Costco is the anti-Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Costco is the anti-Amazon

phenomenalworld.org

581 pointsbookofjoe583 comments

> 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.

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.

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

Right, 100 trucks delivering 100 single items to 100 homes, or 100 consumers each making 1 trip to buy 100 things. It really depends on the details too much to simplify it so far.

It is more like 1 truck delivering 100 single items to 100 homes.

No, not if you're matching the volume of items between the two scenarios.

Well, maybe more than one truck.

One truck per delivery service

Multiple times a week.

For the aforementioned 100 homes, if the 100-items-in-1-truck are needed multiple times per week, then the 100-items-in-100-cars are likely also needed multiple times per week, so the extra CO2 etc would be even worse.

With there typically being a free shipping minimum (or a relatively fixed shipping cost for daily goods), it seems like the benefits of the 1 truck model are likely even greater as customers are explicitly encouraged to group purchases together.

Just anecdotally, I think the typical Costco trip is alongside trips someone would have taken already.

Go to work, take a 5 minute detour to stop by Costco for your prescriptions, gas, and groceries on the way back

As a non-American, all of these threads are utterly fascinating.

Right, so with Amazon you have one truck visiting 100 addresses every day for two weeks (because people are buying 2-3 items per order). With Costco you have 100 people each driving to Costco once, on a single day.

From a cars-on-the-road and fuel expenditure perspective, the latter sounds better.

If Amazon customers ordered like Costco shoppers, the Amazon model might very well be better. But they don't, so it isn't.

In reality, you get both. People don’t shop at Costco OR Amazon. People primarily go to Costco for food (then stumble on everything else), Amazon has struggled over and over to get their grocery business to catch on. They’re just the best source of the everything else part.

These are only comparable in an academic business model comparison, in reality, these are different retailers selling different things and consumers behave differently depending on context of what they’re buying. A lot of people want low cost on food, meanwhile, they’ll spend superficially on disposable plastic junk with very little practical value. I’m taking about the American consumer specifically when I say everyone.

Amazon routinely is delivering things to my house 3+ times in a single day. They don’t do a great job of grouping their orders into deliveries.

We’re usually to “blame”. We don’t do coordinated orders in our household. We have 3 people ordering individually and I know I sometimes place multiple orders per day. But, I’d expect that shouldn’t matter and they’d notice all these orders with the same address could be put on the same delivery truck. Instead, it seems they just process orders as first in first out.

They have recently added a feature in the delivery options if I already have a pending delivery it will say “add to your Tuesday delivery” or similar, which I’m likely to choose. For a while they really wanted me to use an “Amazon day”, which would be like picking Tuesday as the day of the week my deliveries would come on. I specifically pay for Prime to have fast delivery so I don’t understand why they ever thought I’d go for that.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

"Amazon bins" ... or maybe just reusable bins that aren't specific to a company? See: shipping containers. A standard bin for home delivery could still have "Amazon" painted on it but the rest of the infrastructure wouldn't be Amazon specific.

Amazon did that with an earlier version of their grocery delivery service. I assume the cost and logistics of managing and cleaning the bins just wasn’t worth it because their grocery service delivers in paper bags now.

One problem with the bins for normal items is that rarely will they be packed to the brim. I imagine the overall item density would drop significantly if they started using standardized bins instead of appropriately sized boxes for the items.

I quite often get inappropriately sized boxes.

I do too, but also sometimes the boxes are the correct size. With standardized bins I imagine they would rarely be reasonable.

I remember reading somewhere that the boxes are not sized to the items they contain, but to a combination of 'items they contain' and 'space we need the box to take up on the truck'; i.e. if you have five items of one unit size in a six-unit-wide truck they will slide around (and potentially get damaged, fall over, etc), but if you put one of those items in a two-unit-size box then the boxes will not slide around, meaning that while the box is inefficiently sized in isolation it is optimally sized in a logistical context.

I'm not sure how true this is, nor how reasonable it sounds since I don't know what the inside of an Amazon delivery truck looks like, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be true in some circumstances.

I had heard the same thing from (if I'm remembering correctly about who told me) someone who has driven a UPS delivery van for 30+ years, so he has loads of experience with truck-packing. If he thinks it's true, I'm willing to believe him.

And if I'm wrong about my source, the other person who I could possibly have heard it from is my friend who works at Amazon. As a sysadmin managing a small part of AWS, not in delivery — but he would also be in a position to know.

Either way, I believe that's correct, that the oversized boxes are that size because they were being used as filler in the truck. The algorithm calculates the planned truck packing based on what items are going to be transported together (going to the same city therefore in the same truck), then picks out the box size that each item should go into. And most of them will be correctly sized, but in each row either zero or one (or possibly more in some cases) will be oversized.

Well, if there's one company on Earth that's both incentivized to find an algorithm to efficient pack stuff into their shipping bins and also well-financed enough to actually figure out a good linear or quadratic-time algorithm to do so, it's definitely Amazon.

And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)

They might have the ability to do so. The motivation? Well let me put it this way: I tried Amazon’s grocery delivery service, and stopped using it because everything—everything—kept arriving in its own individual bag regardless of whether it made any sense, so it was just a bunch of bags I had to carry upstairs. That bags also had no handles.

So they were optimizing for something, but it definitely wasn’t packaging efficiency.

Optimizing for dollar cost. Human time costs more than the extra packaging.

Results would doubtless be different if they were optimizing for minimal environmental impact or produced waste.

Or the alternative that I occasionally encounter with non-grocery items - giant heavy item and small delicate item placed together in same box that is far too large for the both of them. A token piece of packing paper or lone plastic bladder tossed in, free to move about. The entire contents bouncing around.

Another amusing one was when they packed a somewhat delicate pantry food item in a paper envelope. It arrived thoroughly crushed, exactly as one would expect.

Yes. I recently tried ordering a standard cardboard tube box of oats from Amazon, and it arrived crushed and leaking in its presumably nonsterile paper envelope. They gave me a refund and told me to throw it out.

I think this would have been much less likely to happen without the envelope, since whoever packed the truck would intuitively pack the tube vertically.

I see what you did there. Touché.

Bin packing is theoretically NP Hard but practically solved all the time on real world datasets.

Yeah but NP Hard bin packing doesn't usually include situations where a flat screen TV squished on top of pallets comes sliding out of the truck when you go to unload...

Breakage results.

This sounds like a constraint I model in my bin packing optimization routine.

As someone who worked on logistics optimization algorithms for Amazon, I’ll just say that the one thing Amazon did best was have clueless upper management continuously make poor strategic decisions that continuously nullified all of their improvements from optimization.

What was the root cause of that? (Company consciously prioritized other things than those logistics optimizations? Individual incentives lead to management behavior that was against company's intent? Bad hiring and retention practices for upper management or whomever was informing them?)

OIC.

I will note like the other person though that I often get like "just one thing in a box that's clearly too big"

I have been told, by (if I'm remembering my source right) someone who has worked as a UPS driver for 30+ years, that Amazon does that on purpose. Because the variable they're optimizing for is not "are we wasting cardboard". Cardboard is a renewable resource, which also recycles really well, so a little wasted cardboard is not a big deal. What they're optimizing for is packing the truck. Your item arrived in a too-big box, because that box (and the air within it) was calculated to fit exactly into what would otherwise have been empty space in the truck if the box had been smaller. In other words, you know how sometimes inside a carboard box, you'll find the item you ordered plus another smaller (and empty) cardboard box used for filler space? That's exactly what they were doing, with your box as the filler space in the truck so that other boxes wouldn't slide around and damage their contents.

... I see someone else has posted this elsewhere in the comment thread. Eh, I might as well post this anyway, because it's confirmation from a different source.

The other boxes would slide around anyways after your box was delivered tho?

Yes, but by that time you're driving the truck around neighborhood streets, getting up to 25 mph at most before you stop at the next stop sign. Not nearly as much force being applied as making turns at 55 mph. During the long drive from the warehouse to that city (and the specific neighborhood), the boxes are packed in tightly.

Plus, I seem to recall that they also optimize by giving the driver a route to follow and planning the boxes to be packed in order, so that only one row is being emptied at a time. I know my UPS driver friend has told me UPS does this, and it's an obvious optimization so I'm sure Amazon does it too.

That's a concept that might make sense, and it is something that I've heard from others over the years.

Except: The hypothetical perfectly-packed 53' trailer that leaves the originating warehouse is not the same trailer that delivers stuff to my doorstep. Things get sorted and re-sorted as they move along. It ultimately becomes random instead of optimized, and these random giant boxes take up a lot of space in local delivery vehicles.

Besides, the exceptions can be too exceptional to support any notion of it being deliberate.

It's difficult to describe the biggest box I've ever gotten from Amazon, except to say that it was too big to fit onto the seat of the recliner by the door where I usually put these things. I've received full-size, assembled, 1990s tower PCs in smaller boxes.

