Costco is the anti-Amazon

Seriously though, I was thinking on how I had to stop and get cat litter, milk, and cereal on my way home today when I read what you posted. While I get some consumables online; pet food, filters for my odd-sized vent, and until recently Hello Fresh; I mostly buy consumables in person.

kulahan4• 19 days ago

This surprised me too. My apartment hallway has 5-10 amazon packages in it per day. I guess... everyone's just spending crazy money at home. Seeing the other comment about large purchases being made in person makes sense, but still - you can buy cars and clothes online now. 17 seems REALLY low!

pupppet• 19 days ago

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

DrewADesign5• 19 days ago

I mean, Costco is great, but I think the purest expression of American capitalism is Buc-ee’s.

whalesalad2• 19 days ago

I present to you, the 8th wonder of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Pyramid

throwawaygod• 19 days ago

Can you explain why? Non-american here :)

whalesalad2• 19 days ago

Welcome to Costco, I love you.

oa335• 19 days ago

Agree 100%. Costco exemplifies american dream... recent immigrants perusing well-stocked aisles, friendly employees, ample parking, cheap tasty hot dogs, etc.

rustystump2• 19 days ago

The hotdogs. You know the world is ending when Costco raises the prices of their hotdog.

spike0213• 19 days ago

ample parking? Not at any locations in my area. Even on weekdays.

bellgrove• 19 days ago

Perhaps this depends a lot on location. Parking is a nightmare at my local Costco. The employees are friendly enough most of the time. I truly admire the value and business model but Costco is pretty much the absolute worst shopping experience I can think of.

furytrader• 19 days ago

I find the experience of shopping at Costco very uncomfortable. The parking lots are jammed packed, everyone is darting around with large shopping carts, the lines for the cashier are long, sales people are trying to pitch me on travel deals as I walk by - it almost feels like going through a busy airport. I am a Costco member, but I only go to the store when I really need to. The fact that I can shop Costco via Instacart was a gamechanger for me.

PaulDavisThe1st• 19 days ago

For lots and lots of Americans, endless consumerism, driving and junk food are not a part of the dream in any way.

jatins• 18 days ago

friendly employees

Where are the employees? There are so few employees (other than cashier) on the ground in a football field sized warehouse. Good luck finding someone if you have a question

marcosdumay2• 19 days ago

Wallmart is absolutely impressive. But many places have something similar to Costco.

culi3• 19 days ago

Internally, Walmart is the a larger planned economy than the Soviet Union ever was. If you have a product you agree to sell in Walmart you basically give up total control. They tell you how to manufacture it, where/when to sell, and even at what price. There's a tongue-in-cheek 2019 book exploring this idea called The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Cory Doctorow wrote about it

https://archive.ph/cnDtu

satvikpendem5• 19 days ago

I think of this: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

Sadly this is not the case anymore these days.

eli_gottlieb• 19 days ago

"[W]hat earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"

makeitdouble• 19 days ago

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.

senbrow• 19 days ago

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 people. The weird stereotype of Costco shoppers driving for miles to buy huge carts of food just doesn't line up with the typical case for my area.

alfg• 19 days ago

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.

btheunissen• 19 days ago

I’m in Australia and I love going to my local Costco with my wife monthly to load up on meat we re-portion and freeze. Calling it an exotic experience is a little much, they operate in 14 countries, I’m just there for the bulk savings with a hot dog or two.

newsoftheday4• 18 days ago

I tend to think of veterans and their sacrifices manning those battleships, fighter jets and battlefields so that companies like Costco can exist.

alephnerd3• 18 days ago

They're shifting around 1,000 corporate roles from Issaquah to Hyderabad [0]. They're across the street from TJX and AMD [1].

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/us-retail-giant-costco-s...

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/?link=https://www.google.com/maps/@1...

frollogaston6• 19 days ago

Costco is mostly food, clothes, furniture, other large things, and auto services, which generally you don't get from Amazon even if you aren't a Costco member. The points about less choice more apply to like Costco vs grocery stores or Walmart. And I do like Costco, similar low-choice reason I like Trader Joe's even though Costco is its own league.

jitix• 19 days ago

As per their financials it’s roughly 50-50. I personally buy groceries and household consumables for the most part apart from the occasional electronics purchase.

IMO Costco’s food hits the sweet spot between high end grocery store quality and walmart level price.

DrewADesign5• 19 days ago

Yeah I can’t get 5 different varieties of a ball bearings in the size I need delivered overnight from Costco. And for the things Costco or your local grocery store is great for, Amazon is often a far worse option. I noticed my wife was buying our toothpaste using a subscribe and save thing, so I compared it to our regular grocery store when I went shopping, and Amazon was like 20% more expensive. Great marketing on Amazon’s part getting people to assume it’s always the lowest price, but it’s often not.

frollogaston6• 19 days ago

The dumbest assumption I saw Amazon baiting people into was using Chase credit card points for purchases. You'd think spending those specifically on Amazon would be more efficient than just getting cash and buying from Amazon with that cash, right? Turns out it's the other way around, and by a large amount.

ironman1478• 19 days ago

I think a lot of people buy furniture and clothing on Amazon. It's extremely cheap and easy to return, or just throw away if you can't return it (not endorsing that).

ButlerianJihad2• 19 days ago

I purchased a new mattress to fit my fold-out futon frame, from Walmart.com.

And the reason I chose Walmart at that time is because they offered good products, mostly first-party inventory (despite the marketplace format) but moreover, they offered a quick add-on option at checkout to hire a haul-away service to come to my door and haul away the junked, old mattress.

I own no vehicle; I live on the second floor no elevator, and the haul-away service was a godsend and a bargain price.

frollogaston6• 19 days ago

I do actually buy furniture from Amazon and Walmart, don't think I'm the common case though. And wow it's annoying to get rid of the packaging after.

lemoncucumber• 19 days ago

The Trader Joe's model is an interesting comparison with the Costco model.

Similarities:

* Like you said, both have fewer choices than a conventional grocery store: if you want ketchup or peanut butter, there's only going to be one brand and one size.

* Both of them don't have scales at the registers: unlike at a conventional grocery store, nothing is sold by weight (which I'm sure provides another small efficiency gain).

* Both of them are cheaper than your typical grocery store.

Differences:

* I feel like Trader Joe's leans on store brand / white-labeling items more than Costco -- yes Kirkland Signature is a thing but Trader Joe's takes it further.

* The shopping experience is pretty different both in terms of the in-store experience and the quantities things are sold in.

* Costco requires a membership, Trader Joe's doesn't.

I wonder which elements of the two models would work best for a public grocery store.

khurs2• 19 days ago

Trader Joe is owned by one of the two German Aldi groups (two brother split original business to have one each) And both of them employ the same model globally.

They are huge - ~15,000 stores worldwide and growing fast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi

snark42• 19 days ago

unlike at a conventional grocery store, nothing is sold by weight

Costco and TJs both sell items like meat by weight, they're just pre-labeled so they can be scanned rather than weighed at the register. Things like produce that might be weighed elsewhere are sold by each or container though.

drnick12• 19 days ago

Trader Joe's stores are tiny compared to Costco, and only sell food.

asdefghyk• 19 days ago

They would be , in their own way, competing against "each other"? , with different models to get the product to customer .

cute_boi• 19 days ago

I don’t know why people like Costco so much. BJ’s Wholesale is much better and offers more variety. It seems mostly suitable for carnivores.

That being said their refund and the way their employees is great though. I would prefer walmart if they treat their employee better and give better pay.

mmooss4• 19 days ago

To put it crudely, having someone in a Sprinter van deliver a recently-purchased toothbrush to your doorstep is simply not a universalizable action, from either a business or logistical standpoint. It is a modern feat that Amazon is capable of doing this, but that it can be done does not mean that it should, nor even that it can be done writ large. For most consumption, it is far more efficient for people to handle the “last-mile delivery” themselves by going to stores and buying a good amount of stuff when they do so.

When you order your X, a van doesn't drive from Amazon's warehouse to your home and then back with only your order. The van takes a van-full (hopefully) from the warehouse, and makes many stops at many homes, businesses, etc.

That seems more efficient, in terms of fuel, climate impact, etc., than each customer making a separate round trip. Is there data showing it either way?

mc32• 19 days ago

Indeed true. Even more efficient is when people can wait a few days and let Amazon bundle your orders and deliver on a designated day.

That said people don’t typically get in a car to buy one thing -though obviously sometimes they do. On average though their trips will be for multiple things. I still think even without using designated delivery days Amazon deliveries are more efficient than individuals going out to buy things independently.

mmooss4• 19 days ago

I was zeroing out the amount purchased: The comparison is the customer picks up one item vs. Amazon delivers one item, or the customer picks up 12 or 20 things vs. Amazon delivers the same amount.

I'd still love to see data.

The problem with environmental impact is really a consequence of subsidized energy costs, including the externalization of environmental cost. If the consumer and Amazon paid the actual cost of fuel, they would make valid economic and environmental choices and we wouldn't need to figure it out like this.

nemomarx• 19 days ago

I've always wondered why I don't see passed on savings for the "amazon day" thing. It's gotta be way better for their logistics to deliver bulk orders, or pick a standardized delivery day for each neighborhood or something. Why do they only offer a single dollar of credit for choosing it?

levocardia• 19 days ago

Also this argument is easily refuted by the US Postal Service, which physically delivers individual pieces of paper in a few days, for pennies.

GauntletWizard• 19 days ago

The postal service is a quasi government entity that has operated (not to get too deep into the politics of it) for many years at a loss. It does compete with Amazon, as well as being used by Amazon, but it's very different as a business than Amazon.

nerdsniper• 19 days ago

Right but that’s a government service and it should be totally fine for them to deliver mail below cost using taxpayer money to make up the deficit.

Like every other government service - highways, defense, etc. They’re profitable to the system, but not per se.

ButlerianJihad2• 19 days ago

USPS is fueled by parcel deliveries, but also in large part by literal tons of junk mail on dead trees; spammers have paid Uncle Sam handsomely to spam every citizen's mailbox for decades, and it's the most lucrative thing USPS can do with our home mailboxes.

frollogaston6• 19 days ago

I would expect Amazon to be more efficient. Besides the round trips, there's operating the store, putting items on display, all that. As I said above, Amazon and Costco don't compete so directly though, like you aren't buying a pie from Amazon.

bryanlarsen2• 19 days ago

Here's one study sort that answers your question

https://news.umich.edu/carbon-emissions-and-grocery-shopping...

