The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
urbanproxima.com
urbanproxima.com
This is an either temporally or willfully ignorant statement - prefabricated housing hasn’t had to look like a boring box in decades. I’ve been involved in prefab projects where you couldn’t tell the on-site builds from the prefabs.
Also there’s an elevation rendering of the project that clearly isn’t ’a stack of shipping containers’.
Without plans or a render showing that’s the case I don’t know why we can’t assume it would be at least a little better looking.
Arguably all the way back to Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house, nearly a hundred years ago.
https://todaysecommerce.com/2024/06/costco-is-working-on-ad-...
What are those? I never really found any sort of "unique advantage" of Costco. Certainly nothing to drive the extra distance past Sam's. While I had a membership, it was largely more expensive or didn't have what I wanted.
As a merchant, Costco is significantly more efficient than other retailers due to a much leaner and simpler inventory because they only ever sell one or two brands of a given thing and only one or two things of a given brand. They don't have to deal with the overhead of unmoving stock, micromanagement of stock, and other such inefficiencies of non-scale.
The product return rates are also tied to customer data (membership scanning is required to pay). The better return data allows them to make better decisions on which products to boot.
Customer filtering: The subscription model creates a high trust customer base with way lower chances of shoplifting, fraudulent returns and the like.
That there's enough retention to justify that suggests they haven't burnt their employees too badly.
The only way to bring house prices down is to build build build.
I'd actually be quite trustful of a Costco apartment.
https://x.com/CohenSite/status/1800905974490005978
> Because it got over 400,000 people to read a tweet about somewhat esoteric housing regulations
Thank you!
Is it latent classism? Disdain for tradespeople? Is outsourcing bad when it comes for office jobs, but good when it shaves a few percent off of the final $/ft2?
In the Bay area there's an SF carpenter's union vs Vallejo carpenter's union thing, because there's a modular housing factory in Vallejo.
I live within walking distance of a nice grocery store and would definitely prefer that over a Costco. There are more hot food items than just a hot dog and two types of pizza. It's easy to pick up a small amount of fresh ingredients to make a meal at the last minute.
If you ate nothing but pepperoni pizza, you could feed a family of four for like $500 a month!
Costco even sells an MCT supplement that doubles as the best massage oil and lube I’ve ever used.
(Note: Ivy League Guarantee is for Costco Executive members only and requires the CRISPY genetic engineering package. While supplies last. In order to redeem the guarantee in case of defect, child must be brought to your nearest Costco Organ Center).
I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to own their own housing, but I don't see the two as mutually incompatible in the larger scheme.
> The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing.
My definition of mixed-use development would include the case in TFA: Costco adding housing units above their store. Housing which you explicitly said is 'not a good thing'. I might agree with you, if Costco were slapping down a subdivision of company housing. But they're not, they're adding housing units above a proposed store in a mixed-use approach. This seems like a net good.
There could be a whole (cynical) side conversation as to whether or not Costco is adding these housing units simply to meet the criteria which allow for the expedited approval of this proposal, of course.