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Love Song to Costco

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Re: Love Song to Costco

#151

Post by subliminalpanda »

base698 wrote: post #149
gopalv wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like to understand why people are so enamored with Costco The first thing someone told me when I got to the US was to go to Costco, pay the membership and get an AMEX charge card for Costco. If you are someone with zero credit history and want to buy groceries without having cash on you all the time, then Costco is a big part of the "welcome to America" package. What Costco lacks in variety, it made up in q…

Costco only takes Visa.

In Canada they only accepted Mastercard for some time.

Re: Love Song to Costco

#152

Post by teddyh »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #9
edmcnulty101 wrote: post #4

As a native born and poor American without any parents I feel the same way going to Costco. Its miraculous. After being homeless a few times as a native born American I still feel like showers are the ultimate luxury. I'm always happy to see immigrants with jobs in America and Europe but I can't help but wonder what can we do to make other countries as desirable as America? Theres billions of people. Why aren't their…

Because they are higher trust societies with less low level corruption, allowing one to have more peace of mind in day to day life. Simply going out in a vehicle is magnitudes riskier in the country my parents come from. My whole extended family can afford maids, cooks, and drivers, yet they all moved because they wanted a lower volatility life for their children, even if it meant doing your own laundry, cleaning, co…

> Because they are higher trust societies with less low level corruption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

(Also, if you are comparing places, don’t forget to also consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index)

Re: Love Song to Costco

#154

Post by bigtones »

lbrito wrote: post #47

Haven't read the piece yet, but I definitely will - for a long time I would like to understand why people are so enamored with Costco. I recently joined because they have some good food that is hard or more expensive to find elsewhere, but that's about it. To me it's just a store. Outside of the US/Canada I've never seen people evangelize a store so much.

Australians have had Costco for 2 years and they absolutely love it. Very popular.

Re: Love Song to Costco

#155

Post by DocTomoe »

divbzero wrote: post #115
slyall wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Zealand is getting our first store in a couple of months and people are obsessed with it. Stories in the media nearly every week. Long queues for membership. A lot of this is because the local Supermarket Duopoly avoids competing on price and makes great profits. People are looking forward to cutting their costs and also a flow-on as the supermarkets cut their prices a little to compete. Similar to IKEA which is…

It would be fascinating to be part of that team at Costco or IKEA planning to open a new store in a new country. On top of the challenges you can think of, there must be aspects of running the business that you take for granted in your home country and don’t realize will be a challenge in the new country.

If you want to read an example of people failing at that task, read up on Walmart trying to conquer Germany. [1]

[1] many, many articles, but https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/jul/28/retail.mone... is as good as any

Re: Love Song to Costco

#156

Post by Caboose8685 »

jedberg wrote: post #86
ortusdux wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alcohol restriction is at the state level, so some stores do require a membership. Namely : Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Texas, & Vermont have laws that ban requiring memberships for the purchase of alcohol. IIRC, Costco's lobbiests played a large role in Washington's privatization of liquor sales, and the final law did not include such…

Fun fact, if you get the upgraded membership and don't spend enough to make up the difference from the regular membership, they will refund you the difference if you ask. So technically it doesn't make any sense to not get the premium membership as long as you're willing to float them the difference for a year.

Where is this stated in their rules or whatever? Something I can reference if I need to try this and the person pushes back.

Re: Love Song to Costco

#157

Post by lallysingh »

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #133
insightcheck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business Insider hired an analytics firm named Numerator to create a report that finds on the average Costco customer [0]. I couldn't find the original data or report in Business Insider's summary, but from its article: "Numerator found that Costco's typical shopper in the US is an Asian American woman between 35 and 44 years old who is married and living in a city in the Pacific Northwest. (Costco was founded in Sea…

that doesn't make sense. It says that the "typical shopper" is one very specific gender/age/income/racial category. What the heck does that mean? Am I supposed to believe that the most common category of people are that category, or that those attributes are the more common ones? I'm positive I see an almost even split of male/female when I go to Costco. Otherwise, that wording is jacked by any metric.

Assume statistical mode for enums, mean for floats.

Re: Love Song to Costco

#158

Post by lallysingh »

listenallyall wrote: post #128
jedberg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median Costco shopper makes over $125,000.

No, according to a dubious "research firm" that provides no data, the "typical" Costco shopper (define typical however you want) earns 125k. The same firm also states the typical Wal-Mart shopper earns $80k, same as both Whole Foods and Target. You can decide how close their numbers are to reality. https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-walmart-shopper-demo...

That's one faang employee and two broke people. Wal Mart has stuff you can't get at WF or Target.

Re: Love Song to Costco

#159

Post by rtpg »

f1refly wrote: post #148
kvark wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it’s a modern equivalent of the soviet stores. There is no 10 kinds of everything, but the ones available are guaranteed to be fairly good quality and at an affordable price. Speaking more modern, it saves the mental effort of researching choices. Need something? Check Costco, buy if there, done. Of course there are negatives associated with them, too.

> soviet stores. There is no 10 kinds of everything, but the ones available are guaranteed to be fairly good quality According to people from the former soviet block I know, the reason they got so good at fixing stuff is because the first thing they did after buying an appliance from a store (after it became available eventually) was fixing it because nothing ever worked as expected. I guess "nothing" is an overstate…

I feel like that was generally a property of everything everywhere though. I still remember sticking a fork into my VCR (probably made in USA?) or basically every car having something wrong with it.

Things have gotten more reliable across the board imo.

Re: Love Song to Costco

#160

Post by DocTomoe »

p_l wrote: post #132
namdnay wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the european equivalent would be LIDL

Lidl, at least in most places, doesn't run bulk stores like Costco apparently is. There are some bulk stores with memberships, some of them limited to B2B sales, some accepting normal people as customers - places like MAKRO and Selgross - but they obviously are mainly a warehouse supplier for shops and companies. I don't know how Lidl is in terms of selection in other countries, but especially with smaller stores the…

It is always interesting to read how different such brands are perceived in different countries. Over here in Germany, Lidl is considered "the better discount store" as compared to Aldi (especially Aldi Nord), and has made a push to more high-level products (which often are better than name-brand stuff that they also carry).

When I talk to British friends, the idea of shopping at a Lidl seems to be sacrilegious to them. Still, when I went into one somewhere in Yorkshire before the plague, it was pretty much what I expected.

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