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.
First off, that’s the exact reason they have stores like this…for people with large families or buying for a lot of people. If you don’t like shopping there, then don’t fucking shop there. I thought I would be reading an article about a funny story about bad customer service or another angry customer. All you did was bitch about the point of the store.
And the looks of the store? Who fucking cares? People are there to get groceries not stare at the architecture. It’s “blocky” like that because they don’t have room for fucking Mona Lisa’s since they need to pack up all of this stuff.
You’re blog sucks.
^^ And that, my friend, is why Costco works in North America.
No expectations beyond efficient consumption. It’s practically the American dream incarnate!
You want a pleasant experience, thoughtful design, or tasteful presentation? Or even customer service?
Not a chance.
But if you’ve got an oversized SUV to fill, a small African country (or one equivalent North American child) to feed, and an insatiable urge to BUY LOTS OF SHIT, you’ve come to the right place.
And Trader Joe’s gives you a pleasant shopping experience?? :))
I bet you go to the lumber yard and complain that their selection of screwdrivers sucks too.
Celia: I don’t agree, I think that you can still pay attention to details and do things cheaply. Less than if you make higher added value products but still. Ikea being case in point. When it comes to this price model, wouldn’t it be more efficient to base it on the web and they either deliver it or you can pick it up on site. They could automate more and achieve lower price points.
Mike: Indeed.
Vasko: Good point, it’s is better though. Space among the shelves could use some treatment, as well as the sorting of the shelves at my local one, but it’s still leaps better.
Kuhsay: Depends on the architecture of the lumber yard. ;)
Somebody comes from a small European country ;) – have you seen how sparsely populated some areas of the Midwest are? Web automation is an interesting idea, and one that has been tried and generally rejected in the Northeast, at least for the time being. But for those who live further away from cities, Costco and its Walmart equivalent, Sam’s Club are often a good way for rural folks to stock up on non-perishables, or in my mother’s case, case upon case of Nutella :)
Another big customer base is actually small businesses – those giant mayonnaise jars you so enjoyed hoisting are perfect for mom-and-pop burger shops and caterers alike, especially for ones too small to get the wholesale prices straight from the companies.
Your real issue seems to be that you’re stuck on the wrong coast of an otherwise lovely country ;)
Fantastic article Matic! Personally I would extend these comments to nearly every supermarket chain. It is my belief that the shopping experience of these enterprises of mass consumption are fundamentally at odds with key elements of how living things enjoy interacting with the world around them. Interaction I would argue is void from the entire experience, employees in uniform to create group identity and thus a disconnection with the consumer, an internal environment that encourages consumption without stimulation (a brilliant comparison is a North African market with a chain) and architecture that is about as inspiring as a John Mccain speech.
This is not how it has to be.
Food culture starts from the collecting process at the beginning and ends with the enjoyment of your meal. Shopping at the supermarket is like cheating at your favourite card game, the aesthetic pleasure of winning will always elude you. It is a logical choice to savor all aspects of eating and we do know how a meal alone or with people whose company you enjoy and with ingredients in which you have procured with satisfaction is a pleasurably component of life, the fact remains that it is the consumer that is chained to the supermarkets and not the other way around. For most people the supermarket is not a consumer choice but an economic and logistic one. Unfortunately it is small business and the consumer that suffers, everyone knows when they have enjoyed the purchase of a product and I truly doubt this could ever be said for a supermarket shopping experience.
As the person who guided the author of this post to the temple of Costco, I feel personally responsible for this venomous yet impotent critique of the ultimate shopping spot.
As many before me have pointed out, the Costco experience works exactly as intended: it is utilitarian in essence, delivering high-end goods at sometimes astonishingly low prices, all thanks to its purchasing quantities. People (families, self-employed food industry professionals and so forth) get to stock up on great products while saving time (multiple trips to the store), money etc.
Trying to kick Costco in the groin by claiming that its experience
is the worst manifestations of rampant consumerismsucks is therefore futile. I advise the author to check his premises. Costco need not be more beautiful, user friendly and exhilarating just to please the occasional boutique elitist.It does its job and it does it very well. It makes a profit and saves us time/money at the same time, it keeps the quality in check so that we don’t have to worry about it.
The way I interpret this post is criticism for the sake of being critical, a widespread method of the Frankfurt school that is fed to students of certain academic disciplines, predominantly social sciences. Regardless of the state of the reality, it always needs to be scrutinized. It is an exercise in thinking, not doing.
In Costco’s case, the putrid commentary of its interior hints to a comparison to a cross between a Parisian patisserie and Apple’s latest iPad interface. But in reality, the difference is quite obvious: for example Apple created a beautiful, simple interface because it understands the importance of making its complex products usable by everyone. That means no distractions, no interruptions and no difficulties in mastering its use. And it works exactly as intended. This is what makes it exactly like Costco and not its opposite.
One of the common arguments against the Frankfurt School is that criticizing (however constructive it purports to be) does not mean understanding and this post is a prime example of it.
Check your premises, behold the big picture and let us then venture into the realm of plenty once more, cathartically pushing a giant shopping cart down the isles of Costco.
Amusing article! It looks horrible but I guess it attracts a certain customer.. Im currently sitting in a 2m2 internet hut in Bombay. Not very user friendly as I just tipped over as someone tried to pass me. I made a funny user experience this week when I noticed that basically all imported foods are taxed 100 percent. No wonder they asked me if I wanted indian gin or brittish gin…the drink ended up costing more than in Sweden…(!)
Looking forward to more US oriented hate ;)
Come on Matic, isn’t this post a little one-sided and a bit too much self-centered? Why would you expect a chain supermarket to have an architectural quality of any degree? All they’re doing is giving people what they want and people don’t seem to care the way they’re given it. And since this is no art why waste time and effort questioning this ugly figure of stupendously massive consumption? The photo of you with those huge mayonnaise jars already explains it all. I wouldn’t sell them in a fancy store! I think you should have figured out by now the extent of American consumerism unless contrarily to my knowledge San Francisco is on the edge of starvation :). They call these chains a warehouse market in the Midwest and all they visit these for is to keep their freezers and pantries full of unhealthy food and unnecessarily vast amounts of necessities. I don’t think there’s a possible way of making any business strategy of supplying mass consumer goods appreciable.
I absolutely agree about the membership policy though. This degradation of costumer is unacceptable.
It is my opinion of this chain and shopping experience. I mentioned in the article itself that it might be useful for families and people who don’t care about the details of the experience. I do and that’s why Costco isn’t for me. It does not fit my taste and my priorities when it comes to shopping.
I also think it could be done a lot better even for customers whose priorities it normally fits.
Zealot, since you brought up the Apple comparison, after all that’s been said, it’s clear that Costco throws up a lot of obstacles to its users. Membership being only the first and obvious one.
It’s not critiquing for the sake of critique itself. I can understand the reasons for Costco and the like. From an objective point of view, everything is understandable, neutral and has no positive or negative value. When we use our subjective opinions as we always do (being objective is asymptotic no matter how hard you try), value judgments come into play. I’m very much for praising what I like and there’s plenty of that. Costco simply does not meet my standards of taste and utility. Is that so hard to comprehend?