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.
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.
Speaking as an American with a formative decade overseas, I think some of that may come from the economics of international trade.
People think about a faraway place based on what gets transported and sold from there. If a country's most-visible exports are gourmet food, you'd start thinking that perhaps the average resident is a gourmand. In the case of the US, those "cultural exports" often involve branded goods, copyrighted media, food franchises, etc.
I had a recent conversation with a colleague out of SE Asia and it was surprising to me how little access they have to a diversity of product. For example, I was describing my homelab which uses a lot of Minisforum hardware (mostly due to size constraints) and I found out that, despite literally being geographically closer, said product could not be purchased in their country. So I would imagine that leads to more homogenization than what might occur in the States. But that's just my ignorant conjecture.
And yet somehow, with first 3/4 of this sentence, you've given a more accurate story about America than is almost ever provided!
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.
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?
The implication is the lack of a rigorous class hierarchy in America. Not that the rich don't live different lifestyles or consume more. But that niche luxury products were considered effete and un-American.
(Andy Warhol was almost certainly also being ironic - that the richest people in America publicly shared the same trashy taste as average Americans).
The closest analogue today might be an iPhone. Rich or poor, if you want the "best" phone you have an iPhone. Sure, there are gaudier and more expensive phones out there. But you're essentially using the same product as the richest Americans.
What about cars or houses?
Doesn't the fact that the original quote literally acknowledges "bums on the corner" imply that he wasn't referring to housing at all?
Being rich is better than being poor. The Warhol quote has nothing to do with that fact.
As someone who started out very poor, and is now ~ 30x above that. I strongly subscribe to the idea that happiness from income is very logarithmic. The first 2-3x income was life changing. I'm talking going from eating pasta, rice and beans for most meals to fresh fruit and veg, lean cuts of meat. From renting a room in a noisy apartment with 4 other people to having my own place that was both safe and quiet. My reading list was suddenly more constrained by time instead of price or library backlog.
I suppose it's down to my starting position, a content disposition and a boring lack of imagination, but my expenses have now ~ 5x'd what they were when I was on the strugglebus, but still very modest, and I honestly can't identify any spending that would make my life better or make me happier long term.
Where I live pretty much all new houses are being built with granite counter tops and hardwood floors. Whether that's a good thing is a whole other topic ...
When land and labor (and fees leveraged by the city, state, etc.) are extremely expensive, the additional cost for these "luxury" items is very low by comparison. The buyers for these homes are buying everything new and it makes little sense to save $10k or so on such a visible amenity that is expensive to retrofit afterwards, on a home that costs $500k.
It is the same reason why crank windows are gone from cars. They aren't really status symbols.
The current Model 3 and Model Y are properly built competitively priced cars with many luxury features (such as huge trunks, rear climate control, all wheel drive, etc) and gadgets (Netflix on huge touchscreen, self-driving, etc).
The F-150 extended range is 3.8 as you state, but then the Tesla Model 3 performance comes in at 2.8.
https://www.0-60specs.com/tesla/model-3-0-60-times
https://www.fordoffeasterville.com/blogs/4896/ford-lightning...
We bought it mostly because we wanted an EV for power backup for the house. We get ice storms in the winter and it can knock out power for days, and we need to be able to keep almost 1,000 gallons of aquariums running during them. The F150 extended range has that in spades and was cheaper than the equivalent power wall system.
It's basically a whole house backup generator that we can happen to drive around.
Claims presented without evidence. My slightly modified Subaru Wagon from '05 "out-accelerated" base Teslas - dead even in 1st gear, started pulling once the shift to 2nd happened. (Most) EVs cannot shift gears to get torque multiplication, so they start fast, but fall off as speeds get higher. My Kia gas car will outrun all but the model 3 performance - which the average person is NOT driving. Neither of those cars are "niche".
Slightly modified is doing some heavy lifting there. No 2005 Subaru wagon in stock config is anywhere close to beating a Model 3.
> (Most) EVs cannot shift gears to get torque multiplication, so they start fast, but fall off as speeds get higher.
Pretty much irrelevant, because they’re still blisteringly fast up to 60 which is where most of the acceleration happens in day to day. Nobody really cares about 60-80 or 60-100.
