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Comment by mike50 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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

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.

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?

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