There's nothing appealing about costco to me anymore. Living is suburban DC... The parking lots are packed and dangerous, there's too many people in the store, the produce quality isn't there, and it takes forever to checkout. It doesn't fit my lifestyle anymore, and I'm the perfect candidate for someone that could benefit from going there once in a while.
I want to live like Costco people
311–320 of 760 posts
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate going there and mostly use Instacart to avoid having to, but even with a Instacart mark-up and tip it's cheaper and higher quality than most other options, happy to pay someone else to do my shopping.
Is it really higher quality? I had a membership for a year and didn't find much I was interested in purchasing food wise, at least.
I’m in the same boat. The quality to terrible. No I don’t want a bunch of pumpkin seeds that you’re using as filler for products. The produce isn’t great either. A huge portion of the food is either premade factory food that’s chilled or frozen.
I don’t want a bunch of cellulose in my cheese either.
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#313Always 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
The membership has another impact on the balance sheet. It not only adds revenue, it also cuts loss from shoplifting
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#314With dynamic pricing and other consumer predatory schemes out there, Costco feels like the only one that fights for the consumer. The checkout is lightyears faster than any local supermarket, return policies are good, and I don't feel like the warehouse is trying to waste my time. The low price of good quality meat alone is worth the price of admission. If you cook, you come out doubly saving money.
"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!
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#315> 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…
Nobody is going to come to your funeral and tearfully wail that you had fabulous taste in handbags. 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.
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Re: I want to live like Costco people
#316> 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…
> 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…
> 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.
And yet somehow, with first 3/4 of this sentence, you've given a more accurate story about America than is almost ever provided!
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
That fancy Lamborghini is going to be sitting in the same traffic as my Honda.
You're equals in that regard, but try riding a motorcycle one day. I live in a country where lanesplitting is legal. There's nothing quite like getting passed by an extremely expensive car, and then at the traffic lights, cut in front of it.
Sounds like an evolutionary advantage adapted by the Toxoplasma gondii in your brain to more efficiently deliver you to the big ghost cat in the sky.
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#318I tried to go the Costco route, but somehow it didn't click for me. The portion sizes were too large.
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.
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#319I 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…
Costco buisness centers are usually a lot quieter, and don't have the free sample venders clogging up the aisle. Memberships work for both.
Costco business centers for 50lb bag of bread flour.
Regular Costco for rotisserie chicken.
In life you can't have everything.
Re: I want to live like Costco people
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe. 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 social…
The irony is that, in contrast to their relative positions in the 1960s, communism (in the political-economic Marxian sense) vs capitalism (in the 2026 sense) is now more true to the original communist view above. 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, sca…
So you’re saying China is in the drivers’s seat to make Marxist-Communism a reality?