Our Greatest Fast-Food Joint Is Costco

It’s Fast-Food Week! Always a deal for members.

The Costco food court’s quarter-pound hot dog is, was, and hopefully always will be $1.50. This was true in the 1980s, when the company started experimenting with food service alongside groceries. It was true in the 1990s, when I was in elementary school, and my family made weekend trips to our local outlet, loading shipping pallets of fun-sized Lay’s and industrial-sized drums of Kirkland orange juice into the Ford Windstar. And it’s still true now, in 2023, even as the rest of the American food processing industry leverages inflation to bleed us dry.

A typical ballpark dog can be scarfed down in about two bites; there’s a reason Joey Chestnut can house 70 of them in 10 minutes. But Costco opts for a much more robust tube of meat, about the length of a bread knife, boiled to ruddy, snappy, artery-calcifying perfection. A line of condiment stations dispenses an infinite supply of mustard, ketchup, relish, and (after a brief, COVID-19-related absence) diced onions, which rain down into your sesame seed bun with luscious intemperance. All that salt making you thirsty? Don’t worry: The $1.50 price tag also includes a refillable 20-ounce soda cup.

My dad would tell me that the reason we ate at Costco is because it was, in his words, “the best deal in town.” This didn’t mean much to me as a kid who was blissfully unburdened by a rolling budget of taxes, bills, and rent payments. But as I grew older, I began to understand exactly where my folks were coming from. They started their own business together, and in the early days of entrepreneurship—when money would dwindle—they appreciated any respite from the child-rearing crunch. So, off we went to Costco. It took 10 bucks to feed our family of five.

Now, after living in New York for seven years, I’ve become accustomed to a life where 10 bucks can net me maybe two-thirds of a cocktail. McDonald’s has tried to answer with silver dollar–sized hamburgers off the value menu, and I appreciate how everything at Taco Bell seems to cost about 50 cents, but frankly, there is no financial relief quite like Costco for dinner.

There’s far more than just hot dogs to feast on too. The pizzas—gigantic, floppy, with a hyperreal waxy sheen—are mythic. They arrive exclusively in cheese, pepperoni, or supreme—the holy trinity—and will run you an eminently affordable $1.99 for a ridiculously huge wedge-shaped slice. (A whole pie is going to set you back only $10.) There’s also the “chicken bake,” a $2.99 Frankenstein loaf of bread, cheese, bacon, and breast meat that is essentially a Costco exclusive. In all my gut-ravaging eating adventures, I have never seen a chicken bake facsimile anywhere other than the once-and-future superstore. I remember my mother ordering it as a “healthy” alternative to the more recognizable fatty acids pulsating in the hot dogs and pizza; for the record, it contains 840 calories. I never order the sandwiches, but greasy provolone-and-turkey ciabatta rolls are always available—warmed by the infernal radiation of crimson heat lamps. (They’re $3.99, though the recently introduced roast beef sandwich comes in at an unprecedented $9.99.)

To go to Costco is to embrace our most American habits of consumption. It was put on Earth so we could purchase a cream-colored sofa, a fresh pair of glasses, a 20-gallon drum of Texas chili, and a copy of Breaking Dawn in—inexplicably—the exact same aisle. It is a place to win, and keep winning. There is something so naughty about loading up a 99-cent liter of balsamic vinegar, like a con artist toasting a massive score. To me, there is only one way to consecrate the looting of Costco: eating a hot dog the size of your head.

Perhaps that’s why Costco is the only place on the planet that gets a family excited for a grocery trip, which is the rarest blessing of parenthood. We have all seen the bleary-eyed family units trudging up and down the aisles of Albertsons, Vons, and Trader Joe’s—mothers and fathers simultaneously attempting to rein in their ornery and increasingly chaotic scions while deciding if it’s going to be a white or red onion week. But when a Costco trip is on the docket, every parent holds the trump card—in the form of a pupil-dilating cholesterol rush—to bargain for good behavior. If you don’t settle down, we won’t be stopping for hot dogs when we’re done shopping. I heard this countless times in my formative years. Imagine heading home on an empty stomach, without being able to push my nose against the glass panels of the Costco kitchen and watch those glistening pizzas steadily emerge from the industrial oven. To a 10-year-old, that’s a fate worse than death.

I am not alone in my status as a Costco food court die-hard. We are legion and Swiftielike in nature. The Costco hot dog has its own unofficial fan page, which documents all the minutiae of the best deal in town. You can also find YouTubers embarking on their own gorging superstore stunts, in which they chew through everything on the menu in one über-debauched feast. On Reddit, Costco Nation obsesses over the mild variations in the menu available at locations outside the United States. Did you know that Canadian Costcos sell chicken strips? That United Kingdom stores do baked beans and cottage pies??? Other fans have posed for their Costco membership cards with freshly purchased hot dogs in hand, demonstrating exactly why they keep coming back. Are you in a part of the country that is void of Costcos? Don’t worry—just purchase a bumper sticker immortalizing the menu so everyone understands where you stand. Stateside, a small stir was caused after Costco announced that diced onions would be returning as a hot dog topping, with individual packages available to members upon request. “I can’t believe how happy this news made me,” one person said. Where else can you find such rapture over onions?

My only hope is that Costco will forever live by its morals, and on my next trip to the store, I won’t see a dreaded “$2” plastered over the former “$1.50” at the food court. Craig Jelinek, the store’s CEO, has said this will never be the case, and that the $1.50 amount might as well be etched into the Ten Commandments. (For what it’s worth, Costco has its own hot dog factory in California, and the in-house production of the foodstuff significantly cuts down on overhead.) However, in 2020 Costco did restrict its food court to Costco members exclusively—meaning those outside the orbit can no longer wander up for cheap grub without also forking over $60 or more for a yearly membership fee and the corresponding Kirkland’s for all occasions. It’s a move that distances the Costco food court from its egalitarian reputation, and parceled with the aforementioned $10 roast beef hoagie, loyalists are starting to worry that a more sinister Costco might be on the horizon.

But personally speaking, I refuse to even consider that possibility. Without being dramatic, I think Costco ratcheting up the price of its hot dogs might be a harbinger for the end of America, if not the world. Mr. Jelinek, please understand that those $1.50 hot dogs are one of the few things binding the social fabric together. May it always be the best deal in town.