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Costco is the anti-Amazon

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Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#351

Post by foolfoolz »

drudoff wrote: post #274
borski wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but at higher prices (and with delivery fees), which somewhat defeats the purpose of the cost savings at Costco.

There's free 2-day shipping from Costco for purchases over $75 (at least in Seattle). It's not hard meet that requirement. Right now, I only tend to go to Costco if I need to buy refrigerated or frozen items.

“costco delivery” is basically amazon with a higher minimum spend and no perishables. “costco same day” is delivery costco via instacart, with adjusted prices. i use costco delivery a lot because a good portion of what i buy there can be delivered with it

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#352

Post by TulliusCicero »

brailsafe wrote: post #251

My impression of Costco's selection is that it's the retail distillation of car-centric suburbs, despite it not being exclusively those people who shop there. The happy suburbanite cares about convenience and quantity above all else, from what I can tell anyway. They don't really have a varied sense of taste, they just want stuff, and they want easy access to that stuff. They like a "haul" that they do once a month,…

The nice thing about Costco's stuff is that it's typically pretty high quality too.

Honestly I wouldn't say Costco is terribly convenient, other than the limited selection.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#353

Post by aurmc »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #198
imoverclocked wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go to Costco when I have something else to do in the area; It's almost never a "trip to Costco" for me. Others have mentioned the parking lot sizes. If we wanted the best of both worlds, we could have online shopping at Costco with curbside delivery. There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless. Even Amazon builds warehouses closer to where things n…

Nobody does Costco and something else. That’s insane. Like going to IKEA and then somewhere else. Impossible.

I hit Costco once a month just because they have the only pharmacy near me that always has my prescription medications in stock. Then I hit the bakery section for the blueberry muffins, speed through self-checkout, and then get a hot dog and scroll Hacker News or something like that while I eat it.

In and out in 30 minutes at most. But I've done the same thing at Ikea. You can just go there for the meatballs! You don't have to buy furniture too!

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#354

Post by beAbU »

goosejuice wrote: post #336
hx8 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that has lived in a walkable neighborhood with a lot of shopping let me tell you, it doesn't solve the problem. Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within…

250k skus seems pretty arbitrary. What's the significance of this number? A bodega goes a long way for most people's daily needs.

A bodega is often (and usually unavoidably) more expensive than a bigger grocery retail chain that's further away.

Price conscious buyers will opt to drive to the bigger, farther away store because it has more variety, and the essentials are cheaper.

I know I do this.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#355

Post by datadrivenangel »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #283
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon. And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)

Bin packing is theoretically NP Hard but practically solved all the time on real world datasets.

Yeah but NP Hard bin packing doesn't usually include situations where a flat screen TV squished on top of pallets comes sliding out of the truck when you go to unload...

Breakage results.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#356

Post by TulliusCicero »

SoftTalker wrote: post #115
anon7000 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco is one of the few stores in America that attempts to give great value to consumers. Most supermarkets just don’t

Aldi seems to. I thought of them as I read about Costco, not because of the size of their stores (which are generally quite small as supermarkets go) but because of the limited choices. Aldi normally has everything I need but doesn't have a lot of choice in any individual thing. It makes shopping there feel very efficient.

God I wish we had Aldi in the PacNW. I know, TJ's is technically owned by Aldi Nord, but it's really not the same.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#357

Post by smithclay »

senbrow wrote: post #255
makeitdouble wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To note, Costco doesn't make much sense in most places outside of the USA (and doesn't have to. No shop needs to cater to the whole world). It still exists in select locations in some countries, but are more exotic experiences than anything else. Shopping for weeks of groceries at a time is IMHO crazy niche, it requires a level of isolation and buying power that is seldom combined.

I think your main point is right, but there are many Costco members who are NOT shopping for "weeks of groceries" at a time, and many of them live in suburban or urban areas with high density. For example, I shop at Costco once a week for just my girlfriend and I; we don't buy outrageous quantities. We live in a populous area. Our situation is pretty common; it's just a normal grocery store in effect for lots of peop…

As someone who lives in central San Francisco: Costco is amazing with a cargo bike (or Waymo off-peak).

Haven't had Amazon Prime for 2+ years and don't miss it, but would definitely miss my Costco membership.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#358

Post by kelnos »

gwbas1c wrote: post #33

> Even if you think it is preferable at an individual level, there are good reasons to question the social value of the logistical complexity that it necessitates. Home delivery of single-packaged items entails an entirely different cost structure than freight trucks driving to consumer-facing warehouses delivering entire pallets of goods to be driven home by customers themselves. Ok, so 100 people can all drive to t…

Amazon's logistics and approach discourage bundling, while Costco's in-store approach incentivizes it.

So it's more like 100 people drive to Costco, and they each buy 20 items and drive home. Or one Amazon delivery truck makes 1000 separate deliveries over the span of a week, because those 100 people made 10 different orders each, only ordering 2 items at a time. (I've even run into the situation where two separate Amazon orders made on the same day [because I forgot something in the first order] will arrive two days later, on two separate trucks, at two different times of the day.)

This part bears repeating in a different way: if I go to Costco and get 20 items, I drive there and back once, on one day. If I order like people typically do on Amazon for those same items, I have a truck/van visiting my address 5-10 times on a bunch of days over the span of two weeks.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#359

Post by alfg »

makeitdouble wrote: post #243
pupppet wrote: post #4

Whenever someone says America can do great things, I don't think of battleships, fighter jets, or AI models, I think of Costco.

To note, Costco doesn't make much sense in most places outside of the USA (and doesn't have to. No shop needs to cater to the whole world). It still exists in select locations in some countries, but are more exotic experiences than anything else. Shopping for weeks of groceries at a time is IMHO crazy niche, it requires a level of isolation and buying power that is seldom combined.

I now live in Tokyo and still make my Costco runs at least once a month. It's nice to have access to most of the same inventory since moving from Los Angeles.

Re: Costco is the anti-Amazon

#360

Post by kelnos »

claw-el wrote: post #79
lynndotpy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those individual trips to the store are typically for more than single items, and are often incorporated into trips one would have taken anyways as part of the doing of errands.

Technically, so is the home delivery. It is usually a delivery truck full of packages for nearby addresses.

Right, so with Amazon you have one truck visiting 100 addresses every day for two weeks (because people are buying 2-3 items per order). With Costco you have 100 people each driving to Costco once, on a single day.

From a cars-on-the-road and fuel expenditure perspective, the latter sounds better.

If Amazon customers ordered like Costco shoppers, the Amazon model might very well be better. But they don't, so it isn't.

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