Inside of that exceptional box was just 3 ethernet cables, each 1 foot long, that cost me less than $1 each. That whole box could have been a brown paper envelope.

I used this service before it rolled out widely and these boxes were a mixed bag. On one hand they worked really well, they were essentially insulated hard totes with styrofoam lining and often had dry ice in them for anything that needed to be kept cold. On the other hand, I lived in an apartment, so storing 3-4 totes for a week or more was a real chore.

The funniest thing I remember though is that the totes weren't optimized for the size of some of the products available very well - if you put a frozen pizza in it, it sat diagonally, and without enough room to really put anything above or below it. You order four frozen pizzas, and you're allocating many cubic meters of apartment space for them until the next time you order.

They must have been using different crates for you (different region or perhaps era). For me they were standard plastic bins[1] with a separate “cold bag” inside for frozen stuff. No actual styrofoam I recall, although this was also over 10 years ago so I could be misremembering.

[1] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-9745G

The style of plastic bin definitely looks the same. The ones we were getting looked something like this[0], same folding-flap top as in your link but form-fitted insulation inside:

[0] https://flexcontainer.com/product/insulated-molded-container...

Yeah. I’m not certain if the Amazon ones were actually the same as the ones I linked. But extremely similar at least.

It’s been a long time. Very plausible that we did get the ones with the styrofoam sometimes and I just don’t remember. I know we got the cooler bag sometime.

That service was really weird. They had a special arrangement with the post office.

They’d slice cold cuts in New Jersey, and have USPS bring it to upstate NY and deliver before 8AM. There would literally be a mail van with two orders in it.

and webvan back in 2000 - both amazon's attempt and webvan are unfortunately gone - it's cheaper to throw away packaging away, and that's super unfortunate and sad.

Our groceries from AH in NL come in foldable crates. The cooled items sit inside a plastic bag inside a foam box in the truck. The delivery person stacks the crates and foam boxes, brings them to your door, rings the bell. They hand the bag with cooled products to you and then you get the crates. You return the folded crates. This works just fine. They are also quite adept at filling the crates to a maximum. Unfortunately not always in the smartest way because they sometimes put the fragile things at the bottom and the heavy items like bottles of soda on top.

So this seems like a pretty solved problem. Of course you have to be home to receive the cooled products. There are some startups that sell cooled boxes that delivery persons can open with a code to put stuff in but they are not popular. Since Covid people tend to be at home more often than before.

Lee Valley will accept back boxes:

https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/reuse-your-shippable-boxes

(at their physical stores)

You'd think Amazon could to that at one of their physical partners' locations.

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

Order whole foods from them. They will pack 6 things in 4 reusable insulated bags. The problem is there is no way to send those bags back to be reused.

This must vary by region. We get paper bags with a reflective liner. They’re re-usable if the super adhesive they use for the label stickers doesn’t require ripping the bag apart to open it, but they’re definitely intended to be disposable. Sometimes they just use regular paper bags and let our stuff get warm. It seems random whether they stuff the bags to the gills or have a single item per bag. This happens with both Fresh and Whole Foods.

Anything to avoid walkable neighborhoods, naturally.

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.

You don’t need time limit, you just need to deal with the company frequently enough for this to work.

How I would imagine this work if there was will (I don’t think there is)… there are online grocery delivery services that do this already, it’s not that complicated.

You get your stuff delivered in a reusable bag. They charge you 1 dollar for the bag. Next time you have something delivered, you give the bags back and you’ll get your money back.

That also leads to my other (perhaps main) issue with this idea, which is that it requires some level of coordination or synchronicity with the delivery courier that's simply inconvenient for both of us. I've lived in apartments that 90% of couriers of any service cannot find their way around, because they weren't simple take-elevator-and-walk-to-unit designs, so I thanked the stars when we got lockers at the gate. Perhaps I could leave my packaging in a locker... but that just sounds like we re-invented trash collection? And actually, this is why I never used grocery services like Amazon Fresh or Instacart. I don't think grocery delivery is as solved as you think it is.

The implied time synchronicity also sounds like a nightmare. Taiwan does timed trash collection (you have to throw the bag into a garbage truck when it comes playing Fur Elise at 7pm) and there's a reason it hasn't spread.

I just think this is overcomplicating matters instead of just making the package generically disposable, which seems to be what's happening anyways.

It's a really bad idea, I don't see it happening any time soon. Cardboard is too cheap and easily recyclable.

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.

> The incremental cost of an extra stop is near zero.

This assumes folks get deliveries on the same day and largely only from Amazon. And that we cannot build more walkable / bike able infrastructure.

Amazon already gives a discount if you're willing to wait for them to batch deliveries. Personally I would still have an order arriving every other day regardless of walkable/bikeable infrastructure. Same as most Americans.

Do most American's have an Amazon delivery every other day? It's not what it feels like where I live, but I might live in a part of the country unusually avoiding Amazon. While I see an Amazon truck every day, they visit 1-2 houses around me out of hundreds.

If feels like there are Amazon households that get a delivery every or every other day and non-Amazon households that order 1-5 times a year (if that) and batch their purchases from other retailers (physical or online). That's the genius of Amazon. Those that use them, use them a lot.

That's not the real question.... The real question is "On my block, what is the probability of any given house having at least one delivery on any given day"

I can say for certainty that Amazon delivers to my block every day. Adding 1 extra package is definitely more energy saving than me driving to Costco for the same thing.

> The real question is "On my block, what is the probability of any given house having at least one delivery on any given day"

In the city, I used to see multiple Amazon delivery trucks per day. On the rural road I now live on (dead end road with fewer than 30 households), USPS does most of the Amazon delivery, but this is somehow enough people that we see FedEx and/or UPS drive by pretty much every day in addition to USPS obviously driving by six days a week.

Given that they're also visiting the neighboring roads, it's definitely enough for an economy of scale.

"most americans" absolutely do not have "an order arriving every other day".

I order amazon on average once every 3 weeks. My mother (who has full time career and is under 60 years old) has never used amazon. Other members of my family also seem to rarely use amazon.

Also, having an order arriving every other day is incredibly wasteful.

No it's not. There's an Amazon truck on my street every day. Adding one more package to that truck costs ~nothing. That's why free shipping is free.

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.

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

As someone that has lived in a walkable neighborhood with a lot of shopping let me tell you, it doesn't solve the problem.

Realistically you aren't going to reach more than 250k skus within a 20 minute walk of your home, and probably less. Even this is very heavily biased towards using retail space instead of space for anything else (homes, restaurants, parks, offices). You can only build up to add more space within a 20 minute walk so much, because traveling vertically takes time.

With only 250k skus, you're still ordering from outside of walking distance often for items. This is much less variety then the average consumer is use to. Now, you have a dense area with lots of people and lots of business all needing goods brought in and waste brought. It's doable, but requires the right planned infrastructure, and people start trying to optimize the last mile with ideas like package lockers.

EDIT: It's probably possible to reach 250k if you heavily lean on books/cds/dvds with only a few copies each. The actual daily items you'd expect a store to keep in stock (and thus need more inventory of each sku) end up just consuming a lot of space.

250k skus seems pretty arbitrary. What's the significance of this number? A bodega goes a long way for most people's daily needs.

A bodega is often (and usually unavoidably) more expensive than a bigger grocery retail chain that's further away.

Price conscious buyers will opt to drive to the bigger, farther away store because it has more variety, and the essentials are cheaper.

I know I do this.

Everybody does this, unless its 10pm on Saturday and you are thankfully kissing the hand of bodega owner for being open at such absurd hour

All grocery stores close at 10 here (Ireland) but yes you are right. My local centra, 1km away is used for cheese, milk and beer runs. Everything else I get at the big lidl 15km away.

There's a full supermarket a 10 minute walk from me because it's a dense area.

This is the ideal situation, and common in most west cost dense areas, but not true for every dense mixed use area. Specifically it's common in low-income high-density housing to not have sufficient super market coverage.

Part of this is defacto deregulation allowing suppliers to overcharge smaller stores with less purchasing power than big chains. (The policy not to enforce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act).

Part of this is overregulation, with zoning and planning departments enacting policies that make smaller retail spaces less attractive to builders and owners, leading to a low supply, and allowing egregious rent for well located small retail.

Yes, economies of scale likely mean that larger businesses can afford lower prices, but smaller businesses also get to avoid some costs (no large administrative corporate departments necessary for a one-location bodega), so the prices probably don't need to be as far apart as they are.

Why should the government have anything to say about price negotiations between producers and retailers of frozen pizzas?

Robinson-Patman is terrible law that’s more or less impossible to enforce equitably. So it hasn’t been.

Lax RPA enforcement may have significantly contributed to food deserts. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deser...

I hope government representatives have things to say about that.

That’s not really responsive to my concerns about Robinson-Patman.