In-store pickup using a internal combustion engined vehicle produced more emissions than any other option studied.

mmooss4• 19 days ago

Great, thanks. Here's the abstract. And for context, it's a collaboration with Ford Motor Co.

... We report and compare the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a 36-item grocery basket transported along 72 unique paths from a centralized warehouse to the customer, including impacts of micro-fulfillment centers, refrigeration, vehicle automation, and last-mile transportation. Our base case is in-store shopping with last-mile transportation using an internal combustion engine (ICE) SUV (6.0 kg CO2e). The results indicate that emissions reductions could be achieved by e-commerce with micro-fulfillment centers (16-54%), customer vehicle electrification (18-42%), or grocery delivery (22-65%) compared to the base case. In-store shopping with an ICE pick-up truck has the highest emissions of all paths investigated (6.9 kg CO2e) while delivery using a sidewalk automated robot has the least (1.0 kg CO2e). Shopping frequency is an important factor for households to consider, e.g. halving shopping frequency can reduce GHG emissions by 44%. Trip chaining also offers an opportunity to reduce emissions with approximately 50% savings compared to the base case. Opportunities for grocers and households to reduce grocery supply chain carbon footprints are identified and discussed.

It's interesting that consumers driving EVs reduce the cost on the same scale as deliveries (presumably in an ICE vehicle).

They omit apples-to-apples comparisons (at least from the press release and abstract)

  * Consumer ICE vs. Delivery service ICE
  * Consumer EV vs Delivery service EV
  * Sidewalk delivery robot vs Bicycle or ebike

The last is a bit bizarre - comparing a 2-mile radius sidewalk mechanism to pickup trucks and delivery vans, but omitting the very popular 2-mile delivery method.

socalgal23• 19 days ago

There's also the externalities. Costco effectively supports car infested surburbia which lots of people blame for a great many problems.

Backslasher2• 19 days ago

The part about Costco choosing to avoid the last mile shipping problem reminded me of a proverb, roughly translated as:

A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.

I think it holds a lot of truth in engineering.

mgfist• 19 days ago

Both spectrums are hard. Solving last mile is really really hard, but if you do that's a huge moat (aka Amazon). If you avoid last mile, you best deliver value in some other way, which Costco does by giving you more per dollar than anyone else.

steve_adams_86• 19 days ago

They also offer some degree of curation, so your dollar goes further by volume/weight/unit on average, but also in less quantitative ways quite often. I trust what I buy from Costco, but I’ve completely stopped buying from Amazon (many years ago now) because apart from the poor value prop, I simply don’t like the quality or reliability of what’s offered.

gramie2• 18 days ago

I don't find Costco necessarily cheaper than anywhere else. For example, if I'm careful and search flyers, local supermarkets will often have better prices.

For me, Costco has good prices, an excellent return policy, and reliably excellent quality. I don't need 15 choices of peanut butter, just a few (smooth and chunky, natural and sugary) good ones.

I also appreciate that Costco employees are always busy, but they seem positive and friendly. Most Costcos I go to, I look for the board that highlights long-term employees. The one nearest me has 8-10 people who have been there for 30 years or longer.

As the article said, Costco pays higher hourly wages than most other people. They also provide extended health benefits (in Canada, so basic health is already covered), paid sick days, paid vacation days (one woman I talked to had been working there for 25 years and had six weeks of annual vacation!), and more.

mawadev• 19 days ago

Incredible quote, thank you for posting it

righthand2• 19 days ago

I hear this, I have been in plenty of meetings where I propose a solution that eclipses most of the project requirements, often for a product person to turn around and say something like “yeah but I like working with X techhnology”, for example Tailwind.

Okay you like Tailwind because you seem to think “p-2” is better than specifying “padding: 2rem;” because when it comes time to tinker with things you don’t want to understand CSS, you want to play with Tailwind.

clickety_clack2• 19 days ago

Often, you are better off with a single standard environment rather than one with a hodgepodge of locally optimal solutions.

robotswantdata• 19 days ago

You can put tailwind on the CV

shimman2• 19 days ago

While I understand your overall point your example of tailwind just seems odd. The idea that a css library makes or breaks what a project is capable of is kinda... IDK... laughable?

What is the challenge in downloading class names into a style directory?

furyofantares3• 19 days ago

But they don't avoid solving it, they offer it by partnering with instacart.

wombat-man• 19 days ago

They also ship a lot of items.

AnotherGoodName• 19 days ago

It’s also amazing how bad delivery services are in general. The incentives for third party delivery services don’t align well with the other parties. A retailer is judged on the quality of delivery yet only amazon has seemed to realize this (queue incoming anecdotes about amazon screwing up delivery yet i’ve never had an issue getting a refund when it happens).

ghaff5• 19 days ago

I think it probably depends too on what different people's living situations are. I have an exurban house with a large driveway and I've basically never had an issue with an Amazon delivery. (Yes, it can be late sometimes but I can track it and I'm usually not in a rush.)

m463• 19 days ago

It seems costco can deliver HEAVY things that amazon can't (economically, afaict)

Imustaskforhelp4• 19 days ago

I was reading the book "How the internet happened": During the dot com bubble, there was a company called furniture.com which basically lost a lot of its investor money by learning the hard truth that IKEA also had to learn that shipping Heavy things like furniture isn't actually economical.

I am not sure if costco's model could allow it but especially for amazon, if they tried to do it or make it their USP like furniture.com, then I can imagine a very different outcome for it overall.

There was also a company I think who spent hundreds of millions of dollars (IIRC) in creating a large grocery website with buying large warehouses then and basically losing a ton of money. That business also failed quite drastically.

Another fun fact: when Amazon was first established, one of the largest loopholes that they had used which one can argue was why they were able to exist in the first place was that although they had selected book for Amazon because books are somewhat centralized (barnes and nobles essentially) but I think that the b&n warehouses required 10 books to be ordered each time.

So within the start, what they did was found out there was 1 book which was consistently out of stock. so they would order 1 book which the customer had ordered and then 9 of those other books. I imagine that if it might not have been for this as well, it might've been hard in the start.

There was also the fact that Barnes and nobles created their website and everyone thought that Amazon would basically die. Logic sort of suggests that it should've.

My conclusion is that Retail works in strange ways and timing matters a lot.

Also there are so many little facts within the book and it might be one of the fastest reads that I had of a book but the dot com bubble does feel quite similar to AI bubble IMO.

Here is a graph that I was making of a very limited connection graph of companies during the dot com bubble. https://files.catbox.moe/xdcxuy.png

I think that i have gone a bit too afar from my original comment but I sometimes like to chat and share bits of knowledge that I know and then I can't resist myself! :-D

reddit_clone2• 19 days ago

Yes! When you order a washing machine (I did couple months ago), everything was included. Somebody brought it, lugged it up 3 stairs, fixed it all up and took the old one back.

They even rebated $100 because it got scuffed during installation :-)

serial_dev2• 19 days ago

They don’t avoid the problem. They avoid solving it and let it be your problem.

Imustaskforhelp4• 19 days ago

A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.

Wow, what a great quote!I think that this combined with "there is no free lunch" explains a lot of thing (IMO)

(I like to write and once I write, I like to send it free on the internet in the spirit of how older internet must've originally intended but if you wish to read the TLDR it is: Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at!)

I think that this holds a lot within career-making as well, in terms of deciding what career that you want. For example, I think that sometimes I get hyper-focused on a topic and basically dig the weeds and every information about a particular topic. My recent obsession was with the dot com bubble and supply chains.

but at the same time I think that although its just good thinking about it and gives me more breath of knowledge which helps me form a more nuanced person, but that doesn't mean that for every interest that I have, I have to become the expert or a genuine professional career at it.

Some problems are worth the risk/tradeoff when thought from short term but they quickly become really painful over the long term whereas other problems are more fulfilling long term but really hurt short term and there is a balance within the middle which I have selected which is what's know as CS :-D

I am a somewhat frugal guy and my philosophy has always been of do it yourself but reading about supply chains makes me realize just how interconnected we are. A toilet making company in Japan is an irreplacable component within the AI industry (They make the ceramics sheets on which the wafers are built and they are the only company that have the genuine expertise, patent and skills for doing so and they aren't alone and there are many many companies within such thing)

and even a single aluminim screw-esque component could take like 4-5 turns from australia (mining) -> iceland (cheaper energy) -> China (making proper aluminum bars) -> Vietnam (cheaper labour than China so China itself is offshoring it) -> Back to China.

All while a software engineer from say India/America/Europe is making the website and handling the customer service and taking ad decisions/marketing while another MNC (Amazon) ships it to your doorsteps, a company can be formed anywhere nationwide, and the product could be gone to LATAM.

Basically, although I have gotten on a tangent, my main point is that not every problem has to be solved by you. the world has lots of money in every fields as its just soo interconnected and as such you should decide on the problems which are best worth your time, your expertise and your interests hopefully and tackling that problem and maybe even being clever at that! and being wise in avoiding many of other problems.

Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at! but to be wise on selecting the problems you want to be clever at, you should be aware of other problems in the first place so its good to analyze more problems, though it could very well be a justification that I might provide myself when I am studying supply chains and the humble container, I also find it interesting how the concepts of containers become so intuitive once you know it in modern shipping and then we applied that same concept AGAIN in Docker/podman but before that time, we were none the "wiser" :-D

socalgal23• 19 days ago

Sounds Costco not paying for externalities.

hk1337• 18 days ago

Avoiding a problem doesn't necessarily make the problem go away.

A wise person knows when to avoid a problem and when to solve it.

Backslasher2• 18 days ago

I think the original biblical phrase was about getting out of a hole which you fell into, and in that domain it's always better to not fall into the hole.

cm11• 18 days ago

I’ve struggled following this idea too and wondered if I’m missing something? There’s a (I assumed straightforward) implication that the wise person is often letting problems grow and/or enabling them.

