Costco is the anti-Amazon

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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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.

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...

nothing I buy on amazon is available at costo

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

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.

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.

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.

“Costco is the anti-Amazon” Haha OK

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

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

And yet, Amazon Prime is inspired by Costco membership.

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.

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!

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