A world where it’s enforced uniformly and strictly might have some local benefits, but getting the government involved in regulating every wholesale transaction for “fairness” is a recipe for stagnation, corruption, or more likely both.

It is responsive to your question on why the government should have something to say about price negotiations between producers and retailers of frozen pizzas.

Government overreach X is good because in a sea of bad consequences, a few good things happen, too?

It’s much better for governments to be principled, and only interfere with mutually voluntary engagements by citizens when there’s an urgent harm to remedy.

Despite your assumptions, you should realize all I said was that government representatives should care about the topic and have something to say.

It’s an unrealistic number to justify the argument. Unless you consume for the sake of consuming, there’s no way anyone needs an offer that rich for routine usage.

Aldi and Lidl carry ~2-3k SKUs. A regular grocery will carry maybe 20k. In places where enough of these are built close to where people actually live you don’t ever need to touch the car for shopping. Small shopping centers (those that also have a something like a small book store) will add a few more thousands. A requirement of 250k SKUs in a 20min walking distance is going in the territory of once in a year or more purchases.

I think I drove to do groceries a handful of times in the last 10 years. I have multiple chains close enough that I can always walk, I can buy smaller batches and always have fresh food rather than a truckload to last a whole week but be stale by the end. Self checkouts and the abundance of stores means I have almost 0 wait time.

It can work but it has to be designed properly, and people need to change their habits a bit. Like not expecting hundreds of thousands of SKUs 10 min away at all times (which implies a huge store, so far from where people live).

I use to shop at Lidl. As you say, they carry a limited SKU assortment. But I have found it doesn't really matter. When I go to a grocery store that carries more variety, it feels exciting, but in the end it makes no difference. As long as I can get the essentials, I will manage. I don't need 20 types of hamburger dressing. I can make my own from first principles. I don't need 40 types of yoghurt. I buy can natural and eat with fresh fruit. And so on.

Lidl also has this interesting approach that they rotate some assortment. You can't find everything all the time. But once you realize that certain things periodically come back, you pick them up when they are in stock to make sure you have them at home. It is not as convenient, but if you make it a habit, it is a very minor disadvantage.

The rotation is because they stock the product for which they can negotiate the best discount.

But as you say the 20k SKUs premium stores stock aren’t a necessity. They drive up the costs for the store and the price for the buyer all so the buyer has the feeling they bought something different, when many brands are anyway the same product under different labels.

The premium store 3 minutes from my home stocks 30 types of mineral water. Aldi and Lidl stock maybe 3 of those 30. That’s what 99% of people buy anyway.

> That’s what 99% of people buy anyway

Until there's one less common thing you want. If you don't care much about flavour or have no taste in products then you can sub in any crap food or product.

I go to a particular supermarket because it has the tomatoes I like: they just can't be substituted. It also has an uncommon milk that is the only one I really like. The issue gets harder once you desire specific Deli foods.

How much of SKU selection is driven by individual consumer tastes? Some brand selection is driven by other causes.

That’s fine, you’ll just need to walk 10min extra to the specialty/ethnic/Deli store which stocks that. Supply is proportional to the demand so you can’t expect every niche item to be sold right next to you. How many types of milk can every store stock just so everyone can see their niche preference 10 min walk from anywhere?

250k SKUs means everything anyone would ever want. But the distribution of the demand for those SKUs is very lopsided. 20k are what everyone buys. Another 20k are probably things almost nobody buys. So how could you have both high and low demand items spread equally through a city without creating waste? If everything needs to be 10-20 min from you then somewhere a store is sitting empty with barely any customers or a shelf isn’t touched by anyone. The logistics for stocking and supplying products almost nobody buys costs everyone else.

I picked 250k sku because I think that is really close to maximum sku density, based on my experience designing planograms for certain retailers known for sku density. This maximum number of skews leans heavily towards spending space on retail instead of the other things you'd expect from a city like homes, restaurants, parks, service based business, offices, etc.

I second. I live right above a shopping mall and next to Dongmen, which is easily one of the largest shopping areas in the world, yet I still end up ordering most things online.

For reference, Google tells me that the largest Argos stores in the UK have only ~20k SKUs in stock.

One article I found[1] says that a Kroger store typically carries about 15k SKUs.

As another point of comparison: Costco themselves say[2] that they have about 4k SKUs, and state that most supermarkets have about 30k SKUs.

---

Anecdotally, I can find just about everything I want, in terms of consumables, at Kroger.

Sometimes I walk over to the bodega instead. They don't have much for inventory outside of beer/smokes/soda, and their selection of actual food is both limited and expensive. But it's only a block away, so...

[1]: https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/the-largest-supermarke...

[2]: https://www.costco.com/f/-/about

A full sized target would have about 80k skus. A small independent book store might have 25k skus stocked. A Sephora would stock 20k different skus.

I think people are underestimating the variety of products that are available.

I live in a walkable quarter and I can reach three full supermarkets and 2 specialty supermarkets within 5 minutes. Doesn't matter whether I need to stock up on milk, vegetables or hand peeled shrimp in garlic sauce, I can get it. Same with public schools (5 within a 2 mile radius), childcare (3), hospitals (2) and the park.

I don't get the argument either. Perhaps if you can't walk very far? If I put half an hour into walking I can easily buy all the essentials, such as a crash cymbal, oil of violets, steel nibs for my dip pen, a CD player, and a teapot.

I live in a metropolitan area and can walk to many stores within a 30 minute radius. (First supermarket is less than 5 minutes away).

But there is the added complication of weight. I can’t buy food for a week without driving there. Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.

It's an infrastructure thing. With the right regular/cargo bike or even better, an ebike/cargo ebike, 30-40kg of groceries per run is super doable.

> Nor can I go and buy a TV by just walking to the hardware store.

Do you buy a TV more than once every 5-10 years? You can rent a small van or whatever.

You definitely need infrastructure for that. Biking infrastructure in North American cities is.. not great. Definitely viable in some of the EU ones though.

Personally owned folding shopping carts exist.

For those to be effective, you do need good walking infrastructure.

I'd grab one of those except for the fact that I don't have a sidewalk connecting me to the grocery store. Totes end up working better for me as a result.

Used to do this in Belgium. Still less convenient than driving, and kinda annoying to use during a Canadian winter.

And again, more limited space.

I commute by walking (1h per day) and typically avoid the car when possible, but for groceries there’s just no way I’d go back to walking to and fro.

30 minutes is on the longer side, but I think part of the point of walkable grocery runs is that you don't buy a week's worth of food like you do in a car. When I lived in Paris, I'd happily pop out to buy whatever I needed for a single meal. I had so many grocery stores within a 5-minute walk. Now that I'm in SF, I buy for the week (on my bike with panier bags) because the grocery stores I like are far from my home.

As you have to carry everything, how often do you go shopping?

not who you were asking, but I walk to the store and carry my groceries home. Usually, twice a week or something. It's great. 10 minute walk each way, approximately, and never more than I can easily carry. I buy for two people. I'd go more often if I shopped for more. I do occasionally visit other stores - once or twice a month - because they have different selection of goods. To be fair, I'm still carrying the stuff because I walk or use a bus for most of my transportation needs.

It means my fridge can be smaller because I don't need to keep as much in there. It means it is really easy to shop whatever is on sale - I have two grocery stores near me. I rarely have vegetables that go bad because I can just buy the stuff I need. I can just stop on the way home from work if I'm working the day shift.

I did this for a while when I lived in the states, too, in a small town. I had a similar experience, but it was far less convenient and really only doable because I was in such a small town and lived alone.

Similar - realistically, unless you're stuck at home in a city, you can also plan to stop off somewhere on your way back from some event. If you mostly walk/public transport the overhead of this is very low.

If your events are regular, then you don't need to do the research each time either; and it becomes maybe an extra five or ten minutes.

You clearly have no family

yeah, I think people come at this from very different life expectations. It is hard to take a toddler, a weeks groceries, and 50lb bag of dog food on a bike or bus.

Living without a car is easily possible, lots of parts of europe do it. They do it by living in small aparments, consuming less with more staples

I have a family of four and we manage just fine. The kids aren't toddlers any more (which only means that we can't put everything in the bottom layer of the stroller), but when they come to the age where they eat a week's shopping in a single sitting they will be old enough to take over a few shopping trips on their own.

I clearly said I buy for two and would go more often if I shopped for more. Many, many people with families do this.

I'm in Norway. Vehicles are expensive, children (regardless of age) are used to going outside and going to the stores. It is a common situation in larger cities. Heck, elementary children are often enough at the store unsupervised. I'm not sure why you think a 20-30 minute car ride plus at least an hour at the store is worse than a 20 minute round trip to the store with a 10-15 minute store break is bad, even if it is a few times a week. And even that can be avoided by just spending a little time on your way home from work.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I live in NYC, with a grocery store a two minute walk away, a Target and Trader Joe's a three minute walk away, and a Whole Foods a four minute walk away. (and various bodegas within minutes as well)

I went to that grocery store twice yesterday (picked up a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water to go to the movies, then later some potatoes and sour cream for dinner). I'm going in a few minutes to get eggs for lunch. So three times in the last 24 hours :-)

It's not unusual, but most people can't afford to live in NYC.