It is resolved personally, which is valuable, but most of these things have a larger footprint than that making it a kind of self-prioritizing mindset. There’s some kind of math to the decision involving how much effort, how much personal or short term benefit, how much communal or long term cost. But the math isn’t neutral. So basically choosing to avoid problems is going to correlate with personally better and communally worse. The clever person might be doing the solving, making sacrifices for broader good, and is sabotaged.

alephnerd3• 18 days ago

It's also different demographics. Costco shoppers have always been in the highest income brackets, while Amazon's are middle of the pack and Walmart's tend to be at the lower end [0][1].

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shoppers-richer-than-...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shopper...

lanthissa• 18 days ago

i mean its a value exchange, the last mile matters a ton to the consumer, the value prop the average person gets from amazon vs shopping in 2000 is insane and scales up the more valuable your time is.

Not only are prices good, but if i lose my remote or need a shovel for the winter or whatever in 2000 im going to a store for that, that 15m of my time each way+parking+less choice.

Lets say i make $50 an hour, and lets say i value my free time at my working rate (i'd argue most people by definition value it more or they'd be working more hours).

Saving me 10m in the store 15m of driving both ways and 2-3m of transit is worth more than most items i purchase.

Amazons solved the last mile problem by having one vehicle bring each item to each home so its marginal cost of delivery is the distance between each home instead of the round trip between home and return that a customer has.

The more items you buy at one store the less valuable this is, which is part of why costco is well served by having such large product sizes.

troyvit• 18 days ago

Saving me 10m in the store 15m of driving both ways and 2-3m of transit is worth more than most items i purchase.

It's the opposite for me. The walk to the store, screwing around in the aisles, dragging my dog into the dressing room, the walk home enjoying the sunset, those things mean so much more than cracking open a box I found on my stoop.

shoeb00m• 17 days ago

Yes, how foolish of Amazon to become one of the world’s biggest retailers by solving last mile delivery. /s

tonymet• 19 days ago

I admired Costco for installing USA-made manhole covers rather than use those made in India, which most municipalities have shifted to for lower cost.

I’m probably the only person who would notice that. Sort of how Steve Jobs explained that a good carpenter cares about the backside of the dresser as much as the front, even if no customer will ever notice.

SoftTalker5• 19 days ago

Thanks for an interesting comment! (No irony intended).

gwbas1c• 19 days ago

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 the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house. (Ignoring the packaging waste for a second,) I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.

lynndotpy2• 19 days ago

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.

claw-el4• 19 days ago

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

linker_in• 19 days ago

But to date it has still not been able to make the conversion away from being an online convenience store, which tells you something important about its model: Amazon is there to fill in the gaps of a dominant mode of goods procurement, not to replace it.

Either we can view single-packaged items as a gap in the goods procurement process, or we remove the means (Amazon) and view it as a forcing function to not have single-packaged items since a certain % of 100 people will start batching before they drive to the store.

rustystump2• 19 days ago

But most people go to Costco for bulk buys. amazon deliveries are almost daily sometimes multiple a day and STILL have the same giant trucks dropping off product at distribution centers.

Loudergood• 19 days ago

Yeah, this argument falls flat on it's face. Of course it's more complex than that.

When I worked from the office, centralized retail was very convenient and hardly added any driving. If you work from home, the opposite is true.

The next revolution would be to standardize reusable packaging, that same daily delivery truck could bring that back. But only government could make that happen.

newaccountman22• 19 days ago

I could imagine Amazon incentivizing reusable containers on their own TBH. If I was living in a house and not an apartment, I could easily imagine putting the Amazon bins back out so the next time I get a delivery, they take those, and we are constantly cycling bins back and forth.

Even environment aside, from a purely self-interested perspective, I would much prefer it to dealing with the recycling Amazon deliveries entail.

ghaff5• 19 days ago

In fairness, Amazon does seem to have improved in this regard. There's less plastic and fewer comically oversized boxes.

Zambyte• 19 days ago

Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.

cyberrock2• 19 days ago

That idea is intriguing but brings up a lot of questions. If I live out in the middle of nowhere, order something but take a long time to open it, when does the Amazon truck come back to take the packaging? If there's a million of us procrastinators, is it really that much better than normal centralized garbage collection? Milk bottle delivery and collection only worked because the product naturally had a time limit, and once home refrigeration took off, the practice went away because people didn't consume on the same schedule.

FWIW most Amazon packages I get nowadays are just heavy paper anyways.

scarab92• 19 days ago

Amazon already delivers to the house next door to yours. The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero. The efficiency of home delivery vastly exceeds people going to the shops themselves, even if they are stopping at multiple shops.

Supermancho• 19 days ago

In the US, most people don't their shopping near the office. In Renton (commute into Seattle), it was commute to and from, then optionally local grocery stores to and from. WFH has dramatically reduced our driving which is a bonus over time saved.

oatmeal1• 19 days ago

The next revolution is zoning reform so it's legal to build shopping people want to do within walking distance of where they live.

bluegatty3• 19 days ago

It's still probably more efficient for you to just drive to the centralized place.

The amount of optimization and process improvements required to 'beat that' will be enormous, like infrastructural change enormous.

Your car is very useful an generalized and adaptable.

So are you.

Only you know what you really want, the nuances of comparison, seeing things real, returning them.

Economies of scale work extremely well for Costco.

'Home Delivery' is the operational argument that does not work very well.

If there were a hyper standard for mailboxes and automated delivery for tons of things - and - everyone bought into the same delivery standard, aka robots to the same warehouses, bringing multiple items to people on the same street - then that starts to work out, but we're a long ways away from that.

Home Delivery - in most situations - is effectively a first world luxury.

FYI - meal delivery depends on loopholes on migration, healthcare, work permits, working conditions that if they were all closed and up to standard - would make it just to costly in many situations.

cromka• 19 days ago

Standardized packaging would be more robust, thus smaller as it wouldn't require filler material to protect the shipped item. Thus, volumetric cost would get lower and if ALL shipping had standardized packaging worldwide, it would probably make sense financially, too.

WhiteOwlLion• 18 days ago

You're assuming working from home automatically makes you far from delivery options. It all depends on your walkability and drivability score. I'm residential, but I have retail delivery options within a few miles. So, the nuance really depends on where things will go from and to.

micromacrofoot4• 19 days ago

I suspect delivery of single items cuts back significantly on trips to the store.

Amazon is also specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale, it impacts their bottom line to the point where they care about the shape of their vehicles. Individuals don't operate on the same scale so these sort of micro-optimizations don't happen.

dragontamer4• 19 days ago

Humans are specifically incentivized to be efficient at scale. They'll tend to shop at loctions on the way home from work, or otherwise cut down on travel times because traffic sucks.

I honestly can imagine that Costco is overall more efficient than Amazon, especially for people who do shop at Costco. If there's no Costco closeby, its more likely that the individual humans will shop elsewhere or somewhere more convenient.

claw-el4• 19 days ago

Also, in the photo, it shows a huge car park. The stores, have to support large empty spaces for parking of those 100 people all driving to the store. I also wonder about the social value of utilizing the land that way.

mock-possum• 19 days ago

Put solar panels over ‘em

colechristensen3• 19 days ago

It's quite efficient use of land. Costco parking lots tend to be full, people tend to leave Costco with full carts and go once or twice a month. Direct to consumer warehouses should be encouraged not discouraged by the environmental social use advocate kinds of people.

It results in fewer miles driven and more being done per mile driven. Each parking space gets more done per parking space. There's less retail worker overhead and the people that do work are paid better and have a higher quality of life.

nobodyandproud• 19 days ago

I have yet to see a Costco not filled to the brim.

georgeburdell• 19 days ago

SoMa Costco has the parking under the store. It’s just economics.

On the other end of the spectrum, the notorious (in the Bay Area) Sunnyvale Costco actually demolished a nearby restaurant just to expand the parking lot.

donatj• 19 days ago

It's a little my complicated than that though, I'm very rarely driving to the store for a single item.

ghaff5• 19 days ago

Not groceries, which I'm typically buying locally anyway. But I'll frequently drive to a store for some item I need.

imoverclocked3• 19 days ago

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 need to end up eventually to optimize costs. You are comparing apples to oranges.

Finally, Costco delivers if you really don't want to leave your house. Now we are back to the same model but with far more flexibility.

troupo2• 19 days ago

There has to be a warehouse somewhere which means there are trucks/trains/planes moving goods around regardless.

Do you want an 18-wheeler truck to do your curb-side deliveries? Or a personal train?

satvikpendem5• 19 days ago

Exact opposite for me, a weekend day is explicitly a Costco day to rack up for the week or month. Anything else I have to do that day is incidental. I assume this is many people's experience too rather than the other way around.

xoxxala• 19 days ago

We live two hours from the closest Costco. We make a day of it once every 45-60 days plus shop at other stores we don’t have in our small town and see some family. We don’t have an Amazon account and maybe order something online once a month. We prefer shopping locally or waiting for Costco Day.

bethekidyouwant2• 19 days ago

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

cortesoft3• 19 days ago

On the other hand, I drive to Target to pick up curbside deliveries quite a few times a month, and I am almost only driving there just for that one trip. I would probably do the same if I was going to Costco rather than Target, I just hate the Costco parking lots in my city so I don't use Costco.

I don't know which of us is the more common scenario. What other sorts of things are you doing in the area when you go to Costo? I simply don't have that many things I have to drive for, so I don't have other errands to combine with my bulk good pickups.

paulddraper• 18 days ago

Finally, Costco delivers

Yes, via a service called Instacart.

You can transform anything the Amazon last-mile model if you want to.

stasomatic• 17 days ago

We go twice a month to fill up and re-up on things while there. Gas is cheapest at Costco. The parking lot is a war zone. Don't go to the one in Davie, FL if you can help it, you will discover road rage you didn't think you had. Many inconsiderate shoppers who pull up to the main entrance and turn their emergency lights on to load the car and block the traffic for minutes. I like Costco, but I despise going there. Fix parking, install EV chargers, canopies.

BorisMelnik• 19 days ago

great for specialized items you want to pay premium for, awful for paper towels

zeroonetwothree3• 19 days ago

When the Amazon truck drives down my street it’s always stopping at 5 houses or so. So the marginal cost of my package is practically zero.

oezi4• 19 days ago

If you have ever watched a deliver truck on their tracking app to crawl its way to you from stop to stop you realize the most optimistic timing is maybe 1 minute per package. Assuming the truck, driver, gas could be operated for 60 USD/hr the marginal cost seems more like 1 USD per package, but likely more.

roysting• 19 days ago

That is not a logical way of locking at it. You can’t simply “practically zero” the not-zero marginal cost, on top of acting like there’s not a fixed cost that is literally the reason you rationalize that there is “practically zero” marginal cost.