> My Kia gas car will outrun all but the model 3 performance - which the average person is NOT driving.
What Kia is that? Even the stinger GT (which is definitely a niche car) is slower than a regular dual motor model 3.
Admittedly that’s because he’s an overgrown child, but what the hey.
(And for servers and other business machines, well, other criteria apply, but owning something in the Top500 has to count for something in terms of prestige.)
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.
When a company can make more profit by catering to the ultra-rich-only than selling a quality mass-market product at a reasonable price to masses, that says a lot about the economic segmentation of those masses.
I think it's important to call out that the "capitalism = more stuff" idea is a bit of historical revisionism.
Soviet leaders very specifically saw the goal of Communism was to create abundance and a post scarcity society. There are lots of quotes in particular from Khrushchev about this:
“The socialist system will outstrip capitalism in labor productivity. It will provide the people with more goods, more cultural benefits, and ensure a higher standard of living.”
“Communism is the highest form of organization of society for labor. On the basis of powerful productive forces, it ensures the highest productivity of labor and abundance of material and cultural values for the whole people.”
And it's worth pointing out that that this isn't a Soviet invention. Marx himself made it a central point that material deprivation was an ill (not a feature) of captialism:
"After the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety…”
“The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially… but guaranteeing them the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here.”
When communist abundance failed to materialize, there was a concerted effort to reframe the promise of communism to be purely one of egalitarianism and turn overconsumption against the West as a criticism.
To wit, that end stage capitalism has become an ouroboros eating its own tail that profits off artificial scarcity, while communism's primary defect (an inability to execute economic planning at a pace, scale, and granularity required to run a country well) is now technologically-feasible.
Though the greatest enemy to communism was always the people who made up the party and their fallibility as human beings.
Witness Erewhon fruit juices/smoothies.
Coke is a great example. There’s no product more useless and unnecessary than that flavored fizzy sugar water. Or should I say, high fructose corn syrup water. If you drink it, why? Probably because you were indoctrinated since childhood. Same goes for pretty much all fast food. There’s nothing good or desirable about any of it unless you’ve been indoctrinated into thinking that.
One: It's terrible that you're shopping at a big box hardware retailer instead of a local hardware store and drinking high fructose mass market soda.
The other: Home Depot usually has what's needed, at a decent price, nearby. And Coke from the cooler next to the cash register is convenient, cold, and delicious.
Neither of these are wrong, and they're both worth keeping simultaneously in mind: life should be both aspirational and satisfying.
Brands may serve as camouflage when you're trying to conform, but conforming is not an identity. Your identity is based on what you create, not what you consume.
Just an observation. My computer bag is older than most of my coworkers.
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'm saying that in the case of South Korea, that extrapolation is very much accurate.
The things where you notice the money are private planes and nice houses/apartments (and multiples thereof) and art. And perhaps caring even less what people think of them.
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.
> 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.
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.
This argument stops holding water when those same people start judging other people for not also using Brand X.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Regular Costco for rotisserie chicken.
In life you can't have everything.
Yes, genuinely. At most stores, "store brand" equates to "cheap, lower quality". Kirkland Signature is sometimes higher quality than other brands, and there are items for which they're my preferred brand.
I don’t want a bunch of cellulose in my cheese either.
(I love the Shatner version, sorry!)
I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere
So it started there
What you wrote sounds intelligent but belies an ignorance of the business model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They mostly exist now in a different form as gas station markets, or in dense urban areas like NYC, or some central business districts.
And note how the modern Democratic Party - the originators of that law back in 1936 - utterly failed to give a crap about the issue.
The government telling competitive buyers and sellers which kinds of price negotiation are legal and which are not is terrible economics because it attenuates price signals.
I'm thinking the faded-out enforcement was due to a certain 1980's President, and his administration's "Greed is God" ethos. A lot of protections for the little guy got dumped on his watch.