You're reminding me of the Yogi Berra quote (paraphrasing): "New York is so expensive no one lives there anymore."

You're not wrong, but millions (literally) of people do afford to live in NYC. I live in Harlem, which is more fun and more affordable than many areas.

I didn't mean nobody lives there. I meant if you plucked random people from all over the country and told them to relocate to NYC, odds are they would need a massive income increase to survive. And even then, it would be touch-and-go for most.

I'm from Harlem, and other parts of NYC. I moved out to pursue a career in an industry that is relatively non-existent in the NYC metro area. If I moved back now I could probably afford it on my current salary. But there are no jobs there for what I do. And if there was a bigger tech industry in NYC the costs would likely be even higher.

Depends on how much we need. There are two car sharing stations next to the super markets when we need to stock up on long lasting basics, but I typically cover half a week (full family) in a trip. The nice thing is that when you absolutely need something (either for a recipe or when one of the kids has a sudden urgent urge) it's no big deal

Jesus no wonder Americans are so fat when they don’t even have strength enough to carry their shopping bags

It’s funny that you assume I’m a fat American. Don’t assume so much. And what does Jesus have to do with it.

I never assumed that you're fat. I have no idea what your BMI is. It was more a comment about Americans not being able to use their bodies to carry their own groceries. Of course being lacy and not able to do physical work can still mean that you're skinny. It wasn't a comment about you personally but about your culture.

I mean, you assume I'm American.

Ok but that doesn't come close to the variety of products you can buy online.

I think this is the point I was trying to make, but didn't make as clearly as I wanted.

Sure I could buy two or three different types of keyboards within walking distance, but none of them used my favorite mechanical switches. I was constantly facing choices where I would either need to travel by vehicle to a speciality store (train, bus or car), or I would order the item in. Judging by the flow of packages into my multi-residential building others were facing the same choice.

> none of them used my favorite mechanical switches

One of the major points(/claims?) of the OP article is that fewer choices is better, pointing to how Costco has just 4k SKUs (paragraphs 4, 5, 6, and some within later paragraphs). <shrug>

Sure, but 98% of what you buy is is either in the set of SKUs near you or substitutable for them. Near you only applies if you live among actual density of course.

Ironically I found my current keyboard (a quite nice Cherry) in a store near me. For specialty parts where it doesn't make sense to have to them sitting around in stores everywhere online shopping is still allowed, but I only need to order something every few weeks

> Doesn't matter whether I need to stock up on milk, vegetables or hand peeled shrimp in garlic sauce

I don't even consider those when shopping online.

A lot of trendy ideas have come out of the internet, but I don't think any of them have achieved the religious status of "fuckcars" (aka walkable neighborhoods).

Its not that the ideas are bad or wholly wrong, but their is a sizeable contingent of followers who believe that walkable living is a silver bullet that fixes everything. Everything.

So to someone who happens to fall into contact with an evangelist, they sit and listen for a few minutes, and then come away like they just learned who the real God is. Any societal or personal illness you can think of, the Church of Fuckcars has a confident and surface level "makes sense" answer.

I think it would still be a vast improvement if online shopping was relegated back to only a narrow set of specialty goods.

And this is ignoring the possibility of ordering less time sensitive specialty goods to a relevant store, where they can arrive on an existing shipment and share an errand with whatever else you might want from that store.

I suppose for the absolute majority of use cases, much less SKUs have to be present at store with immediate availibility for purchase, and the rest could be ordered online with delivery to the walkable store, resulting in efficient delivery and little effort required from customer, which isn't bad from health perspective.

I don't think counting SKUs gives you a very useful metric. For example my local grocery store has a whole isle of different flours. Sounds great but its just a couple of brands each having their own interchangeable version of five or so standard flours with barely anything outside that range. That's not to stay that having choice for the "same" product is never useful but clearly not all additional SKUs provide the same amount of additional useful choice.

Much more expensive when you have stores in the city so much cheaper to buy in larger surfaces in the suburbs

This is complicated, though, by the question of how you get there: suburbs may have lower land prices but everyone buys more of it and needs the expense of having a private car (usually one per adult). In the region where I live, 20-35% of household income is spent on cars and that doesn’t include the expense of the land devoted to them or road maintenance.

If you live in a dense environment where you don’t need a car because walking and transit cover your normal life, recouping that much money often more than pays for the higher cost per square foot of building space.

Then you just transfer that money to the landlords, and then remove the flexibility and convenience of leaving that city anytime you want.

30% of New Yorkers spend > 50% of their income on rent.

> 30% of New Yorkers spend > 50% of their income on rent.

My point was that’s a bit less than the median suburbanite here spends on housing and cars combined. That doesn’t mean either option can’t be improved but that these comparisons should compare the whole lifestyle cost. Otherwise you’re making the same mistake Americans do saying they pay much less in taxes than Europeans without including the additional spending we make for healthcare, college, childcare, etc.

> In the region where I live, 20-35% of household income is spent on cars and that doesn’t include the expense of the land devoted to them or road maintenance.

Statistically, a large amount of that is beyond what they need most of the time (whether size, quality, or range).

Totally, but it’s interesting how basically everyone I know who moved to the suburbs to save money pays roughly as much for housing (things like lawn care services add up) plus an order of magnitude more on cars.

I don't know about you, but I would rather not have stores near my home, for obvious reasons like noise, traffic, trash, etc.

There is less traffic and hence less noise when people have stores at a walkable distance.

I doubt this is true. I walk to the store when I quickly need to get eggs or milk or something random I forgot. But I’ll drive to do the weekly grocery trip because I can’t carry food for a week (for a family) on my own without driving.

It’s almost like the AI answering “should I walk or drive to the nearest carwash”. Sure I can walk, I just can’t complete the grocery shopping lol.

https://www.google.com/search?q=grocery cart

If you live within walking distance of a good shop, you likely would make more trips instead of buying in bulk once a week.

I don’t but YMMV of course. Maybe if I was single, but it’s just inefficient to go multiple times a week.

And then there’s heavier things to carry (drinks).

> Maybe if I was single, but it’s just inefficient to go multiple times a week.

You go with the kids and/or wife and you do it on the way to or back from work or to/from school drop off.

You don't do dedicated grocery runs, they're detours on top of your existing trips.

It doesn’t solve the packaging problem. I live in a walkable place, and the sheer amount of single use packaging is utterly insane. They’re different problems that both need addressed.

It's not only about distance but being walkable, I gave a supermarket close to my house but you have cross a street with no crosswalks ( I think the closest would be like 20) instead of just the 5 minutes walk

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.

Home delivery being a first world luxury is a joke. Delivery is a labor intensive low-skill activity. It's fifty times better in developing countries, at least in the cities, where the marginal cost of sending someone to your house is so much lower.

Unless you meant it's a luxury only in the first world, which I could get behind, especially food delivery.

Food Delivery is a First World Luxury - meaning that it's the only scenario in which the system functions reasonably (aka it's inherently expensive, a true economic luxury). Food Delivery is Cheap in places where the system is completely defunct, it's not a luxury it's a sign of failure.

Agreed with this statement. I've lived all over the world and have seen the wide differences.

I still remember living in a large suburb in India (not in the city; people had cars). We sat down for dinner and I asked if they had any ketchup. The host picked up the phone, spoke for 10 seconds, and 5 minutes later a boy knocked on the door with nothing but a single bottle in his hand. There wasn't even a grocery store close to the house that I could see.

Never living in any top-rated US cities have I seen anything close to that.

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

The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are. No, home delivery is not a luxury, it just works really poorly in your country.

India is going through a 15 minute or less delivery boom right now. It's gotten so popular that the government is asking companies to not promise 10 minutes because that would endanger drivers.

The standard is China is 30 minutes home delivery.

It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. Just someone managed to convince you that what you've got is better than what exists out there already.

The comments here always blow me away by how totally out of touch with the rest of the world many posters are.

Yes, home delivery is a luxury, and it 'does not work' in India - it's only evidence of an utterly broken system.

It's a sign of radical inefficiency and economic failure that labour is being used for those kinds of things because it's extremely unproductive.

"It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything. "

--> it's entirely about 'loopholes' <---

Food delivery is not 'efficient' in India - it's the least efficient process imaginable - that can only work because 'loopholes' - marginal cost of labour is cheap aka no rights, no standards, high unemployment, low wages, externalizations and corruption, sketchy taxation, safety, social insurance, healthcare, emissions, food safety etc.

