Wait and see for Costco’s effect
OPINION: My $60 Costco card is in the mail, but I have deeply mixed feelings about the arrival of United States-style bulk buying in Auckland.
I’m not sure how having that card will change my grocery-buying ways, but time will tell.
Bulk purchasing holds the promise of pushing back on grocery prices for households because bulk buyers pay less for each ‘‘unit’’ of an item.
The trouble is bulk-buying, and the very worst forms of food and drink, are made for each other.
Big shelves need to be filled with factory-processed food and drinks with long, long shelf-lives.
It’s hard enough for people evolved to be hunter-gatherers to stay fit and healthy in our calorie-saturated towns and cities without filling our houses with cheap, bulk-bought processed food.
I don’t for a moment dispute a clever, disciplined person can make bulk-buying work for them.
But take a look around you. The rise of processed food, snack food, fast food, and calorie-rich drinks in the past 50 years (I mark 1970 as the turning point) has shown just how poorly we humans cope in an obesogenic world.
Humans didn’t get more stupid in the past 50 years, but we got fatter.
We didn’t suddenly have a mass degradation in our ability to make good food choices for ourselves. It just got easier to make bad choices.
Bulk-buying isn’t only coming with a Costco near you.
The supermarket duopoly will respond as it loses market share.
Earlier this year in Australia, the giant supermarket chain Coles launched a ‘‘big value’’ bulk range to compete with Costco.
It made a big media event of it. And what ‘‘household staples’’ did it highlight?
Peanut butter, Milo, breadcrumbs, instant noodles, lollies, coffee, chips, