normal. That feels more like the costco of 2016 to me.
I resisted joining Costco for many years, because it seemed too culty, or just too popular in general (with my assumption being that most popular things are bad). Eventually they sucked me in though, and yes, it really is good.
This is kind of a weird take on Costco, but I also somewhat resonate with it. I've always seen Costco as somehow the perfect aspirational ideal of the American middle class. Personally, I love Costco, and my love for it has grown as I've become more affluent, because I can actually attain that aspirational lifestyle. On any given day in my local Costco, I'm probably the highest earning person in the store, but that doesn't matter because I want the exact same Kirkland Signature toilet paper as the next guy. As someone who often obsesses over trying to acquire the best things so that they last longer (BIFL), Costco tickles my internal register of "good enough". I don't think I've ever regretted a purchase at Costco other than occasionally upsetting my wife for getting something that wasn't on the list.
> Something about the whole thing always registered to me as, like, lame—too normcore, too boring, perhaps even too cheugy to an informed and taste-driven millennial ur-consumer like me. The kinds of brands I like to buy aren’t what they sell at Costco
Good example of how people can build identities through their brand choices and purchasing habits.
It’s a foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant if another company releases a better product. Yet the crossover between brands, identities, and lifestyles is deeply held by many people.
I know some will try to turn this into a criticism of Americans, but in my travels and international business experience I wouldn’t even rank Americans in the top 10 for integrating brands and identity. In some countries I had to make a conscious effort to try to wear clothes from acceptable brands and swap my functional laptop bag for something more stylish to avoid letting my purchasing habits become a point of judgment from others. It’s actually refreshing to come back to America where as long as you’ve made some effort to look more or less appropriate for the occasion few people care about the brand of your clothes, laptop bag, or car. Some people are proud of their Audi or designer bag, but I rarely run into situations where I’d be judged for arriving in a sensible Subaru instead of a Mercedes.
> In some countries I had to make a conscious effort to try to wear clothes from acceptable brands and swap my functional laptop bag for something more stylish to avoid letting my purchasing habits become a point of judgment from others.
It is kind of fascinating, having come from such a culture, to realize that in the end, Americans, at least the average of the America I met, are not nearly brand conscious as I and everyone in my place supposed them to be.
Of course, America is a fucking giant and diverse place, and I think that even native born Americans have no fucking idea of how many different Americas exist, so, take my views of America with a giant grain of salt.
> "What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” - Andy Warhol
Unfortunately I think America is starting to lose this way a bit, with the influx of newer premium brands and the fracturing of American consumers into endless lifestyle personas. But there's still some truth left in it.
> where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest
To say that "the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest" by using Coke as an example is a significant oversimplification and is cherry picking examples to prove a point. The richest consumers buy plenty of consumer goods that the poorest cannot even dream of buying or even renting.
If there was a truffle-infused Coke with edible 24k gold flakes that cost 10x as much (and actually tasted good) you can be sure pretty much only the richest consumers would be drinking it, and that everyone who couldn't afford it would be doing everything in their power to keep up with the Joneses.
What percentage of "the poorest" own their own home or go on international trips more than once a year let alone owning multiple homes, luxury cars, and private jets?
American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe.
The mantra was sell more, more, more and more, and to do that, you need to sell things to poor people to. A French enterpreneur would be happy selling phones only for the upper middle class and above. In America the idea was to install as many landlines as possible and gain with scale.
An Italian man once told me, "Coca-Cola is American champagne." Take it as you will.
> Unfortunately I think America is starting to lose this way a bit, with the influx of newer premium brands
Witness Erewhon fruit juices/smoothies.
> It’s a foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant if another company releases a better product.
Perhaps those folks found certain brands regularly have decent (enought) quality and stick with them, and/or they have a personal aesthetic that they've developed that may be 'limited' to certain brands.
Some folks also don't want to go through the effort of constantly/regularly (re-)evaluating things: they've found that Brand X gives them enough quality/value, and have stopped looking.
> Some folks also don't want to go through the effort of constantly/regularly (re-)evaluating things: they've found that Brand X gives them enough quality/value, and have stopped looking
This argument stops holding water when those same people start judging other people for not also using Brand X.
It sounds like you’ve just been around toxic and superficial people in your international travels and then extrapolated from them to their whole countries.
Unfortunately, they have people like that everywhere.
Not necessarily.
South Korea is one example that I have intimate knowledge of where one's consumer habits (the clothes one wears, the car one drives, the logo on one's handbag) is the ultimate signal of status.
You're automatically pre-judged by complete strangers without having to say a single word.
There are always exceptions to the rule, but it is in fact an unspoken rule over there.
> I know some will try to turn this into a criticism of Americans, but in my travels and international business experience I wouldn’t even rank Americans in the top 10 for integrating brands and identity.
Can you give a few examples of those brand-centric cultures? Which product categories do they follow? I've never seen anything like this, so if I were to go to one of the places that has this culture, I should probably know about it in advance.
China, India, Singapore, and Korea are a few off the top of my head.
> It’s a foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant if another company releases a better product.
For those of us who grew up in the era of the "Are you a Mac or a PC" [1], many Americans are intimately familiar with the concept of brand identity.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_a_Mac
>build identities through [...] purchasing habits
> foreign concept for many of us who seek out the best product or deals for each purchase and will change brands in an instant
But you are, yourself, defining yourself partially here through your own purchasing habits. In fact you are doing it to a far more universal degree than most of the ones you criticize.
Not that I'm immune to it, but nor do I claim to be. I think it's useful signal just like anything else. Watch: My quintessential American habit is that I wear roughly the same nondescript black T shirt, black boxer briefs, black socks, and maybe an unlabeled black hoddie that I purchase off of Amazon, mostly just sorting by ratings. If at any point I reach into my closet and the stock-flow system that is my laundry habits have deemed it such that I am actually out of stock of any of these items, I immediately go to Amazon and purchase another 6- or 4- or 12-pack. If you feel you understand me better as a person after reading all that, you probably do.
Exposing my superficiality, perhaps: but it pains me that you don't wear pants.