The only place in the world where 'Food Delivery Works' - is for rich people in First World countries.

That is the only scenario in which labour, rights, wages, taxation, non-corruption safety etc. are all met and the 'comparative value' (aka price) still works out.

That's it - the top 10% in the Denmark etc. can have their food delivered in a way that is 'economically efficient' (maybe >10% for some things) - aka those are the only people 'willing to pay a true fair market price when all of the externalizations are built into the model'.

We're making some progress with automation, probably China are leaders there but it's still not closed to automated and won't be because the marginal cost of labour is still low.

How is a delivery service unproductive? Division of labor is one of the most fundamental principles in our economic system. You being able to do it yourself in your free time doesn't make it unproductive. You could also make your own clothes, that doesn't make the clothes industry an unproductive endeavor.

You state things as fact without citing a reason.

For the person getting the item, it is [extremely] productive.

You are correct, and the problem is an embarrassing lack of understanding and imagination on the part of the people criticizing you. An entire car dedicated to delivering one meal at a time, directly to the recipient, should be exorbitantly expensive to cover labor and resource costs for the driver; the artificially low prices customers pay are borne by drivers, who see essentially zero return in the long run when their profits are netted against vehicle costs.

What actually works is delivery of multiple orders to a semi-central location for last-mile pick-up by the customers. In a sense, this is what restaurants and grocery stores are. But to retain the variety, readiness, etc. of delivery, obviously some new solution must come around.

> It has nothing to do with loopholes on anything.

Not sure about India but delivery in China has everything to do with loopholes.

No health care and social security for most, and for the few who have the company artificially fake income for tax evasion.

Working conditions are the usual 12~14 hours a day with 2~4 days off a month.

The electric bike they are riding are dangerously over-limits and categorizes as motorcycles, which are actually banned in most big cities. Of the few that allow it, Shanghai for example, you need to pay ~$70k for registration alone.

In the US the situation is better but not free from problems, for example the first job for a lot of the illegal immigrants who can not speak English is package sorting with similar working schedule, but at least it pays good enough.

For some of the things I buy, I prefer just doing online, because it's often not easy to figure out where one particular thing is in the store. But when I have time, I do enjoy browsing in the store and discovering new things to buy that I never thought of before.

Home delivery in the U.S. is expensive because the labor cost is expensive, and because population is generally more spread out geographically. Cities in China and India have home delivery with much lower cost. But with the advance of robot technology, maybe not too far in future home delivery in U.S. could have lower cost too.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

this isn't even close to true and falls apart in a number of ways, the most popular vehicle in america right now (F-series truck) is woefully inefficient for just about everything

there are people who regularly go out of their way to drive to their favorite store for like 1-2 special items, people bring their dogs along on trips for companionship and leave them sitting in an air conditioned idling car while they shop

individuals are irrationally inefficient in dozens of ways that large businesses root out, for better or worse

Special items they can't get off Amazon, I presume? So they need to take that trip anyway.

No one is driving an hour out of their way for groceries.

And even the F150 truck example: if they are driving 30 miles to work, but 10 miles to Costco and 25 miles to home (Costco being 5 miles out of the way.), that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.

Integrating routes throughout the day that matches your driving habits is a basic adulting task that everyone does, and has reasonably high efficiency.

I'm surprised you don't know any inefficient people! I know many. A friend drives 15 minutes out of the way because that grocery store is a little less crowded (they're the same chain). They've probably been doing it for a decade.

> that F150 going 5 extra miles is more efficient than a Prius driving 25 miles from a Costco to their home.

but that's not what's happening, Amazon isn't driving a Prius to your individual home then back to the warehouse... it's driving to a hundred people on an algorithmically optimized route. They do this because efficiency at scale makes them more profit.

Individual people make inefficient preferential decisions all the time, because the incentive to measure and improve these things is too low to bother on an individual scale.

The human driving to work, various activities, to the grocery store (and wherever else) isn't doing it for just one item like Amazon though.

The vast majority of those Amazon packages are for one thing. When the inefficient pickup truck comes back with a whole weeks worth of $200+ groceries, that further increases the efficiency of the home buyer.

It's unlikely that a daily commuter would go to Costco for just one gallon of milk or a few batteries. But I know from my Amazon deliveries that single items are delivered all the time.

-------

Anyone grabbing just some extra milk or toothpaste is likely grabbing it at an even more convenient store, like 7-11 (mostly because you can't buy one toothpaste at Costco lol).

Amazon generally doesn't do single item delivery for perishable groceries though, Fresh has a $100 minimum to avoid fees, for example.

Non-perishables are fine on a single-unit purchase because again, they're not just going to your house, they're going to dozens in your area every single day.

I know where you're coming from, but there's a reason this whole model exists, and it's not because it costs more.

Well sure. But Costcos model is clear to anyone who visits it. You only have to look at all the other shopping carts surrounding you to get an idea of how things work.

Costco shoppers buy a lot at a time. Because Costco forces you to buy 4 tubes of Toothpaste, 24 eggs (or 60 eggs), minimum 1 gallon of milk (no half gallons or pints), and like 20 lbs of rice / 10kg for the Europeans who havent been here and like 3000 meters of plastic wrap.

For Costco, the efficiency is the shear size of the shopping carts and shear mass of the goods sold at a time.

------

You literally can't buy only one bar of soap or one toothbrush like you can from Amazon.com or other stores. There's efficiency here because of simple mass.

In contrast, I can look out and see the Amazon packages in my neighbors doors. It's all single items across the neighborhood.

I honestly don't know where the nearest Costco is but it's nowhere convenient.

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.

Put solar panels over ‘em

Put the entire building over 'em. And solar panels over the building. The Target near my house is built on top of its parking lot. I don't have to cross an entire parking lot, dodging traffic, when I go there by bike or on foot. And it's on a bus line. What's not to like?

In most places in the US, land is cheap enough that paved surface parking is cheaper than building the store above a parking garage. In central urban areas, it's not, so they build up.

The exepense is what's not to like. Far cheaper to build a single-story warehouse + outside parking lot than a second story above a parking garage.

Only because stores that have large parking lots are in cheap land areas that are hard to reach by bus, bike, or anything except a car really. Where one can comfortably walk to a store, giant parking lots are awful.

Indeed, and in defense of Costco, you don't go there by bus or bike anyway because you'll be coming home with 200 pounds of stuff. Target is different for me. I hop in there for one or two odd things that I need, likewise the nearby grocery store. A side effect is that I don't waste money or space on stuff that I don't need, because I can always hop over there in a jiffy if I do need it.

In lieu of Costco, my family buys all of the big and non-perishable stuff at a giant discount supermarket that's closer to the edge of town, or at least it was until other stuff got built up around it. But we try to minimize the number of trips.

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.

This is in comparison to the delivery center methodology by e commerce where the land use for delivery driver is somewhere further away from what is needed for community events, and every delivery truck is filled to the brim, way more full than what each consumer vehicle would be filled up with?

Big trucks filled with stuff delivering a few things to each of many places is less efficient than personal cars delivering big loads with lots of things to one place.

Your SUV with a Costco haul is probably driving less distance per person and carrying MORE per person while being a smaller more efficient vehicle.

Amortizing fuel per item or distance per item I'm betting the personal vehicle wins while also being better able to deliver perishable/frozen items.

(also the likes of Amazon are terrible to employees in order to make margin while Costco is the opposite)

The problem isn’t the efficiency of car use, it’s car dependency. If retail is only available in the huge units it’s impossible to access those without a car. And if people end up owning cars, even against their will, they will end up using those daily.

The goal is to avoid the car-centric lifestyle, not to optimise it. Maybe that is a totally utopian idea in the us, though.

owning cars against their will? that’s just absurd

if your objection stands even when the effects you claim to be your motivation aren’t a problem you’re just a zealot and should reevaluate your priorities

If you don’t want a car, don’t get one. There are plenty of places where you can live an entirely walkable life.

Stop trying to reorganize society around your preferences.

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

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.

The restaurant was one of those “all you can eat” salad bars. It closed during the early part of the pandemic and had been vacant for several months with no buyers, if I recall correctly.

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

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

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.

> 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?

What?

I think to clarify your point, curbside pickup is the curb of the store/warehouse, not the curb of your house, correct? I think the netizen above thought it was your house's curbside?

That's correct, with curbside pickup you drive to the store, pop open your trunk, and in principle someone from the store's staff is ready and waiting to verify your identity and then load your pre-staged shopping right into your trunk, and you drive off.

So you still have to go to the store but it can be an in-and-out if everything works.

Ah. I've always interpreted curvside pick up as home delivery :)

If I had a nickel for every time an 18 wheeler dropped something off at my house I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t much, but it’s weird it happened twice.

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.

If I'm grabbing a couple items, I can be in and out of my Costco on the way back from work in 10m if the timing is right.