From the article on the Act -
"Enforcement of the RPA has declined since the 1980s. In 2022, FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya endorsed a revival of enforcing the RPA in order to curb price discrimination. In April 2024, sixteen members of Congress wrote to the FTC urging for a revival of the enforcement of the Act. In December 2024, the FTC sued liquor distributor Southern Glazer's under the Act, asserting that they charged small stores more than they charged large chains. On January 17, 2025, the closing days of the Biden Administration, the FTC filed a lawsuit against PepsiCo. In May 2025, The FTC voted to dismiss the PepsiCo suit but the suit against Southern Glazer's is proceeding."
It's a low bar but the Democratic party has given more of a crap about it than anyone else.
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.
Anecdotally I feel like a lot of TJ's shoppers shift into Costco shoppers as they age up.
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.
We're a bit odd though. Highly budget conscious, 4 kidsto feed (including 2 teenagers), and European tastes in food.
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.
I actually only got Costco originally when I lived in Hawaii and it's kinda a requirement there but kept it cause it's actually really nice.
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.
I think one danger with Costco is that it encourages overconsumption. It may feel like you're saving money - but you'd save even more just not buying a robot vaccum or VR headset.
To be fair, this isn't a problem unique to Costco. I'm guilty of buying a lot of junk on Amazon.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meijer is slowly becoming a bad offender of these types of things, Jewel has been horrifying for years, to the point where i avoid their store entirely. The final straw was this limit applied to gallons of milk.
Nobody has suggested that they malfunction.
I thought this was obvious, but to spell it out: I was suggesting that they might not necessarily be programmed to apply a different price depending on quantity. An item might have a flat price of $1 each, but labeled on the shelf/bin as "special: five for $5" to encourage larger purchases.
I have personally encountered this. Meanwhile, I do not recall an example of buying a quantity smaller than suggested and being charged a higher price per item. Hence my question about labeling and law.
> Also, if you do not have a member/loyalty account, you do not get those discounts.
I'm not talking about membership discounts.
That's not a special, that's just math. I've only ever seen that kind of nonsense from Amazon. I've seen Buy 3 for $5, while the individual is $1.99. If you buy one you pay $1.99, if you buy two you pay $3.98, but if you buy three, you end up paying $5. The receipt will show 3 @ $1.99 with a discount under the item bringing the total to $5. My store routinely has various meat offerings of Buy 1, get 2 free. If you ring up one, it shows the price. If you ring up 3, it shows all three items, but discount the cheapest two prices so you only pay for the single highest priced item.
Major chains are not going to be futzing around with gotcha tags. They know they'll be called out for it. It would be the bodega style places that I'd be suspect of that kind of shenanigans.
> I'm not talking about membership discounts.
Why not? It clearly shows two different prices. If you are not using a discount/loyalty card, you pay the full price. A lot of times I've seen when you use a line with a human checker they'll have a card on stand by (probably their own) to get the points while giving the buyer the lower prices.
It is a special when the usual price is $2 each.
> Why not?
Because I'm not interested.
I get my dogs seizure meds there and they're about $10 a month but at a regular pharmacy they'd be $300+.
The shoppers there might still be the same costco members though :)
Shopping like you're talking about (small quantities of everything) will easily double your grocery spending, and I don't know why you would do it unless there's something about the experience you really like. If that's what you want, the chain that comes to mind is Fresh Market if you're in the eastern US, or just a local market.
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
I've heard good things about their wool socks.
I actually like Costco's generic black-and-orange athletic sock as a daily driver. I treat them poorly; we take off our shoes in the house but not socks. As they wear out, I throw them away; once a year I buy a new pack to refresh the losses. I use the Smartwool for activities but otherwise take good care of them. They last.
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.
Costco pledges (I have no idea if its true) that they offer goods at cost, no markup, and their profits (net income ? this is where it gets fuzzy) are simply the membership fees. In fact, I think there's a lawsuit from a Costco purchaser to get back some tariffs if Costco gets refunded tariffs.
So the idea is premium groceries (and homegoods, and tires, and pharma, etc) with zero retail markup.
Its a compelling idea, and it works because it actually seems to work. What you write is "priced well comparatively" is (according to the legend) the wholesale pricing at the quantities offered (again, I'm not sure about spoilage and some of the other details)
Or you just order from Costco as one more store on Instacart or similar, and don't make it part of your identity.