It’s equivalent to “I should live in your house for free because the marginal cost is practically zero”

groundzeros2015• 19 days ago

Prices tell this activity is very efficient and not burdensome on society.

dexterdog2• 19 days ago

It might, but I go to Costco every 3-4 weeks. If I depended on Amazon for everything I'd be getting multiple deliveries per day because there is no disincentive to doing that.

IncreasePosts• 19 days ago

Back in the day people weren't driving to Walmart or whatever all the time to pick up a thing they wanted/needed, they would do that if they needed it right away, but if they didn't they would just wait until they were already in the store for a weekly trip, or pop in if they happened to be driving by on some other errand they needed to run

arikrahman• 19 days ago

I never thought about it but doorstep delivery actually saves on emissions in a more optimized route. Interesting takeaway.

alistairSH2• 19 days ago

One issue is Amazon doesn’t appear to optimize for “fewest trucks trips to the block” - we’ll see 4-5 Amazon trucks/couriers on our cul de sac every day (plus USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL). That’s for 10 homes. If Amazon was able to do one truck to the block, that would big a big win for fewer trips/less emissions. Probably.

cm2012• 19 days ago

For the average person an Amazon package has amazingly lower emissions than driving to the store.

mattmaroon5• 19 days ago

Came to say this, it would be hard to handicap this one. Shopping tends to be clustered, so if I’m methodical, I can go fill a car load with a lot of stuff and that might be more economical and environmentally friendly than the vans. But if I’m not, I could certainly see how it would be worse.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it averages out to being better or worse.

_heimdall• 19 days ago

I'd be curious further upstream as well. How would it compare from whatever shared point of entry the two approaches would have, say from coming off a boat at a port to the end user rather than just comparing the last mile.

delichon2• 19 days ago

For small items, add drones and the last miles savings get big.

  Weight of a typical car: 4,000 lbs. 
  Weight of a typical delivery drone: 80 lbs. 
  Typical drone payload: 5 lbs.
  5 mile drone delivery: ~2 kWh
  5 mile car delivery: ~100 kWh

So the breakeven is ~50 such items in one order.

mciancia• 19 days ago

Lol, where did you get those numbers from? xD

Tesla uses something like 15kWh per 100km, so 5 mile drive is something like 1.1kWh

lesostep• 17 days ago

math checks out, assuming typical car is flying

petra2• 19 days ago

Judging Amazon's social value by delivery efficiency is just wrong.

Amazon's biggest benefit is that anything can be sold there. So now more problems in my life could have a solutions I can buy.

As for the delivery? There are more efficient ways to send deliveries. People can pickup deliveries at work or the gas station on their way home.

People don't care. How is that Amazon's fault?

gdiamos• 19 days ago

I wonder if Amazon eventually gets cut out by 3D printing/replicators for imitable objects.

SideQuark• 19 days ago

So you replace a loop that delivers last mile goods to a lot of cars going decently out of their way to the limited places just to pick one item? Surely it’s less miles driven when Amazon does a loop hitting several people right near me than each of us driving farther in total to get our goods.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 19 days ago

Perhaps this is just slightly oversimplified

Amazon goes to great lengths to make purchasing exceedingly easy and fast. And with Prime, customers can buy a single, low-priced item with no shipping costs, cf. the Costco requirement to buy in bulk quantities. As one would expect, this convenience and facilitation leads to more purchases. It also results in more packaging, more waste, more emissions, etc.

This was detailed in a 2024 Netflix documentary that interviewed a former Amazon VP who was fired for her environmental activism

https://www.netflix.com/title/81554996

She disclosed, brace yourself, that Amazon encourages people to buy stuff they do not need

https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/former-amazon-employee-b...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/amazon-settles-with-employee...

Unlike Costco, Amazon does not disclose data on its environmental impact, e.g., carbon emissions. It's possible Amazon's impact is less than Costco's, Costco's data shows its impact is relatively severe, but if that were true, then why not share the data

Is driving to a warehouse, retrieving items in bulk, paying for them and driving the items home, i.e., offline shopping, as easy as placing an order on Amazon

Of course some HN reply will say "yes", implying that the former Amazon VP's story is false

Let the reader decide who to beileve

bombcar3• 19 days ago

If you don’t think Costco encourages people to buy things they don’t need you’ve never shopped at Costco.

Anyway, my 55 gallon drum of mayonnaise is starting to go bad, got to make a run.

phil212• 19 days ago

You know how Costco constantly moves some of the usual “staples” they have around the store randomly?

And how Costco can never be relied on having the same item outside of those core products every time you go to the store? Better buy it now since next month they may no longer have it and you need to wait 6mo before you see it again - if ever.

That’s on purpose to induce you to wander the store more and “discover” items for impulse purchasing.

Costco absolutely optimizes as much as it can to induce impulse buys. Pretending they don’t is a weird take. Amazon might make it more frictionless, but every retailer out there is doing this sort of thing. I kind of prefer amazons way of doing it since it doesn’t introduce friction to my buying experience and waste my time.

Costco is also world renowned as a meme for peak American style consumerism. I say this as an executive member who also buys a lot off Amazon. They are just yin and yang of the retailer experience. I don’t really see one as more evil or better than the other - just totally opposite business models.

zerobees• 19 days ago

Cuts both ways. When I go to the grocery store, I buy 30-40 items at once. When I buy them Amazon with Prime delivery, I usually order stuff piecemeal, in the heat of the moment. Sometimes, Amazon will consolidate two orders in a single package. Sometimes, they will ship a single order in three boxes that arrive in different trucks.

s0rce• 19 days ago

But there are 100+ items for other people on the route on each delivery truck each day. So maybe better than individuals driving to the store. If you don't drive to the store that will for sure be better but thats abnormal in america.

jasondigitized• 19 days ago

How many items does the average consumer buy when they go to the store? It's not one.

thephyber• 19 days ago

It’s much more complicated than that.

In a society where everybody is already driving to school, work, food, shopping medical appointments, gas stations, kids sports, etc this is just a marginal additional trip for the consumer.

Having redundant logistics companies (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, WalMart, Uber, etc) all making deliveries optimizing for something other than _minimum distance traveled_ means they aren’t optimizing for the same thing the consumer would.

Also, there is the game theory aspect. When a consumer mentally thinks they can just make a $5 purchase on Amazon and get it delivered the next day “for free”, they are less likely to take care to shop in bulk / batch their purchases. Nobody goes to CostCo for a $5 trip (except for the weirdos who go there just for the hot dog / pizza lunch). I personally don’t like the hassle of CostCo for less than a $200 shopping trip.

kbenson• 19 days ago

Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house.

Whether you see that statement and read it as "obviously the delivery truck is better" or "obviously, going myself is better" is going to be primarily based on how far away from Costco you live, and how much you buy when you go.

I live a bit more than a mile away from Costco. I often buy 25-60 items, for each of the about weekly trips. There's enough large items that a normal delivery truck that could safely navigate and stop often in residential areas would have no change of fitting 100 people's purchases into it in a way to be easily offloaded (just the toilet paper and paper toweling would take up significant space). It's much less wasteful on almost all metrics for me to go to Costco. That's before we get into the fact that most of what I'm buying is produce and other food stuffs I wouldn't want shipped for worry they would spend longer than I wanted out of refrigeration.

If I lived an hour away that calculation turns out entirely differently, at least as long as there's enough people close by with purchases to gain efficiencies of travel.

randycupertino2• 19 days ago

I think online ordering is more wasteful because people order the wrong thing and don't know what sizes fit so they often buy multiple sizes and return or toss the ones that don't fit. This article where they buy a pallet crate of returned amazon clothing is pretty crazy- it was all polyester crap!

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/mystery-amazon-pa...

I saw commentary from a garment designer that there is enough clothing currently unused on earth to clothe the entire next six generations even if we completely stopped all production now.

At least in person people can try the stuff on and ensure it fits.

UltraSane• 19 days ago

Costco's trademark is pretty large minimum size containers which reduces transportation costs.

smashah• 19 days ago

Carbon offset credits bought by Bezos' Yacht holdco.

kelnos2• 19 days ago

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.

didntknowyou• 19 days ago

costco buyers typically buy in bulk and fill a pantry in one go. i doubt one truck can fill 100 pantry. maybe a few products each

phil212• 18 days ago

Costco can only fill maybe half my pantry because they don’t carry everything I like to eat or use regularly.

They do a form of cherry picking the easy high volume stuff, and let other retailers deal with the harder more expensive low volume products.

Certainly useful to optimize their bit of the supply chain, but they only can really account for maybe a quarter of the food items we eat, which accounts for a third or maybe half of total product volume any given month. The rest needs to come from additional store runs or Amazon.

messh• 18 days ago

The argument is that people driving will each buy a lot though, not a single toothbrush. So 100 people driving will deliver as many trucks and would drive much less overall

hibikir• 18 days ago

It depends on the lived environment. In my US suburban house, a 20 minute drive from the warehouse/Costco, absolutely. In the Spanish town I am in, where I can do 10 errands in an hour ln foot, as basically every street level space is a store, and streets are themselves narrow, Amazon's logistics advantage loses to the Asian bazaar.

alephnerd3• 18 days ago

Costco's Spain operation is primarily for logistics and product test, not market penetration.

Costco usually tests suppliers' packaging and logistics for products at their ExAmerica warehouses before deciding on exporting that vendor's product to NAM.

This is how Costco became the largest alcohol exporter in Europe, why most frozen fish at Costco is soured from Iceland, and how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean goods and vendors are tested before selling at Costcos with large Asian American populations.

underlipton3• 18 days ago

It should be, "One delivery truck drives to several manned neighborhood drop-off points a couple of times a week, and 100 people walk to those points and walk home with their packages." Central distribution points that you have to drive to are as untenable long-term as everything being delivered individually.

Frankly, this goes for food delivery, too.

elfly• 18 days ago

I have to assume that unless the cost of buying at costco and driving back home is higher than buying it all at amazon and having it delivered.

