The Costco of Housing is Costco? The retailer's plan to use CA housing laws
urbanproxima.com> It will also result in housing that looks like a stack of shipping containers.
This is an either temporally or willfully ignorant statement - prefabricated housing hasn’t had to look like a boring box in decades. I’ve been involved in prefab projects where you couldn’t tell the on-site builds from the prefabs.
Also there’s an elevation rendering of the project that clearly isn’t ’a stack of shipping containers’.
That was what struck me. Sure it could look like shipping containers, but that seems very uncharitable.
Without plans or a render showing that’s the case I don’t know why we can’t assume it would be at least a little better looking.
> prefabricated housing hasn’t had to look like a boring box in decades.
Arguably all the way back to Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house, nearly a hundred years ago.
I'm continuously impressed by Costco. Not only is it one of my favorite places to shop, but I also recently recent to the Acquired episode on Costco[0] and was super impressed by how they run their business. They've continuously been able to align their unique advantages to reenforce each other and make their advantages even stronger. I highly recommend this episode to everyone.
And they are starting their own ad network.
https://todaysecommerce.com/2024/06/costco-is-working-on-ad-...
The beauty of competent management from the very top down. They understand that paying people a living wage has become a massive competitive advantage these days.
> their unique advantages
What are those? I never really found any sort of "unique advantage" of Costco. Certainly nothing to drive the extra distance past Sam's. While I had a membership, it was largely more expensive or didn't have what I wanted.
Product filtering: Low number of SKUs of high confidence. I can basically blindly pick up anything at a Costco and be assured of a certain basic quality. It's the opposite of a place like Amazon.
Customer filtering: The subscription model creates a high trust customer base with way lower chances of shoplifting, fraudulent returns and the like.
As a consumer, the advantage to Costco is they've done the product filtering for you. You can reasonably bet that whatever Costco has is in the upper echelons of good within that product category. Costco also ends up being cheaper if you do enough shopping there, because Costco's low prices are realized by the membership fees comprising the lion's share of their revenue.
As a merchant, Costco is significantly more efficient than other retailers due to a much leaner and simpler inventory because they only ever sell one or two brands of a given thing and only one or two things of a given brand. They don't have to deal with the overhead of unmoving stock, micromanagement of stock, and other such inefficiencies of non-scale.
All of these things are true. But the real advantage of Costco is that they’ve been consistent in their strategy for years. Having built a loyal customer base by offering high-quality products at reasonable prices, they haven’t shifted gears to raise prices or fill their stores with garbage products and coast on their brand recognition. This is shockingly unusual in today’s (US) economy.
Gas is cheaper. Pharmacy is cheaper, whether you have insurance or not. Perhaps more so if you don't have insurance. The regular stuff is good quality and cheaper than competition too. I don't even shop that much, but I still maintain the membership as I come out ahead even with my occasional shopping.
The gas alone is worth the membership.
My family saves about $1500/yr just at the optical center.
Every product at Costco is vetted or experimental. Either way, you’ll always be happy because if you don’t like it they have their eternal refund policy (refund at any time without a time limit)
The product return rates are also tied to customer data (membership scanning is required to pay). The better return data allows them to make better decisions on which products to boot.
They changed the return policy on some items to 90 days. Electronics comes to mind.
They also treat their employees well. (Not with free food or other so-called "tech" company nonsense). I have been impressed with the people from Costco I have met at conferences.
If you go in the back near the bathrooms, there's usually a wall of photos marked "25 years long service", and I noticed more recently one "40 years long service" (although a few of them had "retired now!" stickers).
That there's enough retention to justify that suggests they haven't burnt their employees too badly.
Any housing that can be built is good housing for places that have a severe supply-side constraint of housing.
The only way to bring house prices down is to build build build.
I'd actually be quite trustful of a Costco apartment.
I would very, very gladly live in a Costco apartment complex above a Costco store. Being able to buy Costco rotisserie chicken, ribs, and pizza anytime? Sign me up!
Pentagon city metro is right next to a Costco. Close enough?
What about Costco law school?
There is a Trader Joes with a apartment complex above it in Milpitas, CA (in the SF bay area). I've seen that in my city too but it needs to become more common.
The Trader Joe's they just opened in Hayes Valley in SF was put in under existing residential units: https://locations.traderjoes.com/ca/san-francisco/226/
I used to live in an apartment complex with trader Joe in the westwood area of LA near UCLA. Oddly enough, I would walk over to the whole food’s or Ralph’s instead to grocery shop (but everything was walkable, even the target across the street).
I would end up eating nothing but Costco hot dogs. When are they doing this in the south SFBA? Sign me up.
I wonder what the return policy will be like.
probably pretty good, but I wouldn't attempt it on saturday afternoon.
I wonder if they plan to also build all the infrastructure required to support all these new people living in these new housing. Like expanded electric service, water & sewer, trash pickup, transportation, schools, another fire station. Or are taxpayers going to have to pick up that bill? Build build build is great, we need more housing, but you can't do it without also planning for all the supporting infrastructure.
I’m unclear what your concern is. How is this different than any other home builder? Also unclear what you mean by taxpayers being on the hook. More people in housing expands the tax payer base. The new homeowners will literally be paying for these things when they pay their property tax.
