All hail the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken
Americans: We invented baseball, we put a man on the moon, we made Kim Kardashian’s tush a national treasure.
But when the history of America is written, page one, chapter one will begin with the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken, and yes, I’m capitalizing it all because it deserves it.
The $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken is the height of American ingenuity.
The $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken rocks out with it’s cocka-doodle-doos out.
All hail the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken. All hail.
Truth be told, I’ve never been a warehouse/wholesale club guy. I always thought it brought out the worst of us gluttonous Americans. When I pictured a wholesale club, I pictured a short rotund woman desperately reaching high on a shelf for the 36-pack box of Cool Ranch Mamacita Hot Buffalo Wild Sangria Doritos while her eight children shot snot rockets at passing customers. Not a pretty sight.
Well let me tell you this: I am that short rotund woman. Costco has ensnared me and my family. Beware of snot rockets.
The prices are simply too good to pass up, and that 36-pack box of Cool Ranch Mamacita Hot Buffalo Wild Sangria Doritos is only $6.99, which is ridiculous. (I’m not even going to get into the $2.99 sausage sandwich, except to say this: It’s so much better than you think it is. I’m talking Midway Seaside good.) (OK that’s pushing it, but still: It’s really good.)
In the end though — and what keeps us coming back weekly — is the $5 rotisserie chicken. First off, it’s delicious. No preservatives, artificial colors, none of that. Also, there’s no hormones or steroids added, which is crazy, because these chickens are massive. Really. They’re huge. It’s three pounds of chicken. I don’t know what they’re doing with these birds, but they feel like they’re
... When the history of America is written, page one, chapter one will begin with the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken, and yes, I’m capitalizing it all because it deserves it.
twice the size of a supermarket rotisserie chicken.
Bottom line: We pretty much get three meals out of one chicken for my family of five and that’s just the white meat. The dark meat? We give it to the dog over the course of the week along with his dog food. (By the way, the meals: My wife cuts out the white meat and uses the rest to make chicken soup. Then the chicken gets used to make two rice-based meals. She does a burrito bowl sometimes, a chicken and broccoli thing sometimes, you never know what you’re going to get. She’s skilled.)
It simply makes sense to buy the chicken. Seriously. Our cost per meal when it comes to these chickens is less than a buck a head. It’s silly.
And it’s also not surprising. Food costs have bottomed out in recent years, especially compared to income. In 1960, Americans spent nearly 18 percent of their disposable income on food, according to the USDA. By 2015, that number was down to 9.8 percent. And if all you ate was Costco rotisserie chickens … well, you’d be rich.
Know this: Costco knows what it’s doing. According to a Seattle Times article from 2015, the company loses roughly $40 million a year on the chickens. But it gets people like me in the store and next thing you know I’m chest deep in Cool Ranch Mamacita Hot Buffalo Wild Sangria Doritos and I just inhaled a $2.99 sausage sandwich and hey honey, should we get the 10,000 count of Tums?
It’s brilliant marketing, this chicken.
And we Americans sure do love our chicken. According to the USDA, Americans eat roughly 9 billion chickens a year. That’s 27 chickens per meat-eating American. To give you some semblance of just how many chickens that is, if you stacked those chickens on top of each other — figure they’re what, 18 inches tall, conservatively? — the resulting Tower of Chicken would be tall enough to reach the moon, ten times over. Anyway …
Anyway, the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken: It is the best America has ever done, and I’m only kind of joking.