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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.

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The Kirkland house brand is often backed by one of the name brands they sell. They have quality metrics for Kirkland and they check the products regularly. If the quality dips, they swap out the provider.

This used to be the Sears Kenmore & Craftsman model where appliances were really Whirlpool, or Maytag, Carrier{1}.

Hand tools variously came from many OEMs like SK, Plumb, Knipex, and Williams{2}. I suppose they still do, now at Lowes, but the OEM is Chinese.

{1}https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/How_to_identify_who_made_your_Ke...

{2}https://forum.toolsinaction.com/topic/2118-craftsman-date-co...

The big thing with Sears Craftsman (formerly), and Costco (currently) is that the company will back the product.

If I want to return a product to Costco, I have really strong confidence that they will take it back.

TBF to Amazon they take all my shit back on the reg

Amazon will accept returns, but not like Costco will or sears did.

Sears would exchange any broken craftsman tool for a new one even decades after purchase. Costco is much the same. Used, year old stuff with missing parts will gladly be refunded in full.

To be fair to Costco you have to understand that the way they do that is they just send the item back to the vendor and deduct it from the next purchase. The vendors only option is to not sell stuff to Costco anymore.

Which provides an incentive to the manufacturer to produce at least decent quality products.

I've seen people drop off stained mattresses at Costco for return.

I think it's the other way around. Kirkland takes the "B quality stock" and sells it under it's own label. This is why they have an essentially no questions asked return policy. If the quality dips it eats into this margin and the provider is back to making next to nothing on units that fail to pass their own more stringent brand QA checks.

Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials.

I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.

I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was expecting it to have far more healthy options these days, or even just more options in general.

I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day long my entire childhood.

edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example https://www.costco.com/juice.html.

Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from einsteins yesterday.

edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...

What’s healthier than being able to buy massive amounts of high quality fish and beef and decent quality vegetables and fruit, with zero extra ingredients? Same for legumes, farro, brown rice, etc. They have tons of zero sugar drinks as well.

I can’t eat that healthy via other grocery stores because it’s too expensive typically.

if you want healthier juice....buy a juicer and make it yourself. You're never going to get healthy options from a wholesaler who buys from massive brands that are not known for healthy options. Long term, making it yourself is cheaper too.

Most of the time in the juice space, anything that is designed to be shelf-stable in a warehouse is not. at. all. healthy. It's packed with preservatives and other stabilizers that are not good for you to consume. Or it has been pasteurized, which kills the vast majority of the nutrients in the liquid itself.

I will say as a caveat, that the Kirkland Signature Organic Coconut Water is quite good.

I tried multiple juicers, but they were too hard to clean, so I stopped using them.

The Vitamix is easy to clean, so that's the winner for me.

Are there actually good juices on the public market? I'm pretty sure anything you don't squeeze yourself has been reconstituted from parts.

I was chatting up a hotel chef recently and he told me the lil 8oz of 'proper' orange juice he gave me cost more to put on the table than the entire rest of the breakfast combined.

Well Sunny D is an "orange drink" and there are various widely available "fresh squeezed" real juice options so... Yes?

> Are there actually good juices on the public market?

I never found one.

Fruit juices consist of fructose. It's bad for you in high quantities, just like sugar. Eating a piece of fruit is healthy for you - fructose in small quantities, and the rest of the fruit slows down its digestion. Fruit juice is a fructose bomb.

Not really. I was just using OJ as an example because for whatever reasons I've been paying attention to the pricing of different breakfast places OJ + grocery OJ since covid. I pay $7 for "fresh squeezed" from Einsteins, but Syrup a popular breakfast place next to me charges $8.99 for a cup about half the size of that. I made that mistake once.

I was just hoping for healthier, zero/low sugar options of a lot more things at Costco. If I ever have a zero/low sugar option, I usually get it. I haven't drank a full sugar soda in a decade and avoid all sugar so my tolerance to sweet things is super low. Black coffee, etc.

No/low sugar isn't inherently better for you...just saying. Most of the time stuff that advertises that there's no or low sugar is packed with sweeteners that your body still treats as sugars...but massive food conglomerates have lobbied the FDA to allow them to say there's no added sugar.

Plus, if you're drinking fruit juice to help stay hydrated, you literally need sugars and salts to actually instigate the hydration process.

I find that Costco in store generally has stuff that tends to follow local consumer preferences.

It is worth mentioning that Costco.com does not stock the same things that the physical stores sell, more-so than any other retailer I know of. And different stores have a lot of latitude in what they stock.

My nearest store has tons of things like sugar free sodas, pro-biotic soda, kombucha, no sugar added juices, and juice shots, etc... It might just be the local Costco catering to their market.

Weird, I'm in Denver, pretty healthy crowd here but maybe that Costco is just bad. Nothing like that there.

Yeah, my wife and I always check out the local costco when visiting a city. I can't remember which one it was but I distinctly remember being surprised at all the asian-type foods at one. They had squid chips, sushi, boba, and all kinds of strange things. I want to say it was Oregon or Seattle but it's been a while

I saw a picture of the Costco in Alaska a few years ago and it was full of camping gear and salmon and stuff like that. It was pretty cool. I think it was Juneau, the "smallest Costco."

Yep found it https://old.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/1e0t9u6/costco_june...

Oh they definitely cater to the local market. Here is a costco in Mountain View: https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/1dk2pfo/not_a_wine_...

What are you talking about? Buy a bag of oranges and a juicer from Costco and you’re set. You can also get 50lb bag of rice, tons of produce, milk, eggs, meat—you don’t need to buy the processed junk foods. In fact I don’t find many stores other than Costco where I can buy e.g. entire cuts of meat to cut into steaks myself.

> I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.

Costco sells a lot of junk food because Americans, as a whole, eat a lot of junk food. They also stock a lot of staples (rice, beans, flour, cooking oils, canned/frozen fruits/veggies, &c), and decent quality raw fruit/veggies/meat. Not liking the Costco shopping experience is a pretty reasonable point of view (it forces you to plan/structure your shopping and food storage in weird ways IMO), but it seems like a strange complaint to zero in on the selection of processed foods when they really do seem to try and accommodate a wide variety of needs and preferences the best they can.

They also sell kind of strange (compared to the bags of doritos) stuff periodically, which I love. For instance the Costco in Maine (of all places) has Bird Nest Soup and NordeX PIKNIK cheese in a can. Kind of apropos of nothing. It's pretty cool.

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