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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

I want more costcos.

To people who don't know, part of the core of Costco's business model is curation, which leads to customer trust. I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality. I know that anything with a kirkland brand on it is going to be so high quality and so cheap that it feels like I found a cheat.

What's funny about costco is that their in store experience is so good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence. Yeah they have a website, but it doesn't seem to actually have a comprehensive list of everything they sell. You have to go to the store and check out what they have (and get a hot dog or a piece of pizza while you're there)

If there was a delivery app that curated restaurants, I would absolutely love it, and I also think it would be really successful.

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That was Caviar. DoorDash bought them at the start of the pandemic. It still runs, it's just DoorDash with a demographic tweak now.

"Caviar’s platform architecture created value by focusing on a niche market that would drive a critical mass of users with only a few restaurants, allow for exclusivity to reduce multi-homing, and provide ancillary services for restaurants to reduce the barriers to entering the delivery business.

Caviar launched with a relatively limited, curated assortment of restaurants that had loyal customer bases among food enthusiasts. With only 30 restaurants, Caviar had a small selection compared to its competitors, offering around one vendor per cuisine. Despite this, Caviar’s value proposition of “hype” restaurants attracted a different customer base that were willing to pay a premium to get delivery from these crave-able restaurants, many of which had never been available before on delivery. In addition, by onboarding restaurants new to delivery onto its platform, Caviar was able to sign exclusivity with many of its partners to reduce the multi-homing and creating stronger network effects with its users."[1]

[1] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/caviar-foo...

I loved caviar in NYC. Cost a bit more, but in general higher quality restaurants (that did not list on other platforms). After they sold out it became DD with more bugs.

You've resurrected a memory in me...

KOSMO.com

Back in ~1999 there was a site called KOSMO.com, and, in San Francisco it was basically "doordash" and sought to employ a ton of urban bicycle delivery folks. I bought my first on-line delivery from KOSMO and it was delivered to me by bike messenger within an hour. That thing was the movie DVD "RAN" by Kirosawa....

so shorlty after this, I was on a flight back east and was talking with a guy sitting next to me, and we were talking about KOSMO, and I said to him "You know what would be great, would be a heat-map of restaraunts that are within my radi of travel modes (like whats within a five minute walk and is indian food"

I described this whole model I wanted from these new ways to deliver, order, pay....

Turned out the guy sitting next to me was one of the founders of KOSMO.com.....

They went under pretty quick and never developed tech for "whats near me now", so that sucks.

and to this day, with maps.FAANG everything and online order/delivery service Unicorns, I still dont have the perfect "map of shit thats near me as a heat map, based on what I am looking for and my mode of either transport/delivery"

Maps are really good, but they are still simply "maps"

I'd like a 'sentiment' layer on top of maps.

---

An example would be:

Show me the neighborhood [indian/mexican/whatever] restaurant, but show me traffic to and from, based on the radius of its customer-base

So basically you can see how many people are flocking to a place.

> basically you can see how many people are flocking to a place.

This has been tried many times and is basically illegal now so you will never have it. It always gets litigated for racism and shuts down. The best you will ever get is busy/not busy.

Its also the same reason google will never direct you away from a very unsafe area in an unfamiliar place.

Its the same reason no real estate site provides a crime stat overview.

Litigated for racism? I genuinely do not understand how this could be possible. These services aren’t showing the race of the people attending, are they?

Socioeconomic geolocation bias of algos.

The reality is there is a great deal of overlap of races and socioeconomic status. High crime areas for instance tend to be not white.

I've been involved in a business that was sued for discrimination simply because the target market was low income. Which happened to mean the majority of customers were not white even though we didn't track any customer demographics. They won the suit based simply on that fact. Literally zero proof of any bias occurring. They couldn't even come up with how the business were exploiting them and what the benefit was to the company. Simply that there were a disproportionate amount of customers that are not white is good enough.

The DA(district attorney) kept asking for our racial data and would never accept that we didn't have any. I had to sign so many things saying that I was indeed providing all the data we had and that in fact we did not keep racial data on customers.

You have sources for this? And I’m not seeing the connection of how many are in restaurant to unsafe areas and real estate crime stat overviews.

You awoke a question:

What sort of dark patterns are we (the public) _NOT_ seeing in algo behaviours, and further - how can Dark_Patterns be mapped.

ELI5 is there anyone working in this problem space thats open to speak without NDA issues/state-actor repercussions....

Whats the nomenclature in this space to address the data? And where is the data?

Eventually you will start locating places that have racial bias. For instance a heavily ethnic restaurant. That means its customers will be by default mostly a minority. You are now tracking and exploiting minorities/protected class.

See my other comment on this comment thread for a personal anecdote.

There's "Technically correct" and there is "You're still technically correct but your answer still sucks for the reasoning... and not because I disagree with you, it just sucks that some things suck because that's the way they be"

Any guess as to which version youre in?

>>This has been tried many times and is basically illegal now so

Except for when its fucking CCTV surveillance bullshit.

This is the thing with me and surveillance.

--- >>NOTE: *I've built shit that both surveilled AND KILLS PEOPLE. Not Happy about it.*

I am tired of not having recourse AGAINST the surveillance planet.

