After months of turning my own brain inside out on this blog, digging through my feelings, my behaviors, my whole interior mess, I think I am due for a break from myself. So, I am shifting focus: random concepts, universal experiences, pop culture, tv, all filtered through someone who is constitutionally incapable of seeing anything at face value. Think: what if your favorite political science professor had the mind and sense of humor of a chronically online 23 year old. That is what I strive to achieve, hopefully. I genuinely could not be more excited about it. How fun.

To introduce this new “era” of my blog, today I am very eager to talk about Costco.

Not in like a “omg I love getting a full meal out of all the samples” way, more in a i-have-two-degrees-that-make-me-very-annoying-at-parties way. Why Costco? Because I think Costco accidentally exposes something fascinating and equally alarming about American politics: how often we respond to political ideas based on their labels rather than their substance, and the fact that it’s working on tens of millions of people who would recoil at the s-word itself is, frankly, one of the funniest and simultaneously most painful things about this country. 

Let me build my case. If you’re already with me, I think you’ll enjoy this piece, and if you read my first paragraph and thought to yourself “ew please not another libtard,” I strongly encourage you to keep reading… I bet I can get you to see things a little differently. 

Political labels are peculiar things. The moment we hear one, our brains start filling in the blanks before we have even looked at the underlying idea. “capitalism,” “socialism,” “communism,” “free market.” We inherit emotional reactions to these words long before we understand what they actually describe. Which raises a more uncomfortable question: if you stripped away the labels entirely, would we still react the same way? Would we still feel the same way? Would we still vote the same way?

It starts with a guy who thought profit was kind of embarrassing

Costco’s DNA traces back to Sol Price, who built Price Club (later merged into Costco) and personally mentored Jim Sinegal, the guy who actually founded Costco. Price’s whole philosophy was that a retailer owes something close to a fiduciary duty to the customer. This means that your job is not to extract as much money as possible, but to act in their interest, the way a good trustee would. He reportedly ranked the business’ priorities as customers first, employees second, shareholders third. Inverted. On purpose. That is not an accident of corporate culture, that’s a founding constitution.

So when Costco “feels” like it’s operating on different values than every other retailer, that’s because it is, literally, by design, from a guy who thought making too much money off people was a moral failure (ding ding ding). 

The membership forces thousands of strangers to pool resources upfront so everyone benefits later. Sound familiar?

You pay $65 a year for the privilege of walking into the building. That is not a fee, it is dues. It is the same logic as a tax base; you contribute upfront, collectively, so that the whole system can run lean and pass the savings back to you instead of skimming it off as profit margin at the register. It is not incidental, membership fees are basically where Costco’s real profit lives, which is precisely why they can turn around and sell you everything else close to cost. They are not trying to extract maximum value from every transaction like a normal retailer. Their business model is: take a small collective contribution, run everything close to cost, and let the size of the group make the deal good for everyone in it. 

That is not “shopping,” that is a co-op with a food court. Costco has also reportedly held itself to something like a 14-15% markup ceiling on products; a self-imposed cap on how much profit they are allowed to make off any single item. Imagine a company that treats “we could charge more” as a rule to break rather than a goal to hit… Exactly. 

The $1.50 hot dog is a subsidized public good

This price has not moved since 1985. Not for inflation, not for supply chain chaos, not for anything. It is protected internally like a matter of ideology. Because it honestly is, it is the closest thing capitalism has produced to “this one thing should just be affordable for everyone, permanently, no matter what.” Costco eats the cost elsewhere so this one product stays a fixed, guaranteed, universal price. If that is not “from each according to his ability, to each a $1.50 hot dog.” I don’t know what is. 

The rotisserie chicken runs the same play. $4.99, and it has been reported that Costco actually loses money on every single one they sell. That is not an accident or a rounding error, that is a company deciding a certain price point is non-negotiable no matter what it costs to them internally. Two products, same logic: pick something everyone needs, hold the line on it forever, and absorb the loss like it is just the cost of being a decent institution. 

They pay workers like labor has dignity, on purpose

Costco’s average hourly wage sits around 26 USD, nowhere close to retail standard. Most employees also actually get healthcare, which in American retail is not the norm, it is practically a headline. And Costco has outright said it is not charity, it is strategy. Lower turnover, higher productivity, a workforce that is not miserable. It is an internal redistribution: profits get funneled back into wages and benefits instead of siphoned up to shareholders as aggressively as they could be. It is not a wage ceiling company, it is a wage floor company. That is a values statement dressed up as an HR policy.  

Kirkland is anti-brand-hierarchy propaganda and it is brilliant

Kirkland signature exists to dismantle the idea that the name on the label deserves the markup. Same detergent, same batteries, same everything — minus the premium you were paying for a logo. It is a subtle argument that brand prestige is largely fake value extraction, and Costco just opted out of pretending otherwise. That is a pretty pointed critique of consumer capitalism to smudge into a store that also sells 700 rotisserie chickens PER HOUR. 

No ads, no loyalty gimmicks, no manipulation layer

Costco doesn’t advertise. It does not need to manufacture desire because the model is not built on manufactured desire, it is built on “the deal is actually just good, so you’ll come back.” That is such a different psychological contract than the rest of retail, which is constantly trying to make you want things you would have never even thought of five minutes ago. 

So what is this, actually?

It is not socialism in the “state owns the means of production” sense, obviously. It is still a private company, it still needs profit to exist, and calling it that too literally would be doing exactly the thing I would roll my eyes at if someone else did it in a philosophy 101 way. What it actually is is a really compelling proof of concept: that collective buy-in, thin margins, worker-first economics, and de-branding can all coexist with a business succeeding massively. It is a socialism-flavored, run through a capitalist shell, and it turns out that is an incredibly popular flavor when you are not calling it by its name. 

Which is, frankly, the whole American relationship with these ideas in one sentence. We don’t hate the substance, we hate the word. More accurately, we have been manipulated, conditioned, indoctrinated, and honestly coerced into hating the word. 

Sol Price called it a fiduciary duty to the customer, most people would just call it not being greedy and evil. America, it turns out, will accept an awful lot of redistribution as long as you dress it up as a warehouse membership instead of public policy. This is why I thought Costco was such a fascinating case study. It doesn’t tell us which economic system is “correct,” but it exposes the gap between the words we reject and the principles we often embrace.

So I beg of you, the next time someone jump-scares you with the s-word, take a second to figure out what it actually means before you declare the fall of Western civilization and attempt to trigger the third period of the Red Scare. Tysm.