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

661–670 of 760 posts

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#661

Post by fundad »

pruetj wrote: post #21

I have a Costco that is walking distance from my office. If I need to decompress, I walk to Costco for lunch solo, get a hot dog and a slice of pizza, sit down, and watch both the people and what's in their cart. It's so diverse and pretty fascinating.

The food court is where we can all be ourselves.

When I shop early I salute the people having breakfast in the food court. One afternoon I saw people at a table with an empty rotisserie chicken package, hittin' their macros. I had my baby with me one time, offering him bites of my hotdog and being praised for being a man spending time with my child as if I had vaccinated a needy village.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#662

Post by red-iron-pine »

shaftway wrote: post #98
giwook wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. What about cars or houses?

That fancy Lamborghini is going to be sitting in the same traffic as my Honda.

the lambo is a toy.

the people who have the real money are flying in private jets.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#663

Post by bayindirh »

giwook wrote: post #89
legitster wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andy Warhol's quote is about aspiration and perceived attainment. The average person is not aspiring to drink a gold flake truffle-infused Coke. The implication is the lack of a rigorous class hierarchy in America. Not that the rich don't live different lifestyles or consume more. But that niche luxury products were considered effete and un-American. (Andy Warhol was almost certainly also being ironic - that the rich…

Fair point. What about cars or houses?

Personally I don't envy an "high-end" car (RR, McLaren, Ferrari, Porsche, etc.), or a big mansion which needs a horde of people to run.

I personally developed a feeling for things which are at the edge of "diminishing returns" curve. I get the things which are high-end enough, but not in the "pay 3x more to get 1% more" region.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#664

Post by rsanek »

This website does not respect the `prefers-reduced-motion` flag. For others that find moving elements on the screen distracting while reading, you can use the following uBlock rule:

||tastecooking.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/*.gif

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#665

Post by butlike »

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…

Honest question: What does it matter if others judge you, in this time? Back in the day I understand; you'd be ostracized from the group or killed, but in this day and age people just give you a side eye or murmur at best. It really doesn't affect anything anymore. Why should we care?

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#666

Post by tpm »

elzbardico wrote: post #480
legitster wrote: post #265

Earlier 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…

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 becau…

> 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

and then left this thought (every system outgrows itself and becomes self-contradictory) applied to communism as an exercise to readers, which gave us Lenin and Stalin's (and Mao's) permanent bloody revolution as a pupil's halfbaked attempt at a solution, because their attempt to create communism contradicted itself way before it succeeded.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#667

Post by butlike »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #105
shaftway wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fancy Lamborghini is going to be sitting in the same traffic as my Honda.

no - it will be getting very expensive servicing while you're enjoying 200K+ trouble-free miles

But it's not expensive to the person getting it serviced. Finance becomes a matter of perspective at a certain level, I imagine. You buy the Lambo because it's fun to drive, you buy the clothing with the most 000's at the end of the price because it's most likely the best. It's not 'expensive,' it's just... why would you take anything less than the best everytime?

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#668

Post by stasomatic »

foresto wrote: post #200
sidrag22 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I want is an anti-costco. More like a bodega. Still curated, maybe a larger mark-up, but smaller quantities of everything. Half loaves of bread, small bags of frozen veg, enough sugar or flour to bake just a couple batches. This is becoming even harder to achieve nowadays, there is all this variety in size of products and more and more over the years(at least in the midwest) it seems that grocery stores want t…

> the 8 oz will be on sale but only if you buy at least 2 or 3, its incredibly frustrating. Have you tested this by buying just one, and checking the price on the receipt? I ask because someone once told me this was illegal in the US; that a shop was allowed to display the sale price only for a larger quantity, but they had to honor the same price per unit if you only bought one. (I think we were discussing produce a…

At my Winn Dixie and Publix (FL), tags often say "must by in quantities of 2." for products on sale.

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#669

Post by butlike »

fragmede wrote: post #339
shaftway wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fancy Lamborghini is going to be sitting in the same traffic as my Honda.

Not in LA/socal. The secret is out. There's a bunch of underground tunnels that rich and well connected people can use, that the little people can not.

Is this actually true cause it reads like STRAIGHT paranoia. I imagine those tunnels are owned by the illuminati, right?

Re: I want to live like Costco people

#670

Post by cucumber3732842 »

adolfojp wrote: post #634
insane_dreamer wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they even have Sam's Club in the PNW? I've never seen one. But even if they did, no way am I shopping at Sam's Club for the same reason that I'm never shopping at its parent company, Walmart. Walmart arguably did more to destroy small town America than any other company, and it also treats retail employees like shit. On the other hand, Costco is one of the best places to work as a retail employee (which is why the…

Not shopping at Sam's Club because its parent company destroys small town America is a perfectly reasonable sociopolitical stance so I respect it. Bravo. But if you're still shopping at Costco then you don't really care about the effects that these big box stores have on small town economies. You're just into performative activism. But Costco does have better working conditions so I'll give you that.

>Not shopping at Sam's Club because its parent company destroys small town America is a perfectly reasonable sociopolitical stance so I respect it. Bravo.

Not saying you specifically, but it drives me up the wall that the same people who complain big business bad have so much overlap with the people who champion government policy that makes it so only the big businesses that can amortize the fixed costs of doing business over absurd quantities can exist competitively.

Post reply on HN