> Some people are proud of their Audi or designer bag, but I rarely run into situations where I’d be judged for arriving in a sensible Subaru instead of a Mercedes.
I agree. You can go into Costco and see a store full of individuals who happen to be shopping at Costco that day, or you can go to Costco and see the same people as slaves to an imagined Costco lifestyle that you can then write about for 800 words. It says more about the author than the shoppers. This article is the worst kind of lifestyle trend engineering.
Slaves to an imagined Costco lifestyle? That's not the vibe I picked up from the article at all.
I enjoyed reading about the writer realizing he's turning into his father and taking photos of things his dad used to buy to share with his mom. He spots people that may be falling in love. Clumsy people apologizing to nobody. He counts eight different languages.
I thought it was charming and a little nostalgic.
I would agree. The implicit (or actually pretty explicit in a couple of sentences) class disdain is so tiring.
I get the allure, but it's not for me and my partner.
We live in a small apartment. We drive a small car. The pantry has a good amount of dry bulk & canned food, but we largely shop one week at a time.
Sure, we could "lock in" on two or three foods, buy weeks worth of them at a time, and save some money. But like most people we like a bit of verity. It's just not possible to buy such massive quantities of things with nowhere to store them.
What I want is an anti-costco. More like a bodega. Still curated, maybe a larger mark-up, but smaller quantities of everything. Half loaves of bread, small bags of frozen veg, enough sugar or flour to bake just a couple batches.
The basic membership is $65. If all you do is get a year's worth of detergent, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies chances are that will already pay for the membership. They also have grocery items that are kinda wholesale but not really. Pantry stuff like a bag of nuts that you can go through on your own in under a week that is marked down significantly from the grocery store. Oh also olive oil is another big one for me.
The issue for many apartment-dwellers is storage. You can't store a year's worth of detergent, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies in an apartment.
Costco really incentivizes shopping in bulk, from the huge value-pack sized portions to the focus on frozen & dry goods to the super-sized carts to the anxiety-inducing shopping experience. My wife and I shoot to go no more than once a quarter, just because it's a hassle.
We found our habits (and need for Costco) changed dramatically once we moved into a home and could now put in a chest freezer and pile toilet paper rolls in a corner.
>The basic membership is $65. If all you do is get a year's worth of detergent, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies chances are that will already pay for the membership.
Maybe savings are that large if you're comparing against regular prices at retailers, but if you wait for sales, they're as cheap, if not cheaper than Costco.
If you ever visit Japan, you can buy a Costco membership there for $35 and use it in the US.
I heard you can also get someone with a membership to buy you a gift card, and use the reloadable gift card for continued access. (Or buy one for yourself and then cancel your membership.)
For the kinds of people who post on HN, the real savings of a Costco membership is that they regularly have high-end electronics, appliances, and home furnishings at $50-100 or more off retail elsewhere. Get a robot vacuum or a couch or a VR headset for $100 off and your membership's already paid for itself that year. For several years, if you need to replace a refrigerator or washing machine.
Trader Joe's is probably closest to what you want. It targets single shoppers with small quantities and low prices, and it rotates products frequently to keep things interesting.
Anecdotally I feel like a lot of TJ's shoppers shift into Costco shoppers as they age up.
The nice thing about Trader Joe's is that you can be in and out in 5-10 minutes if you're just buying weekly food items. The store is modestly sized and the checkout lines are short. I'm in there about once a week.
I go to Costco once every three months or so and buy paper towels, detergent, and other consumables that have long shelf lives. I don't feel drawn to it; it's just the warehouse for boring items to buy in bulk. Their hot dog is OK. But a lifestyle? No.
I think trader joe's is what people i know do for small curated quantities. They know what they're doing.
The shoppers there might still be the same costco members though :)
There was a point where two friends and I each lived alone in an apartment, and I was the only one who had a (2-door) car. We still occasionally did Costco runs.
We'd go in and walk the store - the whole store - aisle by aisle.
If I saw something like a 2-pound bag of tortellini, but thought two pounds was too big a quantity for me, I'd ask, "does anybody want to split two pounds or tortellini?" One might say yes, so we'd throw the tortellini in the shopping cart.
At the end, one person (the membership holder) would pay, and we'd divvy up the result of our haul into reusable containers, in the parking lot. One of us would then take point on itemizing the receipt, and we'd pay back the person with the membership.
In hindsight, I think we did this more to socialize than to save money, but we definitely did save money. Even as a single apartment-dweller, I bought my fair share of 24-packs of yogurt and 5-pound bags of frozen vegetables.
Growing up as a kid, we lived in the sticks and the small local grocery store had a limited produce section. My mom joined a little co-op where each person would put in the same amount of cash, but one person would make a trip to the downtown farmer's market. The purchase was split evenly between each member. Each trip a different person made the trip so the variety changed not only by what was available but by the person making the trip's preferences.
This was my introduction to collective buying and at the same time the fact there's a bigger world out there than where one lives.
This is what I did with 3 roommates in college. We saved a ton of money that way.
After college, I only had one roommate and Costco didn't work as well. The quantities for certain things are just a bit much. Buying 36 eggs for 4 adults made sense. Buying 36 eggs for 2 adults... not so much. I ended up going to Costco for toilet paper and gas, and that's it.
To this day, I'm still the "spouse" on one of those college roommates' costco memberships, LOL.
> What I want is an anti-costco. More like a bodega. Still curated, maybe a larger mark-up, but smaller quantities of everything. Half loaves of bread, small bags of frozen veg, enough sugar or flour to bake just a couple batches.
This is becoming even harder to achieve nowadays, there is all this variety in size of products and more and more over the years(at least in the midwest) it seems that grocery stores want to take the small product and apply minimums to deals.
there will be an 8oz offering and a 14 oz offering, the 8 oz will be on sale but only if you buy at least 2 or 3, its incredibly frustrating.
It has incidentally made my junk food habits better though, If i see 2 for 5$ for a package of cookies with no minimum purchase, I'll likely grab a box. As soon as they apply that minimum, i am gonna be thinking "do i really wanna eat all those cookies?" instead i end up with 0.
