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In Costco We Trust
We belong to Costco.
Fan is our column about the way fandom touches every sector of our culture. This is the final column in 2023. Get caught up on previous dispatches:
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I pledge allegiance to Kirkland Signature.
Maddie Kao on the Costco fandom.
My freshman year of high school, a college application essay written by Delaware high-schooler Brittany Stinson was widely circulated by enthusiastic Bay Area parents. The piece went viral, and news organizations published clickbait headlines about how an “essay about love for Costco [won a] student admission to five Ivies.” When my dad sent me the essay, I saw my own visceral memories of Costco reflected in the writer’s experiences, despite having grown up on opposite ends of the country. Its reception made me ponder which childhood rituals I could leverage to score admissions to a prestigious college. Up until that point, I’d only thought of Costco as a store my Taiwanese-American family was oddly enthusiastic about.
My Taiwanese-American dad loved to preach about things that mattered to him to anyone who would listen. He didn’t subscribe to any religion, but he often repeated one motto with a sneaky smile: “In Costco We Trust.” As a child, I envisioned this inscription on the bottom of the U.S. quarter. It paled in comparison to the version that invoked God, yet it underlined our very American love of buying deals in bulk.
Costco was the only place where my brother and I could convince our parents to buy cool American snacks, like Fruit by the Foot.
At Costco, my parents were happy to idle and discover products, rather than check off a shopping list frantically and drag me along with a stern hand. Our route always included a stop inside the dairy refrigerator for the blue-capped gallons of 2 percent milk, which we drank at every meal. Snacks came next. Costco was the only place where my brother and I could convince our parents to buy cool American snacks, like Fruit by the Foot. The warehouse itself is a unique sensory experience. Sitting in the cart, I’d look at pallets of boxes rising like skyscrapers around me, and stare at the huge, industrial bell-shaped lights above my head. I tasted my way through the store with samples, and beamed at the smiley faces on receipts.
There, shopping is a form of amusement, mapped out like a theme park to keep consumers browsing. At some Costcos, the experience is akin to an obstacle course. John Swansburg writes of the experience of shopping at a Brooklyn Costco: “The competition for parking is fierce and frustrating … The checkout area is like Ellis Island in its heyday—the lines are long, disputatious, polyglot.”
I now reside in Northridge, California, hundreds of miles from home, where the layout of the Costcos are different. The excursions are limited by my class schedule, and there are far fewer Asian fusion treats for sale. The bones of the store feel the same, but the fruit and refrigerators sit on the opposite side of the store, making it feel like the “uncanny valley of bulk shopping”, as one Reddit user put it. Pressed Juicery bottles line the shelves after rows of brand-name toys, reminding me that I’m far from home.
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SPONSORED BY CODEWORD
Baby It’s Cult Outside
A $1.50 hot dog. The tried and true Kirkland brand. The unique experience of buying 20-50 of literally anything for a reasonable price. These are a few of the pillars of what has become the Costco movement — no, religion.
More and more, brands are becoming vessels of devotion and worship. It’s not necessarily a bad thing (unless the business is like, MyPillow or something), but it is kind of weird. Just look at the language the industry uses — marketers create brand visions, iconography, and immersive experiences. They want customers to be evangelists. They compile totems and creeds into a source of truth called a brand bible. Adhere to the book of scripture, or your brand will be smited.
At this point, brand leaders know that words (Kirkland) and symbols (a membership card) can carry powerful meaning and emotional resonance. They know that a customer will buy a product, but a fan will join and defend a community, and bring friends with them.
Our world is increasingly hungry for community, and a brand isn’t the worst place for it. That said, choose carefully the cults you join, and the cults you build.
We’re Codeword. Join our cult.
Recently, I asked my dad why Costco still appeals to him after decades of shopping there. It would be more convenient to shop at the Safeway down the street. He likes the fact that it’s a no-frills operation: With Costco, what you see is what you get. The store subverts the carefully manicured “supermarket aesthetic”—a term used by the scholar Andrew G. Christensen in a paper on Don Delillo’s White Noise—where store environments are engineered with displays, lighting, and “cheery exteriors” complete with music. A trademark of the supermarket aesthetic is “a certain ambiguity that the viewer (or target market) may perceive as psychological manipulation—something almost sinister behind the cheery exterior.” Costco’s lack of decor leaves the products to speak for themselves. The boxes the shipments come in line its industrial shelves. The hum in the store comes from conversations and movement, instead of speakers.
Costco stands on the merits of its own model. When Price Club opened in a converted San Diego airplane hangar in 1976, it was “the world's first membership warehouse club”. After seven years as the executive vice-president of merchandising, distribution and marketing, Jim Sinegal co-founded Costco Wholesale with Jeff Brotman. Their first warehouse opened in Seattle, Washington in 1983. A decade later, Price Club and Costco Wholesale merged.
Costco’s lack of decor leaves the products to speak for themselves. The boxes the shipments come in line its industrial shelves. The hum in the store comes from conversations and movement, instead of speakers.
Brian Lange, the Washington-based co-founder of Future Commerce, who’s written about his own relationship with Costco, told me that Costco “feels more real than most things feel” in our very ephemeral culture. This tangibility may be due to Costco’s primarily in-person shopping model. Whereas Sam’s Club offers the same prices online and in-person, Costco has different, generally lower prices in store. The experience of in-person shopping is also more engaging; there are, of course, samples, but the fun is in the exercise you get from browsing in the large space and the ever-persistent question of whether you really need that much of the product. My dad, Sam Kao, says “there’s an implicit joy” to it. “It’s like, ‘Look you found a Costco deal, too, I found a Costco deal!’ Everybody’s on a treasure hunt, to some degree.”
Costco was a place parents and grandparents took their younger children. In Alameda, my friends and I internetworked about items, recommending snack crêpes and sharing ingredient-finds at potlucks. Costco items, recognizable in their big-boxed vibrancy, made appearances at our school functions. Today, the club’s members now consist of second and third generation shoppers, kids like us who’ve become fans of the superstore in their own right. Lange said, “Those nineties kids now have income and kids of their own, and have maybe gotten over some of their prior purchasing habits related to status, and they really just want a decent good that gets the job done, that they enjoy.”
There’s plenty of love left for Costco, compared to a newer company like Amazon that’s received ire and scrutiny for its business model. Costco parking lots are packed like cans of sardines all the time, especially in the evenings or on the weekends. People, from lifestyle influencers to devoted shoppers, love to spread the Costco gospel: Kirsten Titus reviewed Costco’s Asian food selection with her sister to 1.2 million viewers, the same way my grandma recently became a walking ad for their walnut cranberry bread after tasting it for the first time.
Lange described Costco as the pinnacle of American consumerism—a big-box store that’s keeping customers satisfied. Forbes reported that Costco’s total sales in 2022 hit a record high of $227 billion, a 17 percent increase from 2021. “With the reputation that it has for how it treats its employees and the quality of what it’s achieved—to do that at the scale that it’s done is almost unthinkable in any other model,” Lange said. “Capitalism and consumerism produce a lot of crap, or a lot of luxury. But to find something in the middle that has the mass appeal that Costco has, and to do it as well as Costco has done it, few people walk away from that experience unhappy.”
That’s not an exaggeration. My parents often joked that it was an impossible challenge to enter a Costco without spending more than $100. Now that I have my own Costco membership, I’ve realized that it is possible—but only when shopping for one.