Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I want to live like Costco people

tastecooking.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 760 posts

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#471

Post by asdff »

yabones wrote: post #137

I get the allure, but it's not for me and my partner. 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…

Some stuff like milk is a nonstarter. But most everything else I will go to costco for even living in a small apartment. Big costco thing of olive oil is far cheaper than olive oil anywhere else and not too hard to store. pack of trash bags again easy to store cheaper than anywhere else. likewise for dish soap, just as wide as a standard bottle but square and far cheaper. A lot of stuff with longer shelf lifes that I eat anyway in maybe 1.5-2x the volume as sold in a regular grocery stores and works out to be cheaper still somehow than that smaller volume unit at the regular grocery store. Cereal. Oats. I will even get my creatine there. My rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. My generic allergy medicine and psuedoephedrine (which is a RACKET at CVS by the way). There's been times I've had some baking in front of me and 24 rack of eggs made sense. I also get their golf balls and golf gloves. Cheap zinc sunscreen.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#472

Post by golemiprague »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

> 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…

[dead]

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#473

Post by asdff »

throw7 wrote: post #23

The nearest costco to me is an hour and half away. I've been in costco only once, and I guess I got it, but I also was like: do i need this? This year they're opening one nearby (~10mins). I have this nagging growing feeling of fear I will be joining.

The real hooking factor is when you go and recognize items you are already buying in other stores in smaller quantities for more money. Then you start branching out further still.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#474

Post by [deleted] »

Schiendelman wrote: post #39
throw7 wrote: post #23

The nearest costco to me is an hour and half away. I've been in costco only once, and I guess I got it, but I also was like: do i need this? This year they're opening one nearby (~10mins). I have this nagging growing feeling of fear I will be joining.

Don't fear it. Join us. There's a real reduction in your cognitive load, honestly. It's nice.

[deleted]

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#475

Post by [deleted] »

copperx wrote: post #360
Aurornis wrote: post #8

> 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…

> but in my travels and international business experience I wouldn’t even rank Americans in the top 10 for integrating brands and identity. You can't just say this and leave us hanging. Which countries?

[deleted]

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#476

Post by asdff »

ethagnawl wrote: post #397

> the great parking lot of dreams I don't know what Costco parking lots in the PNW are like but in the NE, they're a nightmare. People racing around, lining up and jockeying for spots, enormous carts careening around and being left ... wherever because people can't be bothered to put them back. My family has a membership but I permanently opted out after one trip to the Danbury, CT location. > otherwise you are rarel…

My secret is just parking immediately on the edge of the lot and walking the 100 yards on in. People will play this stupid game for 10 minutes getting steaming red waiting for a spot near the front and I'm already shopping.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#477

Post by TulliusCicero »

elzbardico wrote: post #188
Aurornis wrote: post #8

> 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.

I've been around a good amount of the US and yeah, being very judgey on brands just doesn't seem to be much of a thing. Maybe if I hung around rich people it'd be different, but I do know some rich people and they typically don't seem to give a shit either.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#478

Post by nathanasmith »

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #94
tavavex wrote: post #88

The author's view is alien to me. It paints Costco as some sort of cultural retirement home. A boring place for boring people, not just a big store in a warehouse. I know that displaying brand affinity towards some companies is seen as tasteful and praiseworthy in our cultures, but I didn't realize many people extended this view to something as basic and pragmatic as the place they go to buy flour or whatever.

Costco is a store... where coffee, usually gas and most food + home goods are reliable in quality and priced well comparatively. Comparing the price of salmon fillets at Costco to Whole Foods or elsewhere is eye-opening. Would I buy clothes or furniture from Costco? No - because both are bland. The end. If the writer wants to make it anything more than that... They are a bit too obsessed with self-image vs wasting mo…

> Would I buy clothes [...] from Costco?

Yes. Happily.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#479

Post by naruhodo »

antihipocrat wrote: post #458
Terr_ wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 transport…

The brand that's 'Australian for beer' is very difficult to find in its domestic market!

That brand was in fact created for the American market, I recall. Australians also don't talk about "throwing another shrimp on the barbie". That's another Americanism. We call them prawns.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#480

Post by elzbardico »

legitster wrote: post #265
elzbardico wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American capitalism, for all its defects, was always a mass oriented endeavour in constrast with Continental Europe. 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.

> 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…

Soviet Ideology and Lenin in particular deturpated Marxism.

For Marx, capitalism is historically revolutionary precisely because it expands productive forces at a scale impossible under feudalism. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels explicitly say the bourgeoisie created “more massive and more colossal productive forces” than earlier generations, and then argue that capitalism becomes self-contradictory because those productive forces outgrow capitalist property relations, producing crises of overproduction and destruction of wealth.

We can even say, that is a strict reading of Marx, communism is impossible if the problem of scarcity hasn't been solved before.

Marxism requires abundance as a material precondition for higher communism

Post reply on HN