> the 8 oz will be on sale but only if you buy at least 2 or 3, its incredibly frustrating.
Have you tested this by buying just one, and checking the price on the receipt?
I ask because someone once told me this was illegal in the US; that a shop was allowed to display the sale price only for a larger quantity, but they had to honor the same price per unit if you only bought one. (I think we were discussing produce at the time, in case that matters.) I've long wondered if that was true or just an urban legend.
The thing is you can save a ton of money on a few non-food items to make it worth it. Just over-the-counter medicines save me a huge chunk of the membership fee. Then there are just random household goods: paper products, trash bags, dishwasher detergent, etc.
Their pharmacy is A+.
I get my dogs seizure meds there and they're about $10 a month but at a regular pharmacy they'd be $300+.
Renting a car once a year through Costco Travel is worth the membership fee.
It's great for canned goods and anything bulk for cooking, see: salmon.
Glasses is another place where the savings are astounding
sounds like you just want to live in europe (or probably anywhere outside of the US?). You can typically go buy a half (or quarter) loaf of bread from a baker, and street markets let you buy all the small quantities you want by the kilo
You can even buy half a baguette from a baker in France lol (They're already relatively small!). Love it - great for single people.
I think you’re describing Trader Joe’s for something at the giant chain level.
Trader Joes, Whole Foods, ALDI, Sprouts.
I have a really mixed feeling about Costco. I hate it, I going there, I hate the crowds, the parking, the people, being hawked a credit card, a cell phone, whatever the vendors are selling. It makes me feel like a pig in a slaughterhouse waiting to get out of the store, I feel like it's the platonic form of consumption. We all go to the nice little consumption center like good piggies to get our sustenance and to get milked further (maybe I should buy some electronics!)
Yet, I keep going. I like the cranberry bread, the cheap chicken, the granola, I like not thinking about what to buy so much. I like that it's of an acceptable quality at an acceptable price. I like that I can return stuff easily without getting shit for it. I like "scoring" deals on stuff that seems like a good value.
Costco's gimmick is relieving you of choice and price shopping. They find the best stuff and don't mark it up. If Consumer is your identity yet you fear executing its labors, let Costco step in and become your denomination of consumerism, complete with tithe, proscribed usury, and communion hot dog.
I wouldn't call it a gimmick when the business has been so successful for so many years. They target educated shoppers who want to buy quality at minimum markup and not think too hard about it. If I want a TV, I know Costco will have good ones at a good price. If I need socks, same. Their food is cheaper and better than Kroger. It's just a win-win for shoppers and Costco. The only tradeoff is selection and dealing with the crowds.
What you wrote sounds intelligent but belies an ignorance of the business model.
Parallel to that, I have to imagine Costco makes a lot of money off of impulse purchases, which are induced by uncertainty in the specific items they will have available, plus mutable store layouts.
Long ago in undergrad I took a retail marketing class and we did a field trip to Costco; the GM told us it was part of their policy to rearrange parts of the store occasionally so that you had to browse the entire place to check off your shopping list. This increases the likelihood that you stumble across new products. So it’s this combination of “best price/quality without decision fatigue” plus some impulse buying that works for them. The fact that they are figuring out the price/quality trade off for you up front probably also makes it easier to impulse buy with fewer regrets.
Yeah, this right here. I don't want to sift through thousands of options. Sometimes I just want a widget that is good quality and I don't want to get ripped off.
Identifying as a rabid consumer is not a requirement of appreciating Costco. The end result of that gimmick is that it feels like they're looking out for their customers and offering them a valuable service as opposed to trying to suck them dry. Buy this blender; don't buy this blender; they don't care, just know that this is probably the one that will best meet your needs, it's the best deal you're going to find on it anywhere, and if you're unhappy with it for any reason they'll take it back.
It's a gimmick only for those who get sucked into buying things that they don't need. I've been a Costco shopper for decades, and sure have succumbed to some useless stuff, but my Costco list is 90% the same month to month. I get appalled when I see the same items on my list, that are smaller and in a pack of 1 instead of 2-4, for more money at other stores. If electronics were just like food, it would be like seeing a Macbook Pro for $2000 everywhere but it was $799 at Costco.
Some companies serve the people and some companies want people to serve them.
The sabbath was always meant for man and that makes a lot of people very angry because whatever ideological or religious lip service someone gives their behavior demonstrate they hate man, or more subtly, love mankind like dollars in their pocket, stripping humans of their humanity.
This mendacious attitude is also a major driver of enshitification.
The internet and executive social distancing has made a huge swath of people lose touch with how unique individuals are, so they treat humanity with the bigotry and coldness that the law of large numbers has lead them to, which is ultimately very mean.
> If Consumer is your identity yet you fear executing its labors
This is an interesting take. Spending hours min-maxxing the "best" combination of product/price in every given category has always been peak consumerism as an identity to me. Subreddits filled with tens of thousands of posts and strongly held groupthink opinions about why knife brand x is the best option for you to open your amazon packages, or how much you need to try the new mechanical keyboard switch collaboration, deep dives on wirecutter, waiting for the right sale, etc.
I go to costco because I don't want to do any of that for my groceries and basic home needs. I need oil for my car this weekend, and beer and burgers to hang out after I'm done with it. I don't want to spend 10 hours reading about the best 5w30 oil (or should I get 0w20?), I want a high-quality option at a fair price.
Also the reason that small specialty shops, and mom-and-pop grocery, fruit, dairy, bakeries and butcher shops are largely gone. They just cannot compete with Costco and Sam's Club/Walmart's buying power.
A specialty shop can probably survive Costco much more easily than they can survive Walmart or any other conventional (American) grocery store. The grocery store carries 20 or 30 different olive oils, to select one example. Odds are all the snobbiest will find something they like... odds are even decent that in a blind taste test even the snobbiest would find something that they would be horrified to discover came from a normal grocery store.