But yeah the wrong day, and it's 30m at least.

People go to Costco and only get a couple of things and not a cart load? You've got more self control than I.

I find it easier to do when I bike to Costco _without_ my trailer.

(I have two good sized panniers and can end up with ~$150 of foodstuffs packed well in them no problem. More often than not, I get less than that and add more stops to the trip to pick up from 3-4 places while out. And I get my exercise while I'm at it.)

When I lived closer to a Costco and had my membership, I used to do what I called cartless runs. Go into Costco, only buy what you can carry. Usually just the thing I needed and maybe one or two other things.

I do a similar thing. Stop at Costco to fill the gas tank, then buy a few things with no shopping cart.

Prevents wasting money on things I don't need, and makes the trip quick.

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.

We’re an hour out and I had to do a deep dive and finally admit to myself that the savings just really weren’t there, including membership and gas.

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

I live 5 min from my closest Costco, and I go 2-3 times per week for a handful of items. It’s like any other store.

I actually saw a man check out at Costco once with just a chicken and some milk what a legend.

Did he at least get a hot dog on the way out?!

That was me

Depends on your Costco, I can make a 10m run after work (to from parking lot) if the day is good.

I hit Costco once a month just because they have the only pharmacy near me that always has my prescription medications in stock. Then I hit the bakery section for the blueberry muffins, speed through self-checkout, and then get a hot dog and scroll Hacker News or something like that while I eat it.

In and out in 30 minutes at most. But I've done the same thing at Ikea. You can just go there for the meatballs! You don't have to buy furniture too!

What? Like you plan a day of shopping at Costco? That's insane to me.

I have never spent more than 30 minutes inside a Costco.

Why the rush? Why even plan? Just go in and wander around without a mission.

Interesting how people view shopping at Costco differently. My goal is to spend the least amount of time as possible in there.

This thread was similarly eye opening to me. But it explains why that store is always packed, apparently people just do weekend trips to Costco.

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.

> Finally, Costco delivers

Yes, via a service called Instacart.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

No wonder Amazon decided to basically create their own logistic chain.

Fedex/UPS cost for a single package is roughly ~$13.95 (this was ~5 years ago when I was working in ecommerce) and even if Amazon was getting a huge discount from them for the volume they do, it was still probably nowhere near $1/package.

That 13.95 price includes airplane rides too, it isn't just the last mile delivery.

999/1000 times if you track the package, it was going ground on a freighter.

That price is generally way too low to include air mail.

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”

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

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.

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

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

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.

You aren't seeing the entire picture, though, so it makes it hard to understand the efficiency calculation.

How full are those Amazon trucks, and how many deliveries are they each making on their route? If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency.

They aren't optimizing for "fewest truck trips to the block", they are optimizing for total cost. As long as we price in all the externalities properly (which we don't, but we could and should), then Amazon is going to be strongly incentivized to create the most efficient delivery schedule.

That may include many trucks running to the same location, or it may not. You can't tell which will be most resource efficient just by observing.

> If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency.

Right but a truck could be full of not 100 packages for 100 houses, but 100 packages for 70 houses. Both are full, but one will require fewer miles driven, hence be more (fuel/environmental impact) efficient (not necessarily time efficient).

They are optimizing for time and cost, not message board clout :)

They presort regionally and the trucks at the delivery stations are loaded with assigned containers/pouches of packages. It doesn’t make sense to hold a truck for a pouch and doesn’t really save anything to have ground covered twice.

They do other stuff too. They schlep heavy stuff on UPS, and hazardous or liquids usually go USPS.

> Both are full, but one will require fewer miles driven

That isn't really true, though, because these houses exist in the real world and aren't just buckets to be visited.

Your conclusion would only be true if houses are all equidistant from the warehouse. That truck with the 100 packages for 70 houses is going to have to drive by more than just 70 houses to complete its route. It would not add additional fuel or miles to stop at those houses while it goes.

Yup, exactly. My gut says we don’t price the externalities correctly, so Amazon is able to route for faster deliveries (“Get it by 5am if you order by 10pm”).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Yeah I botched that. It's around 1.5kw/mile for an ICE car.

And ~0.25 kWh/mi for an EV

math checks out, assuming typical car is flying

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?

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

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.

I agree. It depends on how well the pickup points are located. Often Amazon can win. They also use EV trucks, and create jobs, so there are advantages.

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

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.

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.

A few years ago I visited a small coffee plantation in Panama. The owner told us that Costco was the best customer for coffee growers by far, in terms of fair price, reliability, and prompt payment.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Carbon offset credits bought by Bezos' Yacht holdco.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

Amazon largely being a dumb marketplace, a faster-shipping AliExpress/Temu, really makes them easy to drop if you find that shipping speed isn’t super important for those types of products. You can just go straight to the source and cut Amazon out entirely.

It’s not only a faster Temu for e-junk. It can also deliver your paper wipes and bananas in the same order.

Could you just place 3 different orders to 3 different vendors? Sure.

Could you just drive to the grocery for 2 bananas and then to Costco for the big discounted paper wipes? Sure.

But likely you will not. Which is why Amazon pulls a Trillion in revenue.

In Q1 2026, AWS was 60% (roughly) of Amazon’s operating income.

I’m not so sure their retail piece is the part that’s making them big money.

If they were targeting 60% margins in grocery they would be bankrupt.

Retail has famously razor thin margins.

But their cash flow came in handy when AWS needed 300B in cash for gpus. Nobody could lend them that amount.

I’m familiar with the margins in retail (my parents ran a retail store their entire lives).

My point wasn’t that they don’t do a lot of volume; it’s that their retail business is not what’s driving their profit, and I don’t believe it’s growing.

I wouldn’t be surprised (though have not looked) if DoorDash (with DashMart), Uber Eats (which does more than just food), and Instacart have eaten significantly into Amazon’s revenue by solving the “get it to me” problem even faster.

In the US last mile is super hard because of the super high wages. The only way to work around it is volume per delivery person.

If you do 2 deliveries per hour (like Uber Eats / door dash), you pay essentially $5/order (assuming a super low us wage of $10/hour and no equipment cost/ gas).

So no in the US, Amazon is not threatened by such delivery services.

Now if you go to China, the equation flips. Which is why Amazon failed completely.

Thats the story they tell investors because investors love a growing tech company. But scratch the surface a bit and you see retail shoveling most of it's profit into purchasing AWS.

Do you have anything to indicate this? A source or any analysis?

When some of your products are fraudulent all your products are fraudulent. Amazon has zero trust from me these days. It’s the equivalent of an overpriced garage sale.

You do you, I and most others don't have issues, hence their revenue.

I've tried Amazon for groceries on this line of thinking. Verdict: it's terrible. Their groceries are priced uncompetitively and after a few times having some stranger pick my produce (and doing an offensively bad job of it) I don't do that anymore.

So since I'm 100% definitely going to the grocery store for produce, at minimum, this whole concept fails. May as well pick up the ziploc bags and paper towels as well while I'm there.

The competitive advantage is being able to order in the same shipment as all your other stuff, and it should also obviate the need to go to the store too, saving time and likely money by not being enticed to buy other things while you're there. Even if I didn't use Amazon I'd still use grocery delivery such as what Costco offers for example.

I don't think my point got through: purchasing vegetables and fruits, essential staple foods, involves some amount of discernment. It's not like grabbing a USB cable out of the box of identical USB cables.

Passing this task off to someone who's essentially the lowest bidder and doesn't care about picking acceptable quality goods, in my repeated experience, does not work. They pick unusable goods, wasting my time and money.

I've had to be taught this lesson an embarrassing number of times before it really sunk in, but it finally did. I'll not that this applies getting delivery from local stores. Grocery pickers are simply not aligned with your interests.

Maybe you are looking for only exceptional produce because I've never had an issue, in looks or quality. There are even sellers who purposefully sell you produce that does not look good but otherwise tastes fine, such as Misfits Market.

I see this said a lot, but Amazon products I buy actually work (even if the quality of obviously laughable - it actually performs the function and won't break any time soon to justify a 100x price increase for something more...artisan.

The only order I did for temu, everything arrived completely DOA

This is an important point for me. I am too lazy (too much executive dysfunction) to research products. I trust Costco to do the product research and offer us a good quality/price match up.

Return policy is also pain free. You can pretty much return anything you don't like. Just take it back.

They used to have amazingly generous return policy for electronics. Since some people abused it, bit tighter now.

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.

Incredible quote, thank you for posting it

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.

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

Depends on who "you" are. A project manager might be better off. An individual contributor is probably better off using the right tool for the job.

Hum... You want to say that tailwind is that standard, and some place can just avoid any css by using it?

You want to say that there shouldn’t be standards because tailwind has limitations?

You can put tailwind on the CV

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?

> The idea that a css library makes or breaks what a project is capable of is kinda... IDK... laughable?