The total price + driving cost is a good proxy for how efficient the whole process is; amazon will somehow include in the price somewhere the delivery home, and both companies largely won't subsidize their whole business method.

Social value is a little trickier; a lot of people benefit much from delivery, but in the end people probably don't buy everything from amazon or costco anyway.

alsobrsp• 17 days ago

I live in a smallish city, we have a lot of stores I can shop at and a Costco within a 30 minute drive. For me, incremental marginal cost of the delivery is negligible compared to me driving to a couple stores, not finding what I need, and still ordering online anyway. In general, I go to stores to get something that I know they have, not because they have "pallets of goods"

0ckpuppet• 19 days ago

nothing I buy on amazon is available at costo

yawnxyz• 19 days ago

I like the idea that Costco and Amazon are diametric opposites — for example I couldn't shop at Costco for a very very long time because I lived in the city and didn't have a car.

Amazon and other delivery companies (e.g. Weee) came to the rescue. For a while I lived close enough to a Costco for a 20 minute bike, so I'd load up my gym bag full of food - even then Costco is not ideal because there's only so much you can carry (one thing of meat, one thing of eggs, some veggies).

For those that think Costco are the uber-shopping experience are missing that they both provide very opposite consumer experiences. (Yes Costco has shipping, and same day shipping, but it hits different from Amazon).

This is also opposite to corner store grocery systems where you can pop in at any moment to get fresh fruit, a wider choice, smaller quantities at more flexible hours etc.

---

tldr - what I think I'm saying is that Costco is the perfect "suburban" purchasing experience - great if you tick the boxes that you have a big family (otherwise why do you need a 60 pack of toilet paper), a big house (where do you fit all that toilet paper), a car (to transport the toilet paper), etc.

anyone who don't tick those boxes can't really take advantage of any of that - so while Costco is amazing, it definitely shouldn't be the only way to shop.

kfarr• 18 days ago

Agree, Costco succeeds at externalizing last mile costs by offloading it to suburbanites who view it as a sunk cost. Similar to uber/lyft drivers doing their own fleet management.

SpicyLemonZest2• 19 days ago

I nodded along to much of the article, but I really think it's wrong to see this as a model for public grocery stores. The analysis is glossing over a lot of the key factors that Costco uses to make its logicstics model work. You can't buy small quantities, so the staff don't need to spend much time breaking down pallets; you're not allowed in the building without a membership, so there's little need to invest in behavior policing or loss prevention.

fragmede4• 19 days ago

you're not allowed in the building without a membership

I wonder why other stores like Target don't do that as well. Beyond the obvious, it just seems like the way to go.

SpicyLemonZest2• 19 days ago

Walmart does, under the Sam's Club brand, and there's a handful of other regional ones. Conventional wisdom is that the market reached saturation in the 90s. There's a lot of people who just don't want to pay a membership fee.

furyofantares3• 19 days ago

This is about 80% spot on, but the last 20% fails to mention that you can avoid the in store experience if it isn't for you, and in fact get the stuff you want delivered to your door in a short period of time, using services like instacart. Costco even partners directly with instacart for same day delivery. You can use your membership to get same day delivery shopping on costco's website and they will use instacart to fulfill it for you. Or you can use instacart directly, in which case you don't even need a membership yourself.

borski5• 19 days ago

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

SoftTalker5• 19 days ago

But saving the cost and time of you driving there yourself, which if you're honest is probably worth the delivery fee.

furyofantares3• 19 days ago

Sure, although personally the comparison would be to delivery from other stores.

abawany• 19 days ago

Yep, around 18% higher not including tip, in my estimate. HEB (local Texas grocery chain featured here a few days ago) puts in just a 3% margin for pickup or delivery (before tip.) Walmart and Sams have no special delivery/pickup margin but instead charge delivery fees that can be avoided by membership levels or order amount thresholds.

drudoff• 19 days ago

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.

thijson3• 18 days ago

Just got a window air conditioner on the Costco web site, delivered to the home. That was 25% cheaper than in the store.

insane_dreamer5• 18 days ago

I honestly like the shopping experience at Costco -- there aren't a million variants of the same thing to choose from, you find really good deals sometimes (on already good prices), they have new random and sometimes good things all the time (I'll sometimes spontaneously buy, then confirm with my wife at home and if not, return on our next trip), and my kids go to the food court and enjoy the pizza and hot dogs that are decent quality and low priced. We go every ~2 weeks.

forrestthewoods• 19 days ago

Costco is way too damn crowded. There needs to be 2x or 3x the number of stores. It is a great deal. But an utterly miserable shopping experience.

klvino• 19 days ago

Comparatively, as I have both a Costco and Sam's Club memberships, the floorplans on Costco stores are much more efficient. Both stores get crowded but Sams suffers from poor design which makes traffic worse. Although, Sams does compensate with a smoother checkout experience.

cube002• 19 days ago

Costco checkouts are a nightmare, a giant queue on one side reaching back to the deli while people try to "zip merge" in from the other side in several smaller queues.

At one point they had the pallets at the front aligned so you could just queue behind a single register and then they changed it so the pallets at the front form a long wall facing the checkouts forcing you to join the checkout queues from either side.

pizzafeelsright2• 19 days ago

That's because of "them". If they weren't here.

Them is a universal variable you already injected.

zeroonetwothree3• 19 days ago

Part of the reason their prices are low is they are very efficient at using their total hours open.

I often just get it delivered to my house to avoid the crowds though.

rr808• 19 days ago

I dont like Costco, it epitomizes American over-consumption. Parking lot overflowing with oversized SUVs with people loading up oversized trolleys with food from food corporations to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.

anon70002• 19 days ago

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

esskay• 19 days ago

Not sure that counters their point...or even relates to it.

SoftTalker5• 19 days ago

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.

khriss• 19 days ago

If that's the only thing you can find to dislike about Costco, then they are indeed the saints of the retail world.

gustavus• 19 days ago

Because of the large quantities my family with 4 children is able to go to Costco once a month and purchase almost everything our family will need for the entire month this means we only need to go to the store one or two additional times during the month for things like milk and bread.

Saying that everyone eating there is indulging in overconsumption is a ridiculous overgeneralization. Not to mention people that are planning parties, bbqs, get togethers etc. Just because you can't think of any reason for people to need large portion sizes besides overconsumption does not mean others are so limited in their imagination.

skeeter20203• 19 days ago

We have a larger family and Costco combined with access to a decent grocery store that's within walking distance is great: get deals on larger quantity staples and milk, eggs and bread several times a week.

pizzafeelsright2• 19 days ago

Enforcing appropriate sized consumption is a terrifying thought.

dghlsakjg2• 19 days ago

If you don't like American over-consumption you can go to Carrefour and try out French overconsumption where people load up oversized trollies with corporate food to take to their SUVs in the overflowing parking lot... in France.

Are you under the impression that it is a uniquely American trait to have a bigger house than you need, more car than you need, and a penchant for corporate food? Over-consumption is human nature, not an American invention. America just happens to be able to afford it on a scale that most countries can't. Go to the poorer countries on earth, and you will still see people over-consuming if they have the means.

Maybe it isn't even overconsumption. Maybe it's just a different way of getting things done. Do you think that the people that buy Costco sized packs of toilet paper wipe their ass unnecessarily? Or maybe they just make fewer trips to the store to buy toilet paper.

oezi4• 19 days ago

Since toilet paper is mostly non-perishable it shouldn't really matter, right? But for anything that goes bad there is also a tipping point where you bought too much and have things go to waste.

rpdillon3• 19 days ago

Over-consumption? That doesn't follow. I sustain my family on Costco, going once a month or so, but have to feed four people, including two teenagers that consume way more than 2000 calories a day. You keep using the word "oversized", but that assumes the SUV, the fridge, the trolley are not suited for purpose. But they are!

I think what you're really critiquing is people who don't shop frequently, and therefore buy in bulk.

oezi4• 19 days ago

I think the poster is indeed criticizing bulk shopping. I would then to agree that shopping in bulk makes it easier to overprovision or to have things go to waste or being bought superfluously. I am also not sure about it being cheaper in total because my experience with bulk sellers is that they achieve their profit margins by their product mix, so selling you some cheap items as loss leaders or discount items and recouping on others that you buy at the same time. Doing weekly shopping trips at different supermarkets can counteract that by letting you buy more various promotional items.

Of course it comes down to how much personal time you then have to spend on shopping to drive your bill down.

Amezarak2• 19 days ago

to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.

It's really awesome to have plenty of food storage, with extra and oversized refrigerators, and a deep freeze too.

I keep mine full of vegetables and beef - I have a whole beef slaughtered annually.

Can you explain why this is a bad thing or why it means overconsumption? Why is the stereotypical "European" method of going to the store every day superior to me spending ~10 minutes once every two to three weeks to go to Wal-Mart? What do you do when there are shocks, like weather events, power outages (my generator will tide my fridges over, but will take down a store POS terminal), civic unrest, or pandemics? Or if you're just plain busy? I really appreciate being able to be fully stocked (with rotating backups so I am never actually out) of basically all foods and home staples (like TP). What's the downside?

garbagewoman• 19 days ago

Minor point: you have a whole cow slaughtered annually.

titanomachy2• 19 days ago

There’s nothing wrong with your way, it’s just a different lifestyle based on how dense of a community you live in. People living in apartments in dense cities don’t have room for a whole cow in their apartment, but there’s probably a few grocery stores in walking distance, so they pick up food more often. Living in a suburb means that you probably don’t walk by a grocery store on your way home from work, and you probably have some space, so it makes sense to shop less frequently and in bulk. These are both valid ways to live that satisfy different sets of preferences.

tomcam• 19 days ago

What sizes of SUV, trolleys, fridges, and storage basements would meet with your approval?

mschuster912• 19 days ago

Amazon often negotiates delayed payment terms with suppliers, leaning on them to allow payment windows longer than the thirty-day industry norm.

Oh how I would wish for this crap to be banned. By law. Simply put, at the scale of "you are even allowed to sell at large volume to Amazon, Walmart, ..." you aren't on equal footing with Amazon. You are subservient.

Contract law still builds on the idea that b2b contracts are made between roughly equal parties because that was how business was done back 200 years ago, and thus there's much less legal protection than for b2c contracts.