Costco carries one or two options for a given thing, and are outright missing many things you might want. As nice as Costco is for buying things on a budget when you're going to use them up fully, I think it would be a bit of a challenge to make them your only grocery source. Doable as a sort of self-imposed challenge, no problem, there's certainly enough for that, but you'd be missing a lot of things, and/or wasting money on huge quantities of things you won't use. The quality is generally pretty decent (I may have more brand loyalty for "Kirkland" than almost any other brand) but not necessarily the most premium options. If you are the type to even consider the specialty shop in the first place you're more likely to be unsatisfied by Costco than a grocery store.
Actual specialty shops survive just fine. There's plenty of value in real expertise. Run-of-the-mill stores selling the same commodity at a higher price are simply inefficient.
The idealized small mom-and-pop shops were largely put out of business by WWII and rationing more than anything. Supermarkets and department stores have more or less been the norm in the US since long before Wal-Mart began spreading across the country.
There are still plenty of produce stands, bakeries, and butcher shops in the country. Most of what was driven out of business were small bodega-style corner stores.
99% of the reason for the mom-and-pop groceries dying out is that "our" Federal Gov't decided that it would stop bothering to enforce the law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act
And note how the modern Democratic Party - the originators of that law back in 1936 - utterly failed to give a crap about the issue.
If there is wine on the dog, i I'm 100% in.
One area where I'd say Costco -is- a let down is electronics. Yes, you don't always need the latest and greatest, but in my area Costco was selling 2 and 3 year old model TVs that have been superseded by the manufacturer at their (low but still retail) same prices.
The author's view is alien to me. It paints Costco as some sort of cultural retirement home. A boring place for boring people, not just a big store in a warehouse. I know that displaying brand affinity towards some companies is seen as tasteful and praiseworthy in our cultures, but I didn't realize many people extended this view to something as basic and pragmatic as the place they go to buy flour or whatever.
Costco is a store... where coffee, usually gas and most food + home goods are reliable in quality and priced well comparatively. Comparing the price of salmon fillets at Costco to Whole Foods or elsewhere is eye-opening. Would I buy clothes or furniture from Costco? No - because both are bland. The end.
If the writer wants to make it anything more than that... They are a bit too obsessed with self-image vs wasting money and, dare I say, a loser for judging others over something as classist as personal finances. Feels like the write-up is just a statement piece meant to either rattle people for engagement or make the writer feel more hip than they actually are.
>> Would I buy clothes or furniture from Costco?
Careful - even Gen-Z is looking at Kirkland clothing for certain pieces, and some furniture (like the Murphy bed I bought from them) is better when it's bland and greige
> Would I buy clothes or furniture from Costco? No - because both are bland. The end.
But they're like the gas and food at Costco - reliable in quality and comparatively well-priced. I'd buy clothes from other places if I knew where they were. Online shopping is a crapshoot and I mean that (almost) literally: they shoot crap into your mailbox. Department stores and clothes stores at the mall are overpriced for average quality. Ditto for IRL furniture stores.
It's America. We have mythology.
It's interesting how Millennials seem to be embracing boring practicality as they get older. Brands like Costco, Toyota, Ikea, minivans, etc are all staging a comeback as middle-aged Millennials decide they don't have time to deal with hassles or money to pay for overpriced status symbols.
Indeed Costco is a very practical store. You can trust most of the food to taste good because they test it first, vs a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach to a standard grocery store. Trader Joe's is is probably the best in this regard.
The return policy also takes away a lot of concern. If you don't like it you can easily just take it back without any hassle.
> I will never buy Costco coffee—I know too much about coffee, and my allegiance to a coterie of indie micro roasters (Yes Plz subscription for life) and esoteric brewing methods has ruined me for life from enjoying the simple pleasures of a Kirkland Signature K-Cup pod.
You can pry the 2-lb bags of Mayorga Cafe Cubano dark roast coffee from my cold, dead hands.
Always found Costco's largest source of profits interesting:
> Revenue from membership fees accounts for the majority of the company's profits, accounting for over 72% of the company's net operating income in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, and 65.5% in fiscal year 2024.[115][a]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costco#Business_model
It's a great model. We get the benefit of low prices, they get sustaining revenue that allows us to get those low prices.
I always found that weird because we get like 5x our membership dues back in rewards every year, so I guess we're the exception, rather than the rule?
The claim could be true even if every customer is exactly like you. The implication is that Costco doesn't really make money selling stuff, they just need to roughly break even. And "breaking even" here includes paying rewards on purchases. The fact that you earn a lot of rewards doesn't stop your membership dues from contributing to Costco's bottom line.
If you have an executive membership they guarantee that you make back your membership dues. If you fall short you can just ask them to give you the difference (and then they will downgrade you to the regular membership).
But also remember regular members don't get cash back. The ratio is about 50/50. So about 40 million people pay for membership and don't get cash back.
Could be like gym memberships: where there's a population of folks that pay but don't make use of it (and don't bother cancelling).
> The bakery muffins really are smaller now than I remember them being as a kid
Costco bakery muffins are HUGE. If they're smaller now than they used to be, I'd argue maybe that's a good thing.
> They’re always in far-off places
My Costco is only about 1 1/2 miles away. Literally walked there for lunch once.
> the building, an aircraft hangar–size warehouse spectacle operated very much in line with casino design: a place with no outside source of light
Odd, the author mentions living in Portland, and every Costco in the Portland metro area has skylights.
> They’re always in far-off places
That's yet another thinly disguised case of punching down: the author wants you to know that they are not the type of person who lives close to a Costco, typically in the suburbs. This author's attitude is so tiresome.
I just got (at 38) a Costco membership this year, thanks to my in-laws gifting us a membership. There's another huge discount retailer here in Boston (BJs) that I have gone to for years, but Costco is another 10+ min drive away so I've resisted thus far. I will say... I'm still adjusting.
- No aisle signs or labels anywhere. I understand the retail strategy here but the lack of efficiency in MY experience kills me. Clearly they can't move the bakery, or meat department. But after ~5 visits I still have no idea where some basic products can be found.
- Who is buying a kayak, or shed while shopping for groceries?
- I continually make the mistake of going during the weekend when it is the most packed store on Earth. There were no less than 3 Cybertrucks in the parking lot.