Then you didn’t understand my point, because it didn’t make or break a project. Making or breaking a project wasn’t my point.

Who works with Tailwind? The dev writing code or the product person demanding that Tailwind be used in code they’ll never maintain or even look at?

Okay then I still don't know your point outside of wanting to take a "stand" against a CSS library.

You need to write more clear + intentional because you aren't clear in what you're saying at all.

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

They also ship a lot of items.

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).

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.)

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

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

>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.

Probably thinking of HomeGrocer or WebVan (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)

I think it was WebVan and you are right (but I am not entirely sure) but thanks for writing the comment, appreciate it :-D

> (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)

ironic, does make you think if the clock has reached full circle in terms of bubbles but there are just so many similarities within the dot com bubble and AI bubble(TM) which are just so hard to ignore.

I would have said cloud and AI but dot com probably works too.

> when Amazon was first established, one of the largest loopholes that they had used..

I thought for sure you were going to mention USPS “media” rates which allowed Amazon to ship books very cheaply.

> I thought for sure you were going to mention USPS “media” rates which allowed Amazon to ship books very cheaply.

Can you share any articles talking about that? Looks like Amazon had so many tricks up its sleeves/loopholes in its arsenal. I'd be curious to read more about it!

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 :-)

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

> 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

Sounds Costco not paying for externalities.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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

Yeah that’s pretty not bad. They just need to deposit them along the interstate system.

Can you explain why? Non-american here :)

It’s a chain of gas stations along interstate highways, either mostly or entirely in the south. Many are contenders for, and one of them is, the world’s largest gas station— not hyperbole. One has 120 gas pumps and they do so much volume, they have a team of attendants running around outside to deal with card/pump problems. They’re open 24/7/365 and constantly have dozens of fresh, made on-site BBQ items and sides ready to go for very reasonable prices, roasted nuts and other snacky confections being made fresh constantly, plus a huge line of high quality prepackaged snacks, a full clothing store worth of merch bearing Buc-ee the beaver, and a separate convenience store that itself would make an incredible American gas station.

In Florida, driving up through Georgia, the billboard advertisements start 200 miles away.

Truly shocking thing is that it’s genuinely high quality (considering the venue) and reasonably priced. It’s exactly the sort of product American capitalism is supposed to produce, but almost never does.

There are lots of videos on YouTube.

>In Florida, driving up through Georgia, the billboard advertisements start 200 miles away.

There's even a billboard 979 miles away in Arizona: https://stock.adobe.com/images/eloy-az-nov-23-2024-buc-ee-s-...

Wow. I spent decades of my life living in the US but apparently the wrong parts. Now I'm living in a different continent but I hope one day I'll have the opportunity to experience this part of America.

Happy Independence Day!

Being from urban New England, which is about as geographically and culturally distant from Buc-ees country as the US gets, I first patronized one at 45. A distinctly American experience, indeed. I’m normally not big on rampant consumerism but, I like them.

Welcome to Costco, I love you.

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

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

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

Go within an hour or so of opening.

I used to work right across the st from one and would spend most of my shift looking out at their parking lot and you could see it get more packed throughout the day, thin out a little bit in the early afternoon and then slowly drain towards closing.

It's always least crowded right at open and then an hour (? or maybe two?) later they open for the "regular" people and once that's the case, it fills quickly.

> Go within an hour or so of opening.

Hah. It’s such a PITA that Costco includes an hour earlier entry on the top tier membership.

I regularly shop at Costco and its usually one of five which ever is more convenient at the time. In all of my experience with Costco there is exactly one that has shitty parking, the rest are fine. That is if you have enough wrinkles in your brain to notice that in front of the store there 10 cars waiting for spot and parking a little bit in a back is easier.

I often see people cruising around still looking for parking while I already managed: to park, walk to the storefront, get myself a hot dog, eat my hot dog, grab a cart.

I park in the back any time I go to Costco. the locations nearest to me are always packed to the brim. even the sort of "secret" extra spots that are behind the building and could be considered employee spots.

My local locations are busy even during those times. it's a constant battle.

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.

Agreed. The entire store is wired to encourage impulse buying and keep you from making rational decisions about whether you'll be able to finish that 3lb container of guacamole before it goes bad.

I don't see how Costco prevents you from making rational decisions. If anything the incredibly plain atmosphere (wide open spaces, no flashing lights, no loud music) feels much more calm than the typical retail experience.

My average food waste from a Costco trip is significantly lower than other grocery stores.

Also Costco has a really annoying "treasure hunt" strategy where goods are re-arranged around the store trying to get you to explore aisles (aka get lost and waste time) to impulse buy more stuff.

Other stores (Target, Walmart, etc) will let you look up the item's aisle in their app and be considerate of your time.

Costco's app will let you search inventory, but not let you see location or quantity.

I love Costco, but I hate that they constantly move shit!

It's because they are so busy. Yeah, costco is the one store I go to that people seem to have 0 spatial awareness. Every time I go, someone will just stop moving in the middle of the aisle, creating backups, without any shame. But I bet if your other local grocery stores were as busy as costco, they would have the same issues.

That's interesting because my experience is the opposite. Costco can swallow up an irrational number of people and still be pretty smooth inside. The parking lot can be packed and when you walk in the door it turns out to be fine.

Walmart, on the other hand, is the absolute pinnacle of shitty shopper behavior. People being rude, pushy, completely oblivious standing in the middle of the aisle, etc. At least in my area, Costco attracts a different kind of clientele.

"the absolute worst shopping experience I can think of"

Indeed:

* Short opening hours

* checking the membership card at the entrance

* cell phone salesmen inside

* item locations change randomly

* items randomly disappear for weeks at a time, as if Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of restocking

* waiting at the exit for someone to check your receipt

* for a while, they'd check your receipt at the self-checkout and then check it again at the exit

* 1970s level IT, inaccurate inventory information

Microsoft used to give a cash bonus for patents; I imagine Costco has a bonus program for new ideas to make the shopping experience worse. Some ideas:

* throw lit firecrackers into the crowd

* pour oil on the floor so people slip

* complete darkness inside the store

* every 10th person at the checkout has their credit card cut into pieces

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.

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

> 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

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

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

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

Sadly this is not the case anymore these days.

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

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.

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.

As someone who lives in central San Francisco: Costco is amazing with a cargo bike (or Waymo off-peak).

Haven't had Amazon Prime for 2+ years and don't miss it, but would definitely miss my Costco membership.

Agreed. We have two Costco's within 6 minutes driving distance, my wife visits them once a week, like Walmart and Whole Foods. We also shop regularly on Amazon. We don't buy weeks of food at a time.

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.

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.

I mean I'm also in Australia and given how few Costcos we have over here, it pretty much is an event because it's not on your way anywhere, you generally have to make a special trip of a decent distance so you want to make it worth the trip.

I think I've been like... three times?

I do have a mate that makes pretty regular trips, but even then they're just that, trips to Costco for some specific purpose or product.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

It could be an underground system, like sewerage. However, noise might be an issue.

Objection: most large cities haven't been designed. They grew, usually starting because they had a significant transportation advantage (seaport, seaport + river, river junction, river + pass).

A lot of transportation is required into cities to deliver food and supplies into supermarkets and then homes. If you improved that you'd have more space and time for fun

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

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.

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

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

This doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. I think we sometimes forget the ease (in terms of scale and cost) of standing up a massive astroturfing campaign.

That said, I don't think this particular comment has the flavor, tone, or message I'd expect, and it does seem to be a genuine HN poster.

And the kicker is that this could be an ai-agent doing the astroturfing. Now that even the common man can run local ai-agents that can post.

I mean did you see the completely unironic thread where discussors were mentioning "$50 Tees" as the lowest acceptable end of quality?

You are absurdly naive if you think they’re incapable or unlikely to do such a thing. Half the comments and threads on this site are ads at this point.

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

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.

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.

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

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)

Also, I just want to step back and actually give Costco some props here for their brand loyalty. Inshallah, when I have a 400 Billion market cap company and someone writes a fawningblog post about how awesome I am from a social-benefit perspective and how socialist mayors should learn from me…it’ll be the skeptical comments that will be suspected as paid shills for my $2T competitor!

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?

for many, this is a fun activity

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

What on earth is the point of limiting membership to such random and specific groups?

Government Regulations[1]

> According to the Costco U.K. website, memberships to those stores are only available to certain groups of people. Since the store is classified as a wholesaler, this complies with the U.K.'s wholesale store laws. These dictate that wholesale stores are only accessible to those working for select business sectors.

[1] https://www.thedailymeal.com/1483679/costco-uk-membership-re...

It's funny when quintessential American business models bump up against foreign regulations and they have to find workarounds to keep in line with the law while trying to stay true to character.