One way streets (of authoritarianism) Are unsustainable and the people I detest the most in the tech world are the bitches that build shit without qualms.

For example PALANTIR. FUCK THAT COMPANY *AND* their primary investors.

The idea of Palantir (The hint is in the name) is fine.. but the implementation of how evil an "engineer" can be without knowing it is pretty scary.

My Grandfather helped build the fuel for Manhattan project. Brilliant Man. fucking horrendous output. (HANFORD) (nuke designer for GE)

My other Grandfather was a weapons loader for the Enola Gay.

Do you know how much familial guilt we carry?

Those Kozmo messenger bags sell for like $400 if you can manage to find one!

It was awesome to order a single 20oz bottle of coke from them. Sadly they stared a minimum order soon after.

It’s koZmo with a Z btw. Unless we are thinking of different dot.com busts…

We are thinking of the Zame one. I just couldnt recall the spelling...

Thank you for that - and gosh now I want one of those bags.

I think that they don't show store inventory purposely. They still want you going in to the store and doing your Full Big Shop™

The Costco Grocery component of their website is actually pretty impressive. Quick shipping times and decent prices.

Ordering non-grocery from the website still has a long lead time before the item actually ships.

This is good. I don't want some Gary V disciple deciding to do "retail arbitrage" full time---buying all the relatively cheaper products to sell on line.

I just got back from a trip to Costco and I got a fair bit of stuff. As a consumer I do feel like I can trust them.

A couple of tangents:

1. I have ordered things from the Costco website; one time it was a large TV that was cheaper there than anywhere else I could find it, most recently a couple of office chairs. Their web purchasing experience is similar to others I have used.

2. There seems to be some evidence that Costco may be perpetrating animal cruelty on a pretty big scale: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/06/23/costco-chicke...

> their in store experience is so good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence.

This is my experience with IKEA. Trying to have furniture bought and shipped was so painful and expensive that it was like they didn’t want to be bothered.

I bought a set that was too big for my SUV. $2300. Still wanted $150 delivery, two week notice, and it was ultimately fulfilled by some mom and pop service.

It was like IKEA decided, “we have one prescribed user experience but if you want us to find you a guy with a van to do the pickup for you, we don’t mind.”

Welcome to costco, I love you

sorry couldn't help myself...

That all contributes to its image as a high-class discounter. That's fine, it just breaks apart where you say "Welcome to Aldi. You exist." Or "Welcome to Kroger, we love you as long as you buy the six things on sale, but after that we need to talk."

I believe they were referring to this scene from Idiocracy: https://youtu.be/ZIFCWpn4qQ4

Yes, I'm aware, but our brave new future, in its magnificence, has multiple grocery retailers.

> I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality.

Costco online is a different story though. They sell stuff like laser hair regrowth helmets and magnetic healing pads.

Even in store, they sell “medical” turmeric 100ft away at 1,000x the price of turmeric in the spice aisle.

I don't really understand this, but it might be my local costcos. I hate every minute of my time at costco from entering the parking lot to leaving.

I usually go for gas, since its cheaper. There's always a long lineup, 10 minutes or so. Then I go to find a parking space - which I usually try to cut short by parking far away, but costco lots around me are fairly small for the amount of business going on in the store and crowded.

Every second in the store is torture. A mass of people who are all trying to get to wherever they're going. I dont' care about the little food tasting stations - the food sucks and I don't care about it. Items that were there the week before are suddenly no longer stocked at all, and finding boxes is pretty hit or miss. Some items don't have UPCs even though its required to get through self checkout, so self checkout is sabotaged by their own packaging. The mass of people are constantly in the way.

The best part of costco is getting a hotdog on the way out, but in the last 5 times I've gone the wait for a cheap hot dog was ~15 minutes.

I end up going for cheap gas and wasting an hour in line or trying to get to the few items I want to buy.

If this is a so good store experience I have no idea where you normally shop. Every second of it is torture. Maybe if they had half the people in the store, it would be painful instead of unbearable, but thats not a thing.

I don't really understand why people think its a good experience. It's like shopping elsewhere but with even more people around you and trying to get to the things you're standing in front of while you try to make decisions on what to buy, and longer lines.

I don't know that I have a trust level with costco at all. they're just a store.

> I don't really understand why people think its a good experience.

Sounds like you're still going? That is very confusing reading your write up with multiple complaints and how there are better alternatives and nobody has time to wait to save a bit on gas.

Can even have a better experience by not renewing the membership.

I go for cheap gas. It's a 20 minute drive plus 10 minutes wait for gas. after spending a half hour to get gas, not going inside seems like a waste. but I hate every second of the experience from driving on the lot to leaving, so i don't understand the people who crow about how good an experience costco is. It's a horrible experience.

Just go Monday or Tuesday evening, no crowds at all.

I'll try. I haven't seen that yet but if its true it might make it somewhat bearable.

I get Costco via Ubereats, I always order something and underestimate the amount. It took me months to finish one order of Chicken breasts for like 30-40$, each "breast" took days to consume. It really is amazing and the quality like you said has never been bad.

Also, you can order random thinks like TVs or a tent via Ubereats. Fellow humans, I think we are at the peak of Capitalism.

Costco is shopping porn for the middle class affluent who don't know what else to do with their time.

Consumerist.

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