I don't have the "must-buy" item yet, but every time I go, I feel like I need to take a nap after.
I have talked my wife out of us both nearly impulse-buying a mini greenhouse at Costco multiple times.
And the worst part is, I regret it. We need a greenhouse now and greenhouse prices are through the roof! I can't afford NOT to impulse buy a greenhouse at Costco 18 months ago now! I'll never make that mistake again.
Sometimes you just have to trust your Coscto instincts.
> No aisle signs or labels anywhere. I understand the retail strategy here but the lack of efficiency in MY experience kills me. Clearly they can't move the bakery, or meat department. But after ~5 visits I still have no idea where some basic products can be found.
What are you having trouble finding, out of curiosity? In my Costco everything is pretty much in the same general area. They might move stuff a little bit, but it's pretty consistent.
> Who is buying a kayak, or shed while shopping for groceries?
I see this as separate trips for the larger items. Nobody is buying appliances either when you buy meat or paper towels. Also, Costco never fully replaces a full grocery store in my experience. You just don't need things in the sizes they sell them for many goods. Certain foodstuffs are really designed for restaurants and not people. Like, who is buying the 40 lb bags of flour besides people VERY into baking or restaurants?
I do agree that Costco's can be laid out pretty differently and I get confused. My home Costco flows in a circle where you first see:
1. appliances/bedding/toothbrushes 2. alcohol 3. refrigerated foods with the bakery/meat department 4. cleaning products and flats of drinks 5. dry foods
when this cycle is broken or changed in a different Costco I am visiting, I feel VERY lost
Long ago we found that we saved more money shopping at Costco than the membership cost by a long shot. We even get the executive membership because they will refund the difference of you don’t get at least that back rewards (we always have).
For things that are acceptable, it’s usually hard to beat Costco. You have to give up variety, possibly brand choice, and maybe even buy more than you’ll use, but it works out to be significantly cheaper. There are categories, however, where Costco is never the cheapest (soft drinks) or where the commodity store brand is significantly worse than alternatives (batteries).
> where the commodity store brand is significantly worse than alternatives (batteries).
Kirkland batteries actually last longer than Duracell. They're some of the best alkaline batteries you can get, especially considering the price. Sure, lithium batteries will last longer, but the mAh per dollar is lower, so they'll still cost more.
https://youtu.be/8VumAfhdhAI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ_tGjXm0Ng
> cheapest (soft drinks)
24 pack of v8 Energy Drinks are super cheap at Costco, usually $13.49 versus $17+ at other retailers.
My first trip to Costco was also fairly recent.
I think I've gotten the hang of it fairly well. Coffee is over by the coolers but not in them, cat little is on the back wall, specialty cheese is near the meat, Kirland cheese is near the end of one of the coolers, cheap winter jackets are somewhere in the middle between the pants and the tortilla chips, motor oil is at the far right, bread on the left near the old people, and the big expensive life-optional stuff is at the front.
Everything else is either on the way between those points, or it doesn't exist today (because even if it is there, I'll never find it).
Seems good enough for now.
The American mind must be studied.
I saw someone leaving buc-ees at 10:30pm who just purchased a huge fire pit and was franticly trying to jam it in the back of a large chevy. I can only imagine they went for stacks due to the poor planning
The #1 thing for me at Costco is the gas. I have the credit card, so I get 5% cash back on the first $7,000 of gas I purchase in a year. Being as that, as of now I am spending ~$70/week on fuel, I will not hit the max for the year.
But 5% cash back on ($70*52=)$3640 means I get $182/yr by default back to cover the $130 annual cost of the executive membership. Doesn't sound like a good deal until you also factor in that their fuel is typically 10 cents a gallon or more cheaper than the next least expensive fuel place, which means that for my roughly 650 gallons of fuel a year baseline costco gas saves me an additional $65.
So yeah, nothing really amazing, but the fact that having the membership lets me pocket something in the neighborhood of $120/yr on top of the occasional shopping trip and access is nice.
There are so many people like you (who only use it for gas) that they are now building Costco gas stations not attached to a warehouse. Massive stations like the ones near the warehouses.
They also use "Top Tier+" gas.
I hate going there. It's so crowded, the lines are massive, and all so you can save like $200 at the end of the year on some groceries. The other problem is that you end up impulse buying well over $200 worth of stuff you wouldn't have purchased if you just went to the regular grocery store. Oh but you have to go to the grocery store anyways after your 2 hour long Costco trip, because the shit they had last week is gone now. But hey at least you waited in line for another 40 minutes to save $3.00 on your tank of gas you bought while you were there.
I have friends who have membership to Costco, Sam's and BJs. And when they need to buy stuff they go to nearest market from home (none of above 3). Despite working from home forever, they just don't have time to go to these warehouse stores.
My takeaway is at certain income level and lifestyle, one can have all memberships but don't find use of any.
if nobody is buying them, you have to wonder why they are for sale. my guess is someone is buying them
Nah, Costco is so crowded and such long checkout lines. No one buys anything there.
It's odd to me thinking people consider Costco a grocery store. I realize they have groceries but that certainly isn't what I use it for.
Half the store is food - it's an excellent grocery store.
"It's weird that everyone doesn't behave exactly like me." I believe that's what the kids call main character energy.
Really? Even meats? Or drinks?
I'm 43, own a home, live in Seattle, and feel attacked by this article.
"every Costco shopper has a certain item or two they’re compelled to purchase on each visit"
Organic, single-serving guacamole and Magic Spoon cereal for me.
My toddler is obsessed with their mammoth two dollar slices of cheese pizza and talks constantly about wanting to go to Costco to have pizza with his little bestie.
Costco is such a family friendly place. My kids love going there.
They've made some deliberate decisions to make it family friendly:
1. The aisles are wide so the whole family can walk through the store together.
2. The kids love free samples
3. The food court is a great place to have an inexepensive dinner.
4. The store is designed so there's nothing really to grab at ground level if you're a little kid. Everything is up higher.