I have memories of a Costco similar to the author's, but I have no desire to ever go to a store again if I can help it.
Stay repeat indulge enjoy
As a household of 1, it just doesn't make sense to buy that much of most things, unless I'm sure they're almost entirely non-perishable. Maybe it would be fine for my cereal or something, but not a lot of what I buy. And, by design, they limit their SKUs a fair amount.
So ultimately I end up in a situation where I can buy a couple things at Costco, but then still need to do regular grocery trips.
Now I need to drive to 2 separate stores, which is extra trips there and back.
The math just didn't work out. If I could truly do 100% of my grocery shopping there I would.
- 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.
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.
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?
Five employees couldn't find the macarons (I found them next to the raw chicken!?)
The snack bars are being moved around. Now some of the ones we buy are with the toothpaste!?
My wife asks me to pick up some sort of caffeine product. There's three spots they could be in she tells me to look. Sometimes that doesn't work either.
We're considering cancelling. We don't drive much and our vehicles are electric. Not a lot of extra money for their vacation packages.
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
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).
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 don't use a lot of AA/AAA batteries, so I'll buy a pack from Costco and it'll sit in my drawer for 5+ years without issue. They go into a TV remote or bathroom scale or whatever and last a couple years with no issue.
Not leaking is part of the point, but it's definitely not the only point. Alkaline batteries have half the capacity (roughly) compared to lithium cells. They also have lower voltages over time vs. lithium cells and are capable of less current. For certain applications (high current draw intermittent, or long life low current) they excel, and leaking isn't really part of that conversation.
24 pack of v8 Energy Drinks are super cheap at Costco, usually $13.49 versus $17+ at other retailers.
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.
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
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.
My takeaway is at certain income level and lifestyle, one can have all memberships but don't find use of any.
If I want to make tacos tonight, and I try to shop for that at Costco, I'm making tacos for a week or more. There's no small size of anything, which is the entire point.
I cannot fathom the people who do weekly or so grocery shopping there. How can you possibly plan out a months worth of pantry for a family like that? It's a skill I certainly don't have but families did for millennia when running small farms and such. Maybe the Navy could teach me how.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
Comparing one revenue line to total net profit is a category error: the numerator and denominator measure different things.
In FY2024, Costco did $249.6B in net sales and collected $4.8B in membership fees. Gross margin on product sales was about $25B. That $25B is 5x the membership fee revenue. So, even if you consider membership fees as being free money, membership fees are only 16% of gross margin.
Moreover, without those product sales, the membership would be worth zero and no one would buy it.
It could also be similar insurance floats: premiums and claims generally even out, but they make their returns while they're holding people's money.
(Perhaps it's explained in their financial statements, but I've never been curious enough to check.)
Affiliations with providers of products like insurance, bottled water delivery, checks and the credit card are also sources of revenue.
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 not quite their policy - their explicit policy is "The Reward is not guaranteed to be equal to or greater than the Executive upgrade fee paid." - but they will refund you if you ask for it.
I want to live like Costco people because apparently they don't work in the middle of the day!
I think the same thing when a majority of businesses are primarily open 9-5 when they are consumer facing. I have to assume most consumers need hours on evenings and weekends, but I guess it all works out.
I suppose a decent number of people work on the weekend have have varying days off during the week and there are those who don't work for one reason or another (retirees, people with disabilities, single-income homes with more than a single person, vacation days, etc). I guess that all adds up.
They were talking about how they were admiring all the services offered to members, and said they considered buying a cruise vacation package, but then immediately realized “we’d just be on the ship with people from Costco”
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?
- 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 entirely a unrelated subculture going insane about pumping up the prices of pieces of cardboard, and 30's-ish adults who never grew up mentally but now have disposable income.
Normal people buy whatever packs for the kids who proceed to play the game completely wrong.
The membership is the whole reason they can offer the deals they do.
Costco revenue is about 2% membership fee and 98% sales of merchandise and services (most of which is merchandise, not services.)
Now, the membership fee is its main source of profit (because the merchandise sales are extremely low margin), but not its main source of revenue.