This needs to change, and the sooner the better.

zeroonetwothree3• 19 days ago

Why? Then we’d have to pay more to buy stuff.

mschuster912• 19 days ago

Yeah, and? Redistribute all the wealth that goes to the stonk market to the people. Henry Ford figured that out a century ago - for a healthy economy, you need people to be able to afford stuff!

fragmede4• 19 days ago

Because Amazon and Walmart, as the giants they are, aren't hurting for cash. If you're a small time vendor or buyer, those 30 days could be the difference between eating tonight or going hungry. Meanwhile. Amazon and Walmart could just pay it out of their reserves early and Jeff Bezos isn't going to go hungry. Also, why would prices go up?

lowbloodsugar• 19 days ago

Personal convenience vs societal cost? Let’s have both ffs. Fucking luddites. Same kind of folks arguing against AI because it will take their shitty low paying job. No post-scarcity future for us! We want to work in debt servitude forever!

seanmcdirmid2• 19 days ago

Amazon is the anti-Costco also. We thought about it, and it doesn't really make sense to get a Costco membership when we can lean into Prime more. It doesn't help that we live in a fairly urban area (Ballard in Seattle) and Costco's is pretty suburban.

I'd much rather order some heavy stuff from Amazon to have delivered and walk to the local grocery store for everything else.

icantevenhold2• 19 days ago

As someone who finds ordering groceries obscene what kind of heavy stuff do you get that you need to order in?

seanmcdirmid2• 19 days ago

Generally the bulk things I would have gotten at Costco, which isn't much for our family, so mostly protein drinks, olive oil, and so on. They come in pretty big cases, and it definitely seems like the heaviest thing the Amazon driver is delivering that day.

We still drive to the Chinese grocery for a big bag of rice every once in awhile.

random3• 19 days ago

You can order from Costco on Instacart here in the Bay Area. This said, there's a lot of quality stuff at Costco (besides their huge wines collection) that you can't find anywhere else.

gleenn• 19 days ago

A major upside to Costco is you can actually see stuff and you also can walk out of the store same-day. Also I never ever worry about the counterfeit and/or low-quality crap you inevitably get from Amazon. And if Costco sells me something crappy, I drag it back in and don't even have to start up the printer (it's a zombie at this point). Costco has a running rule that they never charge above 10% in profits so I know I'm getting a good deal too.

skeeter20203• 19 days ago

What about the price-quality aspect? Costco blows Amazon away here IME. Plus there's the fact that someone can become an employee of Costco out of high school and spend their entire career there, with decent wages and benefits. That's not happening at an Amazon Prime fulfillment warehouse.

earljwagner• 19 days ago

There's another reason for Costco's appeal and trust among members: Kirkland Signature. Costco mandates that any KS product must be at least 10% better in quality than the leading national brand it replaces and/or cost less.

That further helps simplify shopping and decision-making and resolves the paradox of choice. Instead of having to sort through a wide variety of unknown brands on Amazon, they just go with KS.

https://www.thestreet.com/retail/costco-reveals-why-kirkland...

khurs2• 19 days ago

All the comments appear to be US centric, but Costco is also in other countries. So to tell you about the UK:

Here membership is unusual in that it isn't technically open to everyone, it's business and certain professions: https://www.costco.co.uk/membership but in reality anyone who wants to join can find a way.

Also no mention in the article of non-food. In UK Costco is known for special offers on electrical and white good and more. And cheap car tyres iirc

In the UK not everyone drives like USA and Costco's are few and far between, so that limits who shops there. So a niche player compared to the Supermarkets for consumer shopping.

And people also have smaller homes compared to USA and smaller families maybe (or smaller portion sizes...!), and Costco here is more geared towards selling in bulk, and to corner shops and other small businesses. It's more of a hybrid Wholesaler.

doginasuit• 19 days ago

That's interesting, what do people have to do to get membership?

fmajid3• 19 days ago

Have a limited company or be in a baroque list of occupations:

https://www.costco.co.uk/membership-goldstar-questions

frollogaston6• 19 days ago

USA Costco does also have a business wholesale side

rahimnathwani2• 19 days ago

FWIW you can use your US membership in the UK.

I ordered a dishwasher from Costco UK last week.

thijson3• 18 days ago

I used mine in Iceland too. It was one of the cheaper places to eat there. Still expensive though compared to the USA. I heard that the Costco hot dog and a soda is still $1.50 in Hawaii, that's a bargain.

5555624• 18 days ago

Here membership is unusual in that it isn't technically open to everyone, it's business and certain professions:

Price Club, a Costco predecessor was the same way.

In the early 1990s, Walmart (Sam's Club) wanted to merge with Costco. Costco said no and merged with Price Club.

adi_kurian3• 19 days ago

If the stats in this are true, Amazon’s warehouse workforce turns over at 25 times the rate of Costco’s workforce, for almost the same wage. That is remarkable.

ggm• 19 days ago

Time and motion/Taylorism is an anti pattern for staff retention. There is more to work than pay. Being humiliated and hassled over pee breaks for instance.

vayup• 19 days ago

And yet, Amazon Prime is inspired by Costco membership.

cisrockandroll• 19 days ago

I would love to hear more about Costco's engineering culture. The fact they are still running/modernizing/supporting AS400 infrastructure and RPGLE applications is remarkable. I have to imagine that they have a unique devops model internally to keep that alive; especially facing a dwindling talent market.

mattmaroon5• 19 days ago

Costcos tech stack is frankly unconscionably bad. It’s the one way in which Sam’s Club crushes them.

There’s no reason they couldn’t do basically all of the good things mentioned in this article plus have a functional website, let me scan and pay with my phone in store, have a handheld scanner at each register, etc.

ssl-33• 19 days ago

a functional website

It works for me. Am I holding it wrong?

let me scan and pay with my phone in store

That's already beginning to happen: https://www.cheapism.com/costco-scan-and-go-technology/

have a handheld scanner at each register

I've seen handheld scanners at each Costco register that I've ever paid attention to.

mattmaroon5• 18 days ago

Costcos give a scanner to the person running the self checkouts, not to the customer, so you have to wait for them to come over. They are very attentive usually but still. (Perhaps this isn’t the case at all of them but I’ve seen it several times in various states.)

Their website/app makes it impossible to just see what’s in store at what price. Go search for coca cola and I see the price to have it delivered (much higher than in store) and a link to instacart. No pickup options or even prices.

On Sams Club’s website I can see that in store price and order it for pickup.

Again, Costco could keep the things we all like and just have basic 2018 functionality, it isn’t hard.

bell-cot4• 18 days ago

Very few people are shopping at Costco for their tech stack.

And maybe it's just their talented/experienced/numerous staff, but my in-store experience with their tech is as good as it gets. Stuff just works, and works quickly.

mattmaroon5• 18 days ago

Ok, load the app and search for Heinz ketchup and tell me what it would cost to go get some in store.

You can’t. You can only get delivery pricing. They don’t have the basic functionality every store has had for a decade.

Go to self check-out and grab a scanner for your heavy items, which they sell many of. You can’t, they don’t have them, you have to wait for the attendant to get to you with it. (They’re generally good at their job but it’s still annoying if you’re in a rush.)

Sam’s Club is as good as it gets tech-wise, in-store and out. They even have AI that allows the exit door receipt checker to skip checking people so you don’t get stuck in a line waiting for someone to verify you paid for everything.

bilsbie• 19 days ago

Surprisingly Amazon is actually pretty constrained. There are usually only 3-10 versions of a given product but sold by hundreds of different resellers.

When I was shopping for a water distiller there was only one large one but branded for ten different Chinese companies. (And They all had the same dangerous flaw where water could spill on the electrical plug.)

christina97• 19 days ago

This post seems quite far fetched. Amazon is well aware of the paradox of choice, and the vast majority of UI changes I have seen recently are exactly those that guide and reinforce you to buy one option, without the decision paralysis. Items are not homogeneous, and it is obvious that they try to concentrate purchases to a smaller set of SKUs to reap the same benefits as Costco. It’s simply that Amazon can additionally support the long tail of SKUs with a heterogeneous warehouse system (and heterogeneous profit margins).

On the delivery side: US suburbia is just in general not a sustainable solution. Delivery is just one way in which it bites. Somewhere like NYC, the amortized delivery cost (internalized or externalized) is very low (and opposite to Costcos which require a drive to an inconvenient location).

The bit about agents doing your shopping is falling for the same trap as crypto people thinking NFTs will kill Ticketmaster. These have never been technical problems: the APIs don’t exist for nontechnical reasons.

titanomachy2• 19 days ago

Somehow Costco managed to get their store right in the middle of downtown Vancouver. They put it under some condo towers.

Grombobulous2• 19 days ago

That sounds like they might have leveraged housing development incentives. In a lot of cities with high housing costs you get tax breaks for investing in residential properties.

I don’t know if Vancouver has any of these off the top of my head.

And what you’re saying is true as a generality, that big box stores often fit in at least some parking in dense areas. I have found that grocery stores and big box stores do the most parking subsidies especially when they expect their customers to be buying a lot of bulky items. They seem to frequently have free or deeply discounted validated parking in underground garages.

Maybe not in Manhattan or anything but in many other large cities with high land value in downtown areas.

thijson3• 18 days ago

I know that I trust products from Costco being good quality, I'm less likely to regret my purchase decision. I've been burned with stuff I got on Amazon being crappy.

Grombobulous2• 19 days ago

I think the article misses discussing Costco’s growing online business. There are a ton of Costco items that you can only buy online or that are sold in a different way online, and they’re often doing so with included shipping very similar to Amazon’s business model.

The shipping is slower, but it’s an interesting part of their business, and I encourage Costco members to try it out. You’d be surprised at the quantity of things you really don’t need to go to the warehouse for.

hammock• 19 days ago

“Costco is the anti-Amazon” Haha OK

Just wait until Amazon turns some of its warehouses into Costco-style retail stores…

arealaccount2• 19 days ago

Oh man we went to Costco today to purchase a membership, was finally convinced after all of the $1.50 hot dog memes

It was a used car tier hard sell to get the “executive” membership, after saying no a half dozen times literally everything we said was an invite to highly recommended the damn executive card.

Then they offer $20 back on your membership if you sign up for auto pay (and install the costco app on your phone and give up your email and phone). But you need a card, and it can’t be Amex, Mastercard, or Discover, so of course the very highly recommendation is to get the Costco Visa. It has no annual fee and you get %2 back, and even if you don’t spend enough you'll get a minimum of $65 back, which is the difference between the regular card and the executive. So the executive card is basically a no brainer.