Contrast this with a standard grocery store: small aisles and tons of little things on the shelf at ground level (including random toys) that can get grabbed or knocked over. Every time I take my family to Albertsons I have to pick a dozen things off the ground that we accidentally knocked off.
Once or twice a year I have a chance to go to costco in the middle of a work day and I'm absolutely blown away at how busy the place is at that time. People everywhere young and old, even kids! Long lines and nobody is rushed.
I want to live like Costco people because apparently they don't work in the middle of the day!
I'm from East Asia, where every supermarket brand is basically the same aside from a few different products. When I moved to North America, this whole concept of tiered supermarkets felt really weird and exotic to me. Like, this is the most basic stuff you need, and you still need to tier it down? I'm kinda used to it now, but it still feels very American to me.
China at least has this. The stuff you get at the Ole Supermarket inside a shopping mall is different from the stuff you get from the little store facing the street on the ground floor of your apartment building.
I grew up in a post soviet country. To me Costco, has perfected the soviet ideal of shopping more than any soviet economy ever could.
In a Costco, we are all equal. I could be shopping for the same set of beige slacks right next to the CEO of a multi-million dollar company and never know it. We'll own the same Waterpik. Identical towels. Our lawn furniture will look the same.
Everything is purchased at a fair price. And we know it's a fair price because it's Costco. The workers are happy because they are given a fair wage and respect by an executive team that doesn't think they're better than them.
Yes, you have to admit to yourself that a certain part of shopping at Costco is rejecting iconoclasm. You must be okay being part of a crowd. But the other side of that - are you able to surrender? Can you deny yourself when you find something that is legitimately good? Must you be different to the point of self-detrimental?
So yes, I will go to a store that has better olive oil or coffee or oranges. But how can you not love Costco?
> But how can you not love Costco?
I got my law degree there!
I like money.
Interestingly, my local subreddit loves to describe Costco as a late stage capitalist dystopia.
- fighting for space everywhere: fighting for a parking lot, avoiding people seeming to ram you with their shopping cart, waiting for the extended family of seven in front of you to pick a cereal so you can leave the aisle, waiting for traffic to clear so you can _leave_ the costco
- you have to pay to get in
- and then you have to pay extra to jump to the head of the line
- fights over rare stock like pokemon cards
It's wild that you can look at a physical testament of the sheer abundance and affordability that capitalism has created for almost every consumer good, and people will call it a dystopia because they experience traffic or fight over the right to buy cardboard childrens toys
Good comment, but IMHO the main reason to not love it so much is the annual membership fee. It sits well with cult cultivation. Other stores don't require it and they don't form a cult around them.
Costco derives the majority of their revenue from the membership fee, followed by services. They actually make very little on the products themselves as they have a hard cap on markups at like 11% or something around there.
The membership is the whole reason they can offer the deals they do.
On the contrary, the fact that they exclude free riders is what makes the whole thing possible.
The annual membership fee is about customer selection, for me.
What it buys for me is, "not Walmart People". Totally worth the investment.
But the fee isn't an initiation ritual. It's what partially subsidizes the low prices, often at the expense of people who buy the membership and underutilize it, spending more money upfront than they save on later purchases.
The yearly fee is $65. If you save $5/month on what you buy you break even. Personally I save over $5/month just buying butter there vs buying from my local supermarket.
I like Costco, but it also helps there's one around the corner from my house. That said, I prefer the shopping experience at Sam's, with their mobile checkout. Of course, they're currently building one just a mile from my house. :-)
I think the most extreme hoi polloi, kings and paupers experience I've had in the U.S is at the DMV. No matter how rich you are, you have to show up in person with everyone else, from the poorest mentally ill welfare/SSDI recipient who has to get someone to help them because they can't read the forms in any language, to the extremely wealthy. Everyone has to sit there and wait on those generic plastic chairs.
False: the truly wealthy don't drive themselves anywhere.
In many southern states the job is outsourced to private tag agents so there might be only a few actual DMV offices in big cities.
I shop at Costco not because of the price or the bulk formats. It's not always a good deal vs other places. The value to me is not having to worry about quality. Any product that is not satisfactory gets returned with no hassle.
Part of growing up is realizing that the places where a person eats or shops, what music and entertainment they consume, what clothes they wear - are entirely uncorrelated with their personality and character and worth. And cringing hard at your own past teenage past self who confused such superficial identity markers with personality.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the article's author is only on their first step of this realization.
Of course, one can overgeneralize the correlations between consumption preferences and personality (character is vague and worth practically undefined) but it seems absurd to claim they are entirely uncorrelated. Take the Big Five traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, extroversion. Each has numerous obvious implications for consumer preferences. Do you mean something else by "personality" or perhaps "growing up"?
Right, I noped out of this article when I realized it felt like a guy making up a whole population he could do some elevated punching down at to offset some ostensible self deprecation. What a chore.
I'm quite curious what initially instills this juvenile idea in us. I expect it's advertising which actively seeks to foment this nonsense by implying that if you buy this or that you will become this or that.
> petroliferous
Sent me to the shelf, but one has to appreciate the word choice. Evokes the peanut oil spilling everywhere, the reach for geologic terminology captures the lithic aspects of the peanut butter underneath.
I have a Costco that is walking distance from my office. If I need to decompress, I walk to Costco for lunch solo, get a hot dog and a slice of pizza, sit down, and watch both the people and what's in their cart. It's so diverse and pretty fascinating.
Hot dog and a slice? That's your calorie needs for the day.
If I eat just a hot dog or just a single slice, I'll still be hungry.
Eating a hot dog and a slice, or two slices, and I won't be hungry...for an hour or two.
...I need to get a doctor and ask about a GLP-1.
Unless you are particularly sedentary, 1200 calories is pretty low for daily consumption.
LOL, don't mess this up for me.
I'm guessing the title is a reference to Pulp - Common People
Jarvis Cocker wrote Common People about a girl he did actually know, who was "identified" as Danae Stratou, daughter of a Greek textile magnate, and while she said "the only person who knows for sure is Cocker himself", emails between her and her husband indicated that she saw herself saying and doing several of the things he references, "yeah, I'm rather ashamed to admit it, that -does- sound like me and things I'd say then".