Not long ago I was in a Five Guys in France. There was a sign saying that by law free refills are not allowed, please scan the qr code to fill your cup. I guess there was a qr code on the receipt, I don't know, as far as I can tell there was no enforcement and people just kept filing up their drinks like true Americans. Let freedom ring, I guess.

TIL there is Five Guys in France (I thought they were only in the US)

Some in Canada too!

In the UK as well.

They have an equally baroque list of people who can vouch for you in passport applications:

https://www.gov.uk/countersigning-passport-applications/acce...

Reminiscent of Borges' list: https://thewhippet.org/the-whippet-134-those-that-tremble/

USA Costco does also have a business wholesale side

FWIW you can use your US membership in the UK.

I ordered a dishwasher from Costco UK last week.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

Costco stuff is quantity and quality

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

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

> 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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

“costco delivery” is basically amazon with a higher minimum spend and no perishables. “costco same day” is delivery costco via instacart, with adjusted prices. i use costco delivery a lot because a good portion of what i buy there can be delivered with it

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

yes, I started buying with miles because Amazon was giving me more value for those than my current bank.

They often have promotions which can make this very lucrative. “spend at least 1 mile, get 40% off” etc

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

And regular grocery stores like Kroger do much the same thing. Aside from picking out individual produce items, and even then a lot of times it is per-item pricing. Nearly all of the by-weight stuff is pre-labeled

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Highly recommend the Acquired podcast and their Costco episode if people want to dive deeper into the history of this company.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco

yep. super good. I've recommended it a ton.

the one on Trader Joe's is also excellent.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s safe to default to America. Anyways, an SUV is not a sign of wealth in a crowded city. It’s typically the opposite - they can’t afford a car for the city, so they use the one they already have. If you really want to use that idea, you’d default to trucks. 90% are $100,000 pavement princesses.

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)

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

That's not a service they offer everywhere.

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

Just have the fee be $0 then. Beats having the shelves be all locked up because people be stealing everything.

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.

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

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.

Ok that makes sense to me, so you do this once or twice per year?

I used to buy a lot of olive oil in canisters in Italy when on vacation. Just can’t match the quality with what you get on the open market here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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?

I get 6% back instead of 5% with my Amazon card which is more than enough to incentivize me in many situations.

I don’t know how much they are saving. On the one hand they save a stop (they aren’t saving a van as there are likely already vans delivering near by). on the other they have to hold on to stock longer waiting for things to all be ready. It costs money to store things

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

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.

I got this when I told Gemini "post office loss retirement prepaid" because of other articles I have read that I cannot remember.

"In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). This law forced the USPS to do something virtually no other government agency or private corporation has to do: prefund its retiree healthcare benefits 75 years into the future[0]. Essentially, they were legally required to fast-track billions of dollars into a fund to pay for the future retirement health benefits of current employees, and theoretically even future employees who hadn't been hired yet."

[0]: https://apwu.org/the-usps-fairness-act/

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.

The US Post Office is funded by its own revenue, I'm pretty sure.

It still enjoys many government mandated monopolistic advantages.

See: American Letter Mail Company.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm surprised e-commerce is still under 17 percent.

It makes me want to check my purchasing habits to see if I'm around that mark.

Cars & car parts, food, gas and clothes are still purchased almost exclusively in person. Those are each a massive percentage of spending.

https://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/marts_current.pdf

That tracks. I wouldn't trust e-gas either.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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...

> 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.

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.

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

> 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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Walmart does this too, and it's one of the worst experiences/value-propositions I've ever experienced. It might be better in the US but in Canada it's expensive, poor quality and painful: pick three.

Walmart stores are huge though, particulary the SuperWalmarts with supermarket and department store combined. Aldi is compact, maybe 4 or 5 aisles, a refrigerated section, and a frozen food section.

God I wish we had Aldi in the PacNW. I know, TJ's is technically owned by Aldi Nord, but it's really not the same.

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

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.

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.

Enforcing appropriate sized consumption is a terrifying thought.

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.

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.

In which case you buy a smaller quantity elsewhere. I don’t know anyone who shops exclusively at Costco. Most people buy large quantities of the things they use a lot of at Costco, and also visit grocery stores for other things. Besides, most of what they sell has a long shelf life. With the exception of their very limited produce and Dairy, just about every other perishable food they sell is freezable.

The people I know who shop at Costco aren’t throwing away half of what they buy. They are very often families that are actually pretty efficient about using what they buy. Big families, restaurants, remote work camps (I live in Canada) are the people I see completely filling carts and SUVs at Costco. For them, shopping at Costco is a way to avoid waste in terms of small packages and multiple small trips.

While there are certainly people that shop there and waste what they buy, it’s a pretty overused exaggeration to say that it is any more than a small fraction of their buyers. If you want examples of frivolous consumption, a barebones warehouse store selling staples in bulk is kinda the opposite of that in many ways.

Do you really think families waste half of what they buy at Costco?

Come on now.

I said nothing about that. But there are tipping points where buying too much is actually wasteful.

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.

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.

I've done the A/B test. Costco saves my family 25% across just food, ignoring other stuff I get there (batteries, shirts, jackets, shoes, underwear, deodorant, etc.)

You're pointing out that you need to plan properly to bulk shop, since you're necessarily modeling future consumption over days/weeks across multiple people, but that's different than over-consumption. It means you have to be analytical and plan, but that's exactly how we do it.

I despise the city living lifestyle, where folks jam themselves in tiny grocery stores to buy 2oz containers of jam and mustard because they don't have enough room to actually fit the food they want. My sister and dad live this way in NYC, and it's annoying as hell every single time I visit them. Wanna throw a meal together? First step: leave the apartment.

There are four Costco's in NYC, all but one in working class neighborhoods, and full of large families getting deals.

Yeah, they're in Manhattan. Wasn't trying to paint NYC as homogeneous, just wanted to ground my opinions with experience folks can understand.

I know there's at least one Costco in Brooklyn

I lived two blocks from a Costco in Manhattan for quite some time.

I totally get where you are coming from, just offering a counter. I have observed that the packed like tinned sardines is one kind of life, typically lived by transient folks who desire to live in the hippest neighborhoods, get gouged, live in shitboxes, and then move on and say "I needed more space and convenience", when the space and convenience was always there, just not next to an Equinox.

> 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?

Minor point: you have a whole cow slaughtered annually.

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.

Well, that’s what I’m getting at. There’s no reason I can’t go to the store every day - I pass right by a lot of grocery stores. I don’t want to go in them or even think about buying stuff any more than I have to - it’s tedious. I want to always have almost everything I’d want on-hand.

I think the the GP would love this too if it was practical- but it’s not for him. I’d be more interested in hearing the exact reasons why. I don’t think density is itself that related; you can pack in quite a lot with good organization. I do wonder if it’s a rental vs buying thing; in the US the average trailer is about the same size as the average apartment, but you’re way more likely to see extra refrigerators and deep freezes and stuff of that nature in trailers, because they’re often owned and the resident is responsible for all the appliances, whereas the cultural expectation for an apartment is even though you could get more, it’s the landlords’ area to handle. So I wonder how much is just really small cultural things vs practicality. Thus getting more to his dislike of it - but I’d be interested to here more specifically his thoughts.

I remember seeing pictures from a real estate listing of some euro prince house: he did not have a dryer, just a tiny washer under the counter in the single bathroom, the kitchen had just three-four cabinet sections and an apartment size fridge, no pantry and no closets of any kind, he just had IKEA-level dressers in the bedrooms and mini-split A/C on the wall. You can't really store much food or anything in there w/o turning it into a hoarder house. And this is a royalty house, I imagine common people's apartments are not going to be roomier.

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

> 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.

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

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Ok, let them both commoditize their complement.

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

nothing I buy on amazon is available at costo

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

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

Costco should aquire Hetzner :)

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.

This absolutely. Walmart+ is amazing.

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.

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.

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.

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

Them is a universal variable you already injected.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> Ok, load the app and search ...

> Go to self-checkout and grab ...

Okay, but what if I really don't care about those important-to-you features?

Based on Costco's membership numbers, I might have a whole lotta of company in that regard.

Good old HN.

Me: they’re great but their tech sucks

You: their tech is good

Me: it can’t do basic stuff

You: ok you’re right but they’re great

I can tell you I’m a member of both, but I frequently let my Costco lapse but never Sam’s. Just because it isn’t killing the golden goose doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile to fix.

Okay, cool - measure "bad vs. good" however wish, and shop wherever you want.

I'm focused on my own use case, and how bad or good their tech-plus-all-the-rest-of-their-operations is for that use case. There seem to be plenty of folks with similar use cases and priorities, so my preferred store should remain available longer-term.

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)

Hate Costco. Buying from Amazon

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.

Your last sentence is literally the tragedy of the commons.

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.

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

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

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!

“Costco is the anti-Amazon” Haha OK

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

And yet, Amazon Prime is inspired by Costco membership.

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

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