Of course, the fact that this housing will be filled up immediately, will have almost no effect on anyone’s opinion in the local governing world
I like what I know of Costco, as a service, and as a company. But that architectural rendering, of the cool housing straddling the no-frills Costco big box, reminded me of Idiocracy's "Welcome to Costco; I love you".
It is just like how they are tearing down one story grocery stores and building them as 4 or 5+1s with the store on ground floor and housing up top. This is much better land use anyways.
I too am in a Costco household, one of my friends is a long time employee there and loves it, and I would like to visit a Costco apartment open house, and the satire that this proposal (a big box store getting into residential housing) reminds me of is Sorry to Bother You's WorryFree:
Hi, I'm the person who wrote the Twitter thread this article is based off of, so happy to answer any questions about it
Do you regret writing it in misleading clickbait style, calling it a "prison"?
This gotcha question already has an answer, funnily enough:
https://x.com/CohenSite/status/1800905974490005978
> Because it got over 400,000 people to read a tweet about somewhat esoteric housing regulations
The article had a great headline but I didn’t really understand it. Your Twitter post filled in the missing details.
Thank you!
As a former (well, still card holding) union laborer I have to express my displeasure at Costco circumventing the prevailing wage requirements by building modular sections offsite and trucking them in. Other than that, I like the mixed use approach to this building.
If only housing could be more expensive
I find it curious that people generally applaud Costco for paying good wages to their workers yet don't extend that consideration to those who build the stores.
Is it latent classism? Disdain for tradespeople? Is outsourcing bad when it comes for office jobs, but good when it shaves a few percent off of the final $/ft2?
I’m struggling to think of a form of classism that ranks retail workers over trades people. Can you elaborate?
Just anecdotes or vibes, having been on both sides of that one. I'd call it more of an "indoor" vs "outdoor" work dichotomy, honestly.
Even if the modular housing factory is union?
In the Bay area there's an SF carpenter's union vs Vallejo carpenter's union thing, because there's a modular housing factory in Vallejo.
I like Costco but I feel that living next to it wouldn't be significantly better than living a bit farther away. It's a place where people with larger homes can buy in bulk and save time and money by storing those bulk items in their homes. There is no good reason to go to Costco more frequently than you can use up those bulk items, or until they expire. Gas and pharmacy would be borderline.
I live within walking distance of a nice grocery store and would definitely prefer that over a Costco. There are more hot food items than just a hot dog and two types of pizza. It's easy to pick up a small amount of fresh ingredients to make a meal at the last minute.
Costco is great but their parking lots are awful. I hope the housing has a separate parking entrance because fighting Costco shoppers every time I leave home sounds like a nightmare.
On the other hand, imagine all the money you could save if you just had a $1.50 hot dog and soda for every meal. You could eat on less than $200 a month.
If you ate nothing but pepperoni pizza, you could feed a family of four for like $500 a month!
The bulk pack of medical care you’ll need soon might kill the savings.
Nothing bulk gummy multivitamins and semaglutide can't solve.
Costco even sells an MCT supplement that doubles as the best massage oil and lube I’ve ever used.
Now I’m imagining a Costco acropolis. One membership for literally all your needs. Never leave Costco
From Costco cradle to Costco grave.
Costco indeed sells both cribs and caskets. https://tvnz-1-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/co...
Coming soon to a Costco near you: all-inclusive in vitro fertilization, from egg to Ivy League!
(Note: Ivy League Guarantee is for Costco Executive members only and requires the CRISPY genetic engineering package. While supplies last. In order to redeem the guarantee in case of defect, child must be brought to your nearest Costco Organ Center).
Even cheaper: https://mashable.com/article/cotsco-disaster-kit
But when will you have to leave home?
So a standard mixed-used development but with certifications of how wonderful and eco-friendly they are allows throwing out most regulations everyone else has to follow, creating a preferential, tiered system. That sounds fair and respectful of community interests. /s
Will Costco be collecting rent? The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing. This is just like private equity and 401k’s buying houses. People should be able to own their own housing not become lifelong renters.
Should Costco be explicitly banned from non-commercial development in the otherwise unused air-space above their store's footprint? Forced to sell the air rights to other developers? This mixed-use approach seems like a much better use of the lot space.
I wholeheartedly agree that people should be able to own their own housing, but I don't see the two as mutually incompatible in the larger scheme.
I don’t see how my comment would imply or could be understood as wanting a ban or being against mixed use development.
You didn't rail against mixed use development, nor did I imply that you did. Per your OP:
> The mental gymnastics are impressive. It’s not a good thing that Costco gets to expand to housing.
My definition of mixed-use development would include the case in TFA: Costco adding housing units above their store. Housing which you explicitly said is 'not a good thing'. I might agree with you, if Costco were slapping down a subdivision of company housing. But they're not, they're adding housing units above a proposed store in a mixed-use approach. This seems like a net good.
There could be a whole (cynical) side conversation as to whether or not Costco is adding these housing units simply to meet the criteria which allow for the expedited approval of this proposal, of course.
Rental apartments are important for people who plan to live there less than 5-7 years. If all apartments were condos and there was no renting , where are people who don’t have a down payment saved supposed to live? What if they need to move to a larger place after a year or two?
That is entirely not the issue I’m raising here.
If you didn't intend to say that all rental housing is bad, you really phrased it badly.