And then Disco 2000 was written about Deborah Bone, childhood friend who was a mental health nurse (who helped form Step2 and created the Brainbox), and said the only thing inaccurate about the song was that her home did not have "woodchips on the wall". She said, shortly before she died of myeloma, that she "did grow up and sleep with Jarvis Cocker, somebody had to, and it was perfectly innocent" (I think the implication is that they fell asleep together).
Not of any great relevance. I just see myself as a collector of information that might only be useful for music trivia nights...
And browse and grab and queue because there is nothing else to do!
I wanna live like Costco people I wanna do whatever Costco people do Wanna sleep with Costco people I wanna sleep with Costco people like you. Well, what else could I do? I said, "I'll... I'll see what I can do.
"And she just laughed and said 'Oh, you're so funny.' And I said 'Yeah, well, I can't see anyone else smiling in here'."
... which often mirrors my feelings in Costco, particularly near the registers, where oftentimes in my local stores it feels more akin to the Thunderdome.
“…and let the deals, wrap their arms around me”
—Death Cab for Cutie
You’re probably right, but Pet Shop Boys also have a take on the theme - https://youtu.be/eQLpNpSXewo?si=bYSSBpoDAL2HKMI3
My motto in life is, "If I need it and it's available at Costco, I buy it at Costco"
I don't feel the need to demonstrate my unique personality through where I buy groceries.
Costco encapsulates the American Dream; offering quality, value, and fair dealing to upwardly mobile strivers from all backgrounds.
I've become a Costco person in recent years. At least in my perception, inflation has affected grocery stores unevenly:
Whole Foods: eye-bogglingly expensive (and no, I don't think it always was)
Wegmans: substantially more expensive than a few years ago, and a noticeable decline in produce quality
Trader Joes: incredible value on many prepared foods, but not the best source for staples like rice or paper products.
Costco is not inflation-proof by any means but they have pretty much 0 margins and they're reliably the best value on just about whatever they sell. The selection can be limited in some ways compared to a supermarket, and they can be a bad place to be health conscious (as it can be hard to resist massive containers of ultra cheap and delicious treats of various kinds) or to try to try to be an ethical consumer (and please spare me the HN cynical line on this, I get it, I have no real agency and I'm pathetically guilt-ridden): I've read bad things about their meat sourcing, they rarely have coffee with bona fides like fair trade or shade grown, I see controversial products like bird's nest soup, etc.
I was a coffee snob, but now I'm buying coffee in Costco, you just have to do it online:
https://www.costco.com/p/-/kirkland-signature-organic-ethiop...
https://www.costco.com/p/-/mayorga-buenos-das-usda-organic-l...
I have no idea why do they not sell these(light roast) ones in warehouses.
My local Costco carries the fair trade artisanal coffee brand that is roasted in my city, just in a 3 pound bag of beans instead of a 1 pound bag of beans like at the bougie grocery store. I can understand not wanting the Kirkland brand coffee, but that is far from the only coffee brand for sale at Costco. I am a coffee snob of the highest order and I buy my beans at Costco.
Whole Foods started wildly expensive, toned down a lot after the Amazon bought them, and then creeped back up to wildly expensive the last few years.
Huh, really? Re: Wegmans. For me they still have the best produce quality by far.
Agree their prices have gone up in general though.
It's probably very store specific. If you know the Market Basket in Somerville, MA, it's got a legendary produce section. I've been to locations in NH with crap.
IMO H-Mart is the safest bet in the Boston area for high quality produce (outside of farmers markets, natch)
If I’m being honest I find a lot of this kind of stuff pretentiously performative. It’s a wholesale market with a membership fee. The food is nutritious and cheap and there are economies of scale to be had.
There are no Costco people. There are no Whole Foods people. There are no Gus’s people. In San Francisco, I live a block from Whole Foods, a block from Safeway and a block past that is Gus’s. Costco is six blocks away. We go to all of these places at various times. My gym is near Gus’s. Whole Foods has the biggest selection. Safeway has Envy apples. Costco is where we get the base load of stuff when we do weekly shopping.
As commentary on consumerism has filtered down from philosophy to the masses it really has become incredibly middle-brow. Copy-paste opinions about shopping substitute for any intellectual examination of food availability. Like LLM text the language is sound but the ideas are incredibly shallow shadows of the ultimate concept.
It really brings home the idea that if you can’t appreciate living in an era of abundance where fruit of high quality is available throughout the year and it has been bred to high perfection and eggs, milk, and rice are practically costless compared to the past, that perhaps there is nothing that can bring you joy. All the “this is late stage capitalism where you consume consume consume without thought and reason” takes have the shape of meaning but carry nothing. They’re some kind of cargo cult mimicry of some concept.
We have solved food. Costco is the solved form. $2.99/lb of chicken.
This article seemed mildly interesting to perhaps kill 5 minutes. I clicked through only to be slapped by a cookie consent and a newsletter signup pop up, together they entirely obscure the content on mobile. Too much friction, so I decided to just close it, this saved me from wasting 5 minutes of my life reading, which I instead proceeded to use cleaning a toilet. All in all, a good outcome I would say.
The nearest costco to me is an hour and half away. I've been in costco only once, and I guess I got it, but I also was like: do i need this? This year they're opening one nearby (~10mins). I have this nagging growing feeling of fear I will be joining.
Don't fear it. Join us. There's a real reduction in your cognitive load, honestly. It's nice.
There was the best university in the world -- Costco University, in the movie Idiocracy.
It's giving "Frasier Crane goes to Costco."
But yes, you can buy many different items there. Many come in large packages. The public can be found there shopping too. You are not required to purchase every item. Welcome to the 90s and holy shit thanks for the journalism.
I let my Costco membership lapse because it's cheaper, healthier and more pleasant to buy 1) small quantities, of 2) fresh foods, in a 3) nice store, that is preferably 4) nearby, and 5) quietly forget to buy all the other crap you don't need.
