Look, I’ve been around the block. I know what it means when a feature of my life is suddenly appended with words like -coded and -core . It means the things about myself that I can’t or don’t want to change are being sold back to me as a lifestyle choice, or worse, a movement. It means I’ve become real in the realest way possible: in the eyes of marketers and assignment editors running on fumes.

I knew what the dad-bod trendlet amounted to. As with nerdcore, the hard sound of the last part did not cancel out the dweebness of the first. It was a cheap attempt to aestheticize the mundane, to apply a layer of hip gloss on the utility of nobler, truer, Britisher words like paunchy . Which is to say, I know my role. It’s to tell you that Costco is real .

I, too, am entitled to declare a trendlet, and you may consider the gauntlet thrown. Dads love Costco. It is a culture, real and strong. It is their friend. It’s got everything they love: value, planning, home-inventory-related paranoia, transport and storage logistics, and a small but day-defining sense of occasion. More than anything, in a world where nearly every service is getting more expensive and exploitive at the same time that it’s getting intentionally worse, Costco seems like one of the few nationwide consumer experiences where Americans can still proudly say, as your grandparents and mine used to: “I don’t get fucked when I go there.”

I know my role. It’s to tell you that Costco is real .

Thank the hot dog. The store began selling Hebrew National wieners from carts in the parking lot in 1984. When exactly the iconic $1.50 for a dog and 20-ounce soda began is unclear, but it goes back decades. But it really became a culture-curio institution because of what company co-founder and former CEO Craig Jelinek said about it. ”If [the price] ever goes up, what will it mean?” he once asked rhetorically. “That I’m dead.”

His successor, Ron Vachris provided Jelinek’s other money quote. After an executive underling informed him that the company was taking a bath on every single dog and a drink, Jelinek replied, “If you raise [the price of] the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”

Costco figured it out. Much like the theory undergirding their business, it wasn’t all that hard. As for that, not only does the concept of economies of scale date back to Adam Smith, but other warehouse clubs preceded Costco into this market. Roughly 40 years later, 142 million Americans shop at warehouse clubs, cramming cases of sodas in second fridges, located in garages that long ago stopped housing cars and started housing boxes, palettes, mancaves and bonus family rooms with floors as hard as the old Astrodome. As soon as we can persuade the same chunk of Americans who already understand economies of scale vis-a-vis mailbox-sized boxes of Cheddar Goldfish to apply this thinking to healthcare, we can begin healing as a nation.

On this last front, there is some cause for optimism, because the hot dog isn’t the end of the story. If there’s one thing runaway income inequality and social media outrage has accomplished besides greasing the skids for fascism, it’s making billionaires famous in ways they’d rather you ignore. Every time Walmart heir-in-law Stan Kroenke buys another sports team (Arsenal, the L.A. Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, etc.), it invites another graph showing how much of the American economy is controlled by his wife’s family.

Once the Waltons enter the discussion, they usually invite another graph, showing how Walmart’s low, low prices rely on taxpayers subsidizing Walmart employees’ supplemental food assistance and Medicaid . What usually begins with another plutocrat outrage invariably progresses to Instagram or TikTok stories about the hot dog, followed hot on their heels by breakdowns in employee compensation between Costco and the Waltons’ Sam’s Club. As content goes, it’s sexy enough even for the quaalude guy from “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

There are smartly self-interested reasons why many Americans pay to become members of these clubs, too. Amid rising prices from President Donald Trump ’s trade wars and deserving humiliation in the Strait of Hormuz, the desire to bargain hunt by buying in bulk is self-explanatory. I too have invoked both the reliable value and more reliable quality of their produce and meats with unapologetically dadly effusion, and I’ve watched as friends get sucked into the even more desperately dad-coded scavenger hunt of who makes this or that ridiculously underpriced Kirkland (i.e., the store) brand single malt, Italian roast coffee or unreasonably decent box of wine. Every mom and dad I talk to has some family bulk dependency — disposable undergarments for baby and grandma, creatine- tub -sized bottles of gummy vitamins — whose savings justify the membership alone.

How high does a price hike have to be to register as an aberration?

Costco’s habitual virality suggests that there is an underexplored social enthusiasm for a store or service whose premise is that neither you nor its employees are getting screwed the entire time you’re in the building. That someone, far up the decision chain where it actually matters, has a curious affinity for selling an experience in which everyone is doing their best, and the products don’t suck. Uncannily often, the things inside the box look like the picture on the front, even before too thoroughly taste-testing the Kirkland scotch and squinting.

A personal yearning for the “Costco of     ” first stirred at the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I’d careen through the store shrouded like Lawrence taking Aqaba. It persisted through the first tearing of the social fabric, when a woman in the parking lot screamed at me and called me a child abuser for having my son mask inside, and it’s gotten worse in all the rending and arson since. But, admittedly, that chaos itself inspired the daydream.

When prices are spiking because “the president and Canada are fighting,” it seems a perfect time to slip a poison pill of reliable competency into the marketplace. In a nation whose fate was perhaps swung by an egg cartel , the question persists: How high does a price hike have to be to register as an aberration, and what’s too high a price to pay to participate in the economy without feeling humiliated by every part of it?

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