The New Yorker:

With its standout deals and generous employment practices, the warehouse chain became a feel-good American institution. In a fraught time, it can be hard to remain beloved.

By Molly Fischer

Costco, in one sense, is simple enough to define. It’s a chain retailer that operates on a club model, offering members who pay sixty-five dollars a year the chance to buy bulk goods at prices close to wholesale. Costco sells fresh and packaged foods, household and pharmacy staples, electronics, furniture, and clothing, from both name brands and Kirkland Signature, the company’s private label, which appears on everything from golf clubs to gasoline. Employees, who receive excellent wages and benefits, often work there for years. The stores are called warehouses, and this captures their look: merchandise stacked on pallets across industrial shelves rising toward high ceilings.

During my childhood in San Jose, California, Costco was a source of many cherished treats—the six-pouch box of Ghirardelli triple-chocolate brownie mix comes to mind. Yet this fails to explain the atavistic loyalty I have to its warehouses. I know exactly how Costco smells—like clean concrete and the static of plastic wrap—and would recognize that smell anywhere. The parts of California where going someplace requires getting on a highway and driving for thirty minutes feel like both Costco’s native habitat and my own. The Costco where my family got its paper towels, frozen French-bread pizzas, and ibuprofen—Warehouse No. 148, on Senter Road—opened the week I was born. “I will be cremated in a Kirkland flame lol,” my brother texted me when he heard that I was writing about the company. My late father, our family’s designated Costco shopper, wore Kirkland Signature pants.

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