Frasier, at a free sample station: I do thank you, but I'm afraid I'm rather particular about the provenance of my shellfish. To subject a scampi to the radiation of a microwave is not cooking, madam, it's an execution! My god, Niles, is that a '98 Chateau Latour in your cart?
Niles: I've already secured six cases! They're over there, just between the Kirkland Signature Leaf Blowers and the 5 pound bags of "Kickin' Queso Jalapeño Poppers"!
Martin: Oh I LOVE those, where?
I've only been to Costco a handful of times in my life. It seems like each time, there were hordes of people standing lifelessly in a huge line waiting to check themselves out(sometimes with help from an employee), which took longer than it should. Then, once that task was accomplished, they'd then stand in another huge line waiting to leave. Is this the typical experience or did I just happen to pick the worst times/locations?
I happily pay more at places like Publix to -not- have to do that.
This was my experience, too. I have tried going at noon on weekdays, as soon as the store opens, and every other time folks on the internet have recommended. Every single time, it was an absolute slog to get through aisles full of oblivious people blocking areas with their carts and (hilariously) getting mad at you for asking them to move their cart.
Also, this may be my own bias coloring my perception but there was a palpable undertone among some of the shoppers of “at least we’re not Walmart customers”.
I’m sure quite a few Costco members enjoy the treasure hunt model they offer but I’d much rather have an option to order online and go pick up what I need or, failing that, labeled aisles.
To Costco’s credit, though, they refunded my membership fee in full as soon as I asked to cancel. And their return policy the one time I had to use it was exceptional as well. It’s a shame the rest of the experience has to be such a sensory overload.
In my experience, get there as early as possible and it's not bad. But that's the standard for these membership stores, although Sam's Club has the edge being able to use their app to scan your items and pay without having to stop anywhere (other than the line to get out.)
Publix' pricing is obscene though.
I have a Sam's Club membership primarily because it is much closer to me than Costco. I hate the crowds but it baffles me there are lines when the scan & go app exists! And I swear last time I went they weren't even scanning receipts, but you walked through some sort of gateway?
Costco actually has a better checkout experience than most places IMO. They always have basically all lanes open, and the employees are efficient at moving people through.
I love Wegmans for most groceries but their checkouts seem to be getting worse.
How are people supposed to act while waiting in line to check out?
That's the takeaway - that people are supposed to be bored in line? I wasn't insulting the people, I was describing what to me is the awful human experience of shopping at Costco.
I deliberately take my time in self-checkout lines. If they are going to cheap out by not having cashiers, I'm not going to hustle to make their lines move faster.
I will brave the downvotes and say: I don’t like Costco.
It’s not out of snobbishness, their quality is excellent at excellent prices.
My problem is that I find I spend more at Costco than at conventional grocery stores like Trader Joe’s.
The paradox is, it’s cheaper, but I spend more. I buy things I wouldn’t normally buy, and ant higher quantities. Even worse, I somehow eat it all quite quickly.
I spend more and eat more when I shop at Costco.
Unfortunately that’s neither healthy for my wallet nor for my waistline.
We didn’t have Costco in our area when I was a kid, but iirc that’s why my parents stopped going to Sam’s Club: any money they saved on buying cheaper bulk things went into buying random extras.
I love Costco, but I get it. My wife and I always joke about how we can't leave without spending at least $100, and how that's only like 7 items sometimes.
Ah, the terrible agony of realizing the hoi polloi aren't entirely wrong about everything after all.
I've been to Costco (UK) a couple of times. It mostly seems to be: 4x the quantity for 4x the price (i.e. same price as any other store). I don't get it? I honestly think a large majority of people think it being in bulk MUST equal a saving?
Is it just for like catering companies or families of 20 where the bigger size is kind of helpful?
They do some nice discounts on Macs online though (can't say I'm a fan of their customer service either though based on my experience returning a Macbook)
normcore?
This could possibly be the most cringe piece of coastal elite content I've ever read.
Aesthetically-minded hipster writes a think piece on reluctantly aging out of high school fears of being "uncool," finally grows up and has a family, but 15 years too late.
Discovers the concept of economies of scale and also that families who live in the center of the country who don't spend their weekends marching at pride events might not be nazis after all...and actually it's kind of convenient to go to a big warehouse full of curated bulk items and buy shit when you have kids.
I imagine its exactly the type of thing boomer hippies (the hipsters of their generation) wrote about in the 80s/90s after they realized dropping acid in nudist drum circles gets old after a while and that communes don't actually work. Just rewrite the title to "I want to live like Kmart people," and voila, you've got a New Yorker thinkpiece from 1986.
I've been a costco member for more than 10 years now since it's about a 7 minute drive from my home. It's really fun to discover new things they bring in, like a flea market kind of vibe.
These past 2 years it has gotten significantly worse. Too crowded. Too many people who have no common decency of not blocking the lane. And way way way too many instacart delivery people FLOORING IT to get their next item pickup and leave. Looking at their phone and bumping into people/stuff. I don't like the vibes.
The one cool thing they have now is the 9am executive hours where you can go in earlier than normal. That feels more like the costco of 2016 to me.
I resisted joining Costco for many years, because it seemed too culty, or just too popular in general (with my assumption being that most popular things are bad). Eventually they sucked me in though, and yes, it really is good.
This is kind of a weird take on Costco, but I also somewhat resonate with it. I've always seen Costco as somehow the perfect aspirational ideal of the American middle class. Personally, I love Costco, and my love for it has grown as I've become more affluent, because I can actually attain that aspirational lifestyle. On any given day in my local Costco, I'm probably the highest earning person in the store, but that doesn't matter because I want the exact same Kirkland Signature toilet paper as the next guy. As someone who often obsesses over trying to acquire the best things so that they last longer (BIFL), Costco tickles my internal register of "good enough". I don't think I've ever regretted a purchase at Costco other than occasionally upsetting my wife for getting something that wasn't on the list.
Stopped reading at "cheugy". Born near Seattle and now lives in Portland - like two of the biggest non-conformist regions out there..
WELCOME TO COSTCO I LOVE YOU
I'm going to law school there next semester.
It honestly disturbs me how true so many of the predictions from the Idiocracy have been.