My friend Ariel visited us in San Francisco and sang praises of the Costco shopping experience. It’s a shopping chain with a specific business model.

First you need to be a member to even shop there, you can’t even enter without a membership card. The basic membership card costs $55/year or $110/year if you want some extra buyback offers. It’s a brilliant way on their part to make you come to their store over and over again. Plus you have to appreciate the idea of paying someone so you can shop there. Brilliant!

The model is built on quality goods discounted a great deal due to large quantities. Sadly that doesn’t mean that it’s only them that have to buy the large quantities, the packaging itself is larger then normal and the consumer is forced to buy packs much larger than they would normally. I guess that works if you have a 7 member family back home and buy in large monthly shopping rounds, but for more casual customers it’s a complete overkill.

For example, you can’t buy a single loaf of bread, 2 are necessary, all cereals are sold in packs at least 3 times the normal ones, you can only buy 6 red peppers in pack, never just one… You get the picture. For someone like me who likes to try a lot of new products without committing to buy a gallon of it, it’s horrible. It also entails a lot of waste of the products that perish because they were necessary to be bought in such large quantities.

Don’t even get me started on the aesthetic appearance of the stores. It’s quite literally a giant grey block of concrete blocks occupying an entire street without any thought at all to architecture and pleasantness to the people who use it. It’s worse in many respects even when compared to the socialist functionalist architecture. Inside is not much better, simply a giant warehouse with people with oversized shopping trolleys bumping into each other.

I’m the type of person who would rather pay 10% more for their products and have a pleasant user experience while shopping. I enjoy exploring new food I haven’t yet tried before and the nervousness and ugliness of places such as Costco insult my sense of aesthetics as well as create a bad experience for me. I’d rather be enjoying my time. The quality of the products may very well be on par, but that does not balance the fact that I’ve had to buy 4kg of it and had a horrible time buying it. I’m staying with Mercator back home and Trader Joe’s and Rainbow Grocery here.

In fact I think that it can be quite handy for large, price sensitive families. But if you don’t consume a small tribe’s worth of food and actually care about user experience, Costco is a horrible choice to make. I consider it one of the worst manifestations of rampant consumerism and precisely where I wouldn’t want the world to be heading.

The glorious entrance. Membership cards are checked at entry. Those gray blocks are used for the entire outside surface of the store. I dare not call it facade.

Welcome to the warehouse.

Ariel and Miha, brave shoppers undertaking the task in high spirits.

A degustation in progress. Coincidentally, "Bolani" is exactly how I'd describe this store.

If that's the chips packaging I'm afraid to think of the nacho cheese gallons.

Me doing some weight lifting with jars of mayonnaise. Certainly healthier than eating it.