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The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#22Will Costco be collecting rent? The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing. This is just like private equity and 401k’s buying houses. People should be able to own their own housing not become lifelong renters.
Rental apartments are important for people who plan to live there less than 5-7 years. If all apartments were condos and there was no renting , where are people who don’t have a down payment saved supposed to live? What if they need to move to a larger place after a year or two?
That is entirely not the issue I’m raising here.
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#23Will Costco be collecting rent? The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing. This is just like private equity and 401k’s buying houses. People should be able to own their own housing not become lifelong renters.
Should Costco be explicitly banned from non-commercial development in the otherwise unused air-space above their store's footprint? Forced to sell the air rights to other developers? This mixed-use approach seems like a much better use of the lot space.
I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to own their own housing, but I don't see the two as mutually incompatible in the larger scheme.
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#24I'm continuously impressed by Costco. Not only is it one of my favorite places to shop, but I also recently recent to the Acquired episode on Costco[0] and was super impressed by how they run their business. They've continuously been able to align their unique advantages to reenforce each other and make their advantages even stronger. I highly recommend this episode to everyone. [0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/c…
> their unique advantages What are those? I never really found any sort of "unique advantage" of Costco. Certainly nothing to drive the extra distance past Sam's. While I had a membership, it was largely more expensive or didn't have what I wanted.
As a consumer, the advantage to Costco is they've done the product filtering for you. You can reasonably bet that whatever Costco has is in the upper echelons of good within that product category. Costco also ends up being cheaper if you do enough shopping there, because Costco's low prices are realized by the membership fees comprising the lion's share of their revenue.
As a merchant, Costco is significantly more efficient than other retailers due to a much leaner and simpler inventory because they only ever sell one or two brands of a given thing and only one or two things of a given brand. They don't have to deal with the overhead of unmoving stock, micromanagement of stock, and other such inefficiencies of non-scale.
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#25Costco is great but their parking lots are awful. I hope the housing has a separate parking entrance because fighting Costco shoppers every time I leave home sounds like a nightmare.
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#26Costco is great but their parking lots are awful. I hope the housing has a separate parking entrance because fighting Costco shoppers every time I leave home sounds like a nightmare.
On the other hand, imagine all the money you could save if you just had a $1.50 hot dog and soda for every meal. You could eat on less than $200 a month.
If you ate nothing but pepperoni pizza, you could feed a family of four for like $500 a month!
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#27Will Costco be collecting rent? The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing. This is just like private equity and 401k’s buying houses. People should be able to own their own housing not become lifelong renters.
Should Costco be explicitly banned from non-commercial development in the otherwise unused air-space above their store's footprint? Forced to sell the air rights to other developers? This mixed-use approach seems like a much better use of the lot space. I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to own their own housing, but I don't see the two as mutually incompatible in the larger scheme.
I don’t see how my comment would imply or could be understood as wanting a ban or being against mixed use development.
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should Costco be explicitly banned from non-commercial development in the otherwise unused air-space above their store's footprint? Forced to sell the air rights to other developers? This mixed-use approach seems like a much better use of the lot space. I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to own their own housing, but I don't see the two as mutually incompatible in the larger scheme.
I don’t see how my comment would imply or could be understood as wanting a ban or being against mixed use development.
You didn't rail against mixed use development, nor did I imply that you did. Per your OP:
> The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing.
My definition of mixed-use development would include the case in TFA: Costco adding housing units above their store. Housing which you explicitly said is 'not a good thing'. I might agree with you, if Costco were slapping down a subdivision of company housing. But they're not, they're adding housing units above a proposed store in a mixed-use approach. This seems like a net good.
There could be a whole (cynical) side conversation as to whether or not Costco is adding these housing units simply to meet the criteria which allow for the expedited approval of this proposal, of course.
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#29Hi, I'm the person who wrote the Twitter thread this article is based off of, so happy to answer any questions about it
Re: The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
#30I'm continuously impressed by Costco. Not only is it one of my favorite places to shop, but I also recently recent to the Acquired episode on Costco[0] and was super impressed by how they run their business. They've continuously been able to align their unique advantages to reenforce each other and make their advantages even stronger. I highly recommend this episode to everyone. [0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/c…
> their unique advantages What are those? I never really found any sort of "unique advantage" of Costco. Certainly nothing to drive the extra distance past Sam's. While I had a membership, it was largely more expensive or didn't have what I wanted.
Gas is cheaper. Pharmacy is cheaper, whether you have insurance or not. Perhaps more so if you don't have insurance. The regular stuff is good quality and cheaper than competition too. I don't even shop that much, but I still maintain the membership as I come out ahead even with my occasional shopping.