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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, my local subreddit loves to describe Costco as a late stage capitalist dystopia.

- fighting for space everywhere: fighting for a parking lot, avoiding people seeming to ram you with their shopping cart, waiting for the extended family of seven in front of you to pick a cereal so you can leave the aisle, waiting for traffic to clear so you can _leave_ the costco

- you have to pay to get in

- and then you have to pay extra to jump to the head of the line

- fights over rare stock like pokemon cards

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It's wild that you can look at a physical testament of the sheer abundance and affordability that capitalism has created for almost every consumer good, and people will call it a dystopia because they experience traffic or fight over the right to buy cardboard childrens toys

Would the world really be worse off without cardboard children's toys but also without people fighting over cardboard children's toys?

There is nothing about Costco that is causing the fighting.

It's entirely a unrelated subculture going insane about pumping up the prices of pieces of cardboard, and 30's-ish adults who never grew up mentally but now have disposable income.

Normal people buy whatever packs for the kids who proceed to play the game completely wrong.

I guess it feels less abundant when there's a million people in the store and you're basically in line to check out the minute you step in.

This is Costco literally suffering from success, they have had an enormous growth in subscriptions yet opening stores takes time, faces regulations, has limited availability

Ah yes, the bread lines were a sign of Soviet success! Enormous growth in demand they just had trouble keeping up with!

Could you please review and follow the site guidelines when posting here? Your account has unfortunately been breaking them in a few places. (Other examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48045387, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46948554).

Fortunately you're a good contributor generally, so this should be easy to fix. We'd appreciate it.

Look, I get that everybody has a job and can't go during the week, but if you're going to Costco outside of working hours, you're doing it wrong. I dunno about fighting over pokemon cards, which like you do you, but crowding doesn't happen at 10 am on a tuesday.

people on reddit describe literally everything as late stage capitalist dystopia

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