Costco derives the majority of their profits from the membership fee:
What it buys for me is, "not Walmart People". Totally worth the investment.
(1)https://boardwalkpuzzles.com/products/costco-treasure-hunt-1...
> Contrapuntal to the list of things we must buy on each visit, there is perhaps a more controversial list.
That's... a very strange application of the word. I’ve only ever seen it used in the context of baroque music, interchangeable with the idea of counterpoint referring to independent melodic lines in a piece, such as you would see in Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Using it here feels forced and out of place.
Alternatively elsewhere, small shops, many locally owned, butchers, vendors convenience stores replace the existence of 'costco'
In these facts, I dont know if its necessarily a bad thing, but there is something empty, soulless and anti social about it.
Maybe a few grape tomatoes for thought between the world salad of this article, "cognitive pattern. It is a jarring thoughtscape, remarkably compelling and nondiscursive and utterly hard to shake." - That is what the author too is getting at?
"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.
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.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the article's author is only on their first step of this realization.
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.
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.
And the slices are huge also.
And most people probably get a 32oz cup of sugar water with them.
Maybe I'm overestimating.
I did look up the calorie count for both. 550-ish for the hotdog, 650-ish for the pizza.
You can pry the 2-lb bags of Mayorga Cafe Cubano dark roast coffee from my cold, dead hands.
Back in the Pepsi days there were always free cups around from people that didn't like Pepsi. Now - nada.
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...
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life (via The Mirror), Cocker addressed claims that the inspiration was Danae Stratou, a Greek woman who attended St Martin’s at the same time as Jarvis, but confirmed that “it wasn’t her because she had blonde hair and the girl had dark hair.”
https://www.nme.com/news/music/jarvis-cocker-is-on-a-quest-t...
If we're dropping random trivia it should probably be mentioned that her husband is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
... 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 don't feel the need to demonstrate my unique personality through where I buy groceries.
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.
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.
I get my beans for my summer cold brew at Costco, but my typical pour over beans elsewhere.
Agree their prices have gone up in general though.
IMO H-Mart is the safest bet in the Boston area for high quality produce (outside of farmers markets, natch)
Much of my wardrobe is from CostCo, effective suburban camouflage as well as being fine as clothes.
I can't think of another clothing retailer that has garments right there in front of you that you can touch and hold up to your body, the experience is far superior to just looking at photos.
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.
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.
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 happily pay more at places like Publix to -not- have to do that.
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.
Whoever told you to go at noon on a weekday was pulling your leg. That's when all the peeps with jobs go to shop and get a quick lunch on their lunch break. It's always packed then.
At open on a weekday is usually pretty good, but 30 minutes after open might be better (if you've got the executive membership with an exclusive hour, then be sure to go then). Never go on the weekend, unless maybe 30 minutes before closing, if you know what you want and where it is. Or you can probably go during the super bowl, but not before or after. Double don't go on the weekend before a weekday holiday.
Publix' pricing is obscene though.
I love Wegmans for most groceries but their checkouts seem to be getting worse.
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.
I think where you shop and what kind of products you buy says a lot about you. For example - I have two friend groups that sometimes meet up for drinks. One group drinks craft beer, fancy wine, etc. The other drinks relatively inexpensive beers and chu-hi. The experience in the two groups is completely different - everything from the conversation topics, manners, ideals, hobbies, how much people drink and for how long, etc. In both groups I have seen someone mention that they shop at a certain store, and elicit surprise from the other group members.
> 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.
I actually think says quite a bit more about you than you may think. I can probably guess which way you vote, for instance, and where you stand on a range of social issues. I can probably guess how much income you earn, and whether you have a college degree. I may be wrong - we're dealing with probabilities after all - but demographics are real.
Their staff felt a bit cultish, but they were always pretty friendly and helpful so from a customer perspective it was nice.
I tried Costco once and everything was too big. By the time we got to the end of anything we were absolutely sick of it.
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)
"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." -> What even is this? Get over yourself.
Remember that the CEO of Costco wears his name tag to work, and eats the Costco hotdog like everyone else. I'd buy that for a dollar!
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.
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 in the center of the country who spend their weekends at Costco instead of 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.