Well we couldn’t get the $20 back coupon and at this point im feeling like Costco isn’t as customer friendly as the internet says, but it turns out we can actually use discover (debit only) on the phone app. Even though honestly the executive card pays for itself, also the Costco visa has no annual fee you can just get it and never use it.

I ended up getting the plain gold star card, got some free samples and was thoroughly impressed with the $1.50 hot dog. But I think I hate this store, onboarding was such a shady process.

_RPM• 19 days ago

You can sign up online, which you should have done, the guy you were taking was doing his job.

arealaccount2• 18 days ago

I understand the guy and his manager he called over for the hard sell were doing their jobs, that’s exactly the point.

brailsafe4• 19 days ago

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, and buy vehicles that will fit it.

For me, I'll join a friend who has a membership from time to time, but I'll only get chicken breasts, a rotisserie, maybe frozen fruit if the price is competitive, and... soap; everything else is just noise and/or extra calories that I wouldn't have bought anywhere else but happens to fit in the industrial-size cart and usually isn't a substantially better price, or it's just not a good offering. I could buy greek Yogurt cups, but really I don't want that brand or the lemon or lime ones, so I'm paying marginally less to enjoy half of them. I could buy salsa, but unless it's a party, I have no need for a year's supply. It's just a lot and it's probably kind of agreeable. Also the blankets, they're alright.

The small selection of things I get are the few items—as the probably AI author suggests—that I'd either buy anyway in smaller quantities or just don't have opinions about. The one time I actually did have a membership, I'd find myself working backwards from it to justify to expense. I let Costco borrow my money and to get it back I'd need to exploit their good deals, but ultimately they just made a killing off of me filling my cart with arbitrary bullshit stuff.

whall62• 19 days ago

Agree with you on most angles but with a twist: the suburbanite should be seen not as the adult shopping, but as the children that the suburbanite is most likely shopping for. I’m certainly not going to be picky about the Greek yogurt when half of it will end up uneaten (or on the floor).

frollogaston6• 19 days ago

Costco stuff is quantity and quality

emtel• 19 days ago

I’m guessing you don’t have kids. My membership pays for itself just for the savings on string cheese alone. Same for eggs.

TulliusCicero2• 19 days ago

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.

brailsafe4• 18 days ago

The convenience, anecdotally, largely comes from stocking up on a big buy and not having to carry anything futher than from the cart to the car and from the car to the house. This is also done at any other big box store, but Costco does it the best, because the savings cones from the lack of selection and the sheer size of the carts and items.

the-grump• 18 days ago

As a member, the gas savings pay the annual fee, and I get my staples from Costco every few months. Peanut butter, paper towels, TP, tissues, and sometimes mushrooms and washed greens.

Everything else I'd rather get from my local grocery stores.

testfoobar2• 18 days ago

"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, and buy vehicles that will fit it."

This is not reflective of the Costco shoppers I know and the place Costco fits in their lives.

Bi-Rite and Erewhon or Citarella and Eataly are not Costco competitors.

To understand the appeal of Costco to suburban families, you have to understand their caloric needs. Costco is the best solution if you need to buy 48 eggs and 4 gallons of milk a week along with 8lbs of chicken, 4lbs of turkey, and pounds of broccoli, green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes, onions accompanied with apples, peaches, mangos, avocados, blueberries, strawberries and oranges.

brailsafe4• 18 days ago

To understand the appeal of Costco to suburban families, you have to understand their caloric needs. Costco is the best solution if you need to buy 48 eggs and 4 gallons of milk a week along with 8lbs of chicken, 4lbs of turkey, and pounds of broccoli, green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes, onions accompanied with apples, peaches, mangos, avocados, blueberries, strawberries and oranges.

Isn't this effectively what I said? Admittedly I could have gone a bit far in suggesting they don't have a varied sense of taste, but what I meant was that it's not important to them to apply it to groceries, if they're a Costco member.

Quantity and convenience

quacker• 18 days ago

I don’t need “a varied sense of taste” to save money on gas and non-perishables.

I don’t need “a varied sense of taste” to budget and do simple math to determine the membership is worth it.

Babies don’t need “a varied sense of taste” to use diapers purchased from Costco in bulk at a great price.

Do I lack a “varied sense of taste” when I buy ingredients from Costco, like chicken thighs and rice and eggs and olive oil, and cook them at home?

brailsafe4• 18 days ago

I went a bit far in saying there's a "missing" sense of taste, but did mean that it's not important to apply it when buying huge amounts of groceries, so I agree.

What I was thinking of more broadly was the cookie cutter nature of many suburbs. You get a stamped out template of a neighborhood with the same franchises. Houses over here, parking lot over there.

insane_dreamer5• 18 days ago

Costco is a must if you have teenage boys :)

the lack of choices for similar products is a huge plus for me - speeds up the shopping process considerably, and their curation is pretty good

kittikitti• 19 days ago

I think Costco is good, but it's vastly overhyped. Comparing the two is just ridiculous. Having only 4,000 SKU's and thinking less choice is good is brainrotted. Costco shoppers are annoyingly conformist.

Costco is an exploitative mega-corporation and Amazon is too. Ask a Costco enthusiast and they will say they do it out of the goodness of their heart. It's really annoying and makes me completely avoid Costco. Please, tell me again how you think Costco hotdogs were invented by Jesus Christ and how you love guzzling down their wieners.

kulahan4• 19 days ago

You should look up choice paralysis if you think that less choice being good is somehow "'brainrotted'".

hahahaa3• 19 days ago

I agree IKEA is my cathedral. Aldi Süd is my shrine.

VladVladikoff• 19 days ago

I really don’t understand why people are so passionate about Costco. Every time I try to shop for items there, it is always cheaper elsewhere. Perhaps this is just Canada vs USA, but Canadians are extremely passionate about Costco too. A good example I saw recently was toilet paper. Their cheapest 30 pack was $30, when I can get basically the same product for $20 at Food Basics. But it’s not just one item, it’s every item in the store, there is always a better deal elsewhere. I honestly believe that people are suffering from mass delusion, and thinking they are getting a good deal “because bulk” without actually doing price comparisons. The only exception I’ve ever found for this was car tires.

narag• 19 days ago

I just realized that I use more different kind of stores and transportation to shop than ever. I walk for groceries, ride the motorbike to malls for monthly or yearly buys like clothing or light electronics, take the metro to specialized stores for heavier items and buy online hard-to-find or high-margin-elsewhere stuff. Also online buys are seldom delivered home, but to a nearby convenience store because work hours match delivery hours.

Thinking of changing this distribution is highly disturbing because of time wasted, much more limited options and huge price differences. Of course YMMV depending on location, Madrid here... the world the article describes is totally alien to me.

culi3• 19 days ago

I've rarely lived somewhere where I can't bike to a grocery store within 10 minutes. It's definitely something I look out for when picking a place to live. I can't imagine having to drive every single time and I dread the few times I do have to get in a car to get something

hmxrye• 19 days ago

AWS enterprise VA-1 outage regularly secure DNS.

B. F. Skinner's Utopian Vision: Behind and Beyond Walden Two

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2778813/

sholladay• 19 days ago

I understand the appeal, but let’s be honest. Costco is designed for rich people who think they are frugal. You drive your big SUV there to load up on months worth of food and goods, which you can only do because you have a big house with enough storage for all of it. And who cares if some of it goes bad because you can always go back for more and hey it was so cheap anyway. You even pay a membership for the privilege.

whall62• 19 days ago

I’m not sure you have to be that rich to pay the $300 per year membership to buy food at loss leading prices. The bulk sizing of everything at Costco is overblown anyways. I wish it was bigger

AstroJetson• 19 days ago

Membership is only $65 a year and I save more than that on diapers. So it pretty easy to cover the fee.

cavoirom• 19 days ago

I think average familiy could do better at financing so that they can affort to plan for 1 month or more on groceries. For me, it's not about rich, it's about planning, I must know exactly what I need before I go there. It save time and but stability, I have at least 1 month buffer on common goods shortage.

probablycorey• 19 days ago

46% of Costco shoppers are middle class (earning $40k-$125k) and 33% are upper class and according to market research companies.

Membership is $65.

You don't need an SUV to shop at Costco, it is easy to load the groceries into a sedan.

kulahan4• 19 days ago

If you think "has an SUV and can buy food in advance" == "rich", then the billionaires truly have scrambled your brain.

inigyou2• 19 days ago

We don't know from which perspective they're speaking. They might live in a dense European city in an apartment without a car and without parking, and with a supermarket 10 minute's walk away.

insane_dreamer5• 19 days ago

I go for the $1.50 hotdogs

(just kidding, but they are the best priced hotdogs anywhere! smart move by Costco even if it loses money on them)

culi3• 19 days ago

I know it's not your point, but the idea that SUVs have more cargo space is a myth. They are large cars with really thick hulls but they do not compete with station wagons, minivans, etc when it comes to cargo space

https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/buying-a-car/measured-c...

moviet• 19 days ago

Has Amazon ever tried a curated, low-SKU section of the website? I guess that’s just the “Overall Pick.”

For that is a large appeal of Costco. If I need a blanket, I can visit a Costco and buy their softest blanket with no hesitation. It will be around $20. If it’s bad, they have the most generous return policy.

hahahaa3• 19 days ago

Biz idea for you. Make that as an external site using Amazon associate.

pandaman2• 18 days ago

Costco is not only curating the selection: most products you buy there are created specifically for Costco, even if it's not the "Kirkland" brand, it's an SKU you cannot find elsewhere. Amazon would need to figure out the process of creating such products first and I see it's been trying: there are "amazon basics" brand products and even house brands ("Denali", I think, is Amazon's tool brand). The problem is that unlike Costco, Amazon cannot offer much to the suppliers of such products. Costco gives a limited shelf space in their high traffic stores in exchange for a discount and warranty. What can Amazon? Only thing I see is "amazon basics" being a bit more valuable than the brands like GOOLOO or MEPTY.

James_K• 19 days ago

Sad that we don't see more high praise of simple things. Not exciting enough, I guess.

aabajian• 19 days ago

I don't think anyone has mentioned the obvious middle ground: PO Boxes at USPS post offices. Nearly every town and city in the USA has a post office. Instead of driving packages to individual's homes or having businesses deliver to their specific warehouses, the middle ground is to deliver everything to the USPS offices.

toast0• 19 days ago

UPS, Fedex, and Amazon all use USPS for some last mile deliveries. It's usually a little less when using UPS and Fedex; not sure if Amazon bills less for it because I use prime shipping so the cost is hidden.

cube002• 19 days ago

It embodies the precise opposite of everything imagined by the e-commerce futurists

Costco do plenty of online only offers, partner with Doordash/Instacart, even sell holiday packages so I'm not sure how the author arrives at the conclusion they're at the "precise opposite of everything imagined by the e-commerce"

The only precise opposite is that they're still paying IBM goodness knows how much to stay on their AS/400 architecture.

dhosek• 19 days ago

Costco is also an anti-Amazon in that they treat their workers and their suppliers well.

hahahaa3• 19 days ago

Costco should aquire Hetzner :)

davidk42• 19 days ago

Hate Costco. Buying from Amazon

diogenescynic• 19 days ago

Costco works hard to charge you less. Amazon works hard to charge you more.

psyclobe• 19 days ago

Forget Costco and Amazon it's all about Walmart. They are killing it with local from store delivery and they are more local then Costco. They will win at the end of the day.

heohk2• 18 days ago

This absolutely. Walmart+ is amazing.

rcleveng2• 19 days ago

this article sounds like a poorly AI written of a mashup of the https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco and CNN news article on the Mamdani bodega killing grocery store (which sounds super expensive for the value it provides)

moomoo11• 19 days ago

130+ iq move is to order daily stuff from amazon, and same day costco delivery when you need stuff in bulk

heohk2• 19 days ago

Costco products have fallen off big time. Every time the long time staple items are New and Improved, they are materially worse (literally).

bell-cot4• 18 days ago

That said, there is no question that, in a better society than the one we have, key parts of Amazon’s operation would be retained for offering functions that contribute to the social good. The capacity to deliver prescription medicines same-day to the elderly is a genuine social contribution.

You know you're old when...

1920's-era "kid on bicycle" tech could do that. Ditto any healthy local social network. I do it occasionally for less-healthy family & friends.

Or - how many housebound elderly folks are already using DoorDash & similar?

Bigger picture, the best practice would be a dedicated service for this. Staffed by Nurse Aides, who interacted enough with their clients to notice developing problems early. Because compared to occasionally cycling old folks through the hospital - for "easily treated, if noticed sooner" conditions - that would probably have a negative cost.

amelius• 18 days ago

Ok, let them both commoditize their complement.

newsoftheday4• 18 days ago

We are probably fortunate, we live 5 minutes from one Costco, 6 minutes from a second one and 17 minutes from a third. My wife visits Costco every week, Walmart every week often on different days, etc. We buy from Amazon online frequently. Sometimes an item is cheaper at one place than another, comparison shopping, sometimes cheaper online, sometimes cheaper in the store.

It all works, though the article mentions public stores and references military commissaries as an example. We can shop at the commissary if we want. We don't because the other stores I mentioned above cover all our needs better at a better price point.

I do not think the article's author understands the subject matter as well as they think they do and with the many political references to the current New York mayor; it may just be disguised political messaging article.

__float• 18 days ago

Why do you need to visit Costco every week? This feels like the most inefficient combination of the city-style "shop small quantities often" and suburb-style "buy everything in bulk once a month".

...it may just be disguised political messaging article.

It doesn't seem to be particularly for or against the NYC proposal to me, so I don't understand why you are suggesting this.

testfoobar2• 18 days ago

From families I know: food is the reason. Athletic teenagers consume a lot of calories. Proteins, fruits, and vegetables along with milk, eggs, cheeses and snacks are easy to buy in bulk at Costco. These items are replenished weekly.

rawgabbit• 18 days ago

Not the person you are replying to. I live near a Costco and it offers good value for money. I go there multiple times per week. I use their pharmacy which is very reasonable even without insurance. I buy fresh produce and eggs and milk and salmon. I get my tires rotated and balanced there. I also get my eyeglasses made there. Their food court is also something I can’t pass up.

jungturk• 18 days ago

Costco sells fresh food (produce, meats, baked goods) and quite a bit of prepared-on-site ready-to-eat deli choices (soups, salads, tacos, etc...).

While sold in larger packages, they don't last any longer and so must be bought frequently.

newsoftheday4• 18 days ago

Wife does the shopping, I'm partially disabled, can't stand long. She enjoys getting out and treats herself to a hot dog and/or a desert and likes to sample the free taste test tables. She has made some enduring buying decisions based on those taste tests, they do work.

mlinsey3• 18 days ago

Costco is an elegant solution for the suburbs, where everyone is driving around a vehicle large enough to store giant boxes off a pallet and bring them home. Here in NYC, it's really impractical to go to a warehouse and carry a month's worth of supplies home on the subway. The flip side is that the Amazon last mile deliveries are done on electric scooters that can bring a whole trailer worth of packages to the mailroom of a big apartment building. These have some other externalities (eg around traffic laws and sidewalk space) but they are on the whole a lot more resource-efficient than everyone driving around giant cars to go to the store.

dietr1ch2• 18 days ago

I wish cities should design a delivery railroad. I don't want to let food delivery robots take over pedestrian spaces and having standardised package sizes and weight limits would help make things efficient.

luisln• 18 days ago

Large cities are designed to get people outside, not keep them inside. A delivery raiload would take up space that could otherwise be used to transport people.

mike503• 18 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

mike503• 18 days ago

This has to be astoturfed or something. There is literally a Costco in Manhattan and several in suburban Queens and Staten Island. Nothing stops you from going to Costco and just getting a cab back for a once a month trip.

wilg• 18 days ago

It's also possible its not a conspiracy and you and the other poster just have different opinions.

missedthecue• 18 days ago

The idea of Amazon astroturfing an HN thread to get more retail customers.

bossyTeacher• 18 days ago

This sounds so American. Why not just do a home delivery?

deeth_starr_v• 18 days ago

I'm in SF and have a car but I have called an Uber before to bring the stuff home when I just had a bike.

gWPVhyxPHqvk• 18 days ago

As someone who used to live in lower Manhattan... yes there is. The smaller apartment sizes, the 45min - 1hr each way travel time, the difficulty loading and unloading out of a car that's not yours. Costco is totally a suburban, car dependent location phenomenon, while Amazon/FreshDirect/bodegas are much more convenient in a city.

tegiddrone• 17 days ago

Costco is popular in Japan as well. I also think about the bike infra[0] to Ikea in Netherlands— a similar store that may be more associated with car/suburban culture.

[0] https://youtu.be/CgvYgxo6UY8

mlinsey3• 15 days ago

You got me, I'm totally paid off. Real New Yorkers love to go five miles (just for the closest one to me, in Manhattan seven avenues over and around 100 streets north), take a cab back from shopping, then haul costco-sized boxes up the stairs. I only pretended to not love that to get the sweet check from daddy Bezos (good thing he didn't notice my aside criticizing the e-bike trailers breaking traffic laws, though I guess that was subtle if you haven't been following the controversy about them here)

seaal• 18 days ago

Don't know what I would do without Instacart.

Closest Costco is 1 hour on a bus or 22 minutes/9 miles driving. The Wegman's that delivers to me is 40 minutes/26 miles driving, all for a like 10-20% fee on every item. Honestly I'm surprised more people don't use it considering how much time they waste going to these places, and how much more they spend by walking through the stores in person. Sometimes I'll get the receipt and the price will be more than what I paid after delivery fee/tip.

I'm sad the 80$ for 100$ Instacart giftcard deal at Costco is gone. And the $2 off scheduled delivery. At least uber eats/doordash/walmart+/whole foods keeps this market competitive. Wonder how much trader joe's would make if they turned on deliveries?

kyawzazaw• 18 days ago

for many, this is a fun activity

insane_dreamer5• 18 days ago

Half the fun of shopping at TJs is the actual shopping at TJs.

jhbadger• 18 days ago

Costco also delivers -- I also live in a city in an apartment and order bulky things I don't want to carry from Costco online.

saveferris• 18 days ago

Heck, I live in the burbs and do Costco delivery all the time. I dont want to carry them either :-)

QuiEgo• 18 days ago

I like Amazon's service. Parking at Costco on a Saturday is absurd to the point there's memes about it. I really hate standing in lines. Delivery to my door is awesome and I'm willing to pay extra for it. I also see the Amazon truck going house-to-house and don't feel guilty: I'm just one more stop along the way, my marginal impact is nothing at this point.

Loughla• 18 days ago

Your last sentence is literally the tragedy of the commons.

MrDresden2• 18 days ago

Costco's is only a model that works in cultures used to having to drive to get groceries.

Having now lived a few years in the Netherlands, I much more prefer the ability to cycle/walk by one of the myriad of grocery stores in my day to day area and grab what I need for todays dinner.

dmix• 18 days ago

Costco does deliveries like most grocery stores, so you don’t need a car

MrDresden2• 18 days ago

That's not a service they offer everywhere.

caycep• 18 days ago

The Costco buyers are all really quite good; whatever they are doing, they manage to fine really good suppliers for most things they carry in the store. The SoCal locations all carry really good mangoes when in season, rivaling one well known heirloom producer (Wong's...or maybe they buy from Wong's...). A local chef tried all sorts of strawberries from various farms for his line of ice cream, and concluded the Kirkland ones were the best bang for the buck...

bobbytheblkbear• 18 days ago

Costco prices suck and I don't know why people clap for them.

ktosobcy• 18 days ago

One brilliant feature of the Costco experience is, paradoxically, the constraint: as opposed to Amazon, with its near infinite assortment, or even Walmart, which has approximately 130,000 SKUs (stock keeping units, or distinct items) in the average Supercenter, any given Costco will only hold 4,000 SKUs to choose from.

I live in Spain now and over here we have Mercadona as a "low cost market" and they do basically the same thing - limited selection of mostly in-house brands.

At first I was stlightly annoyed by it but over time it turned out that it's kinda preferred way -- indeed I waste less time hunting for The Brand and just The Item I need. And most of the time quality is on pair (or better) while costing less…

Costco is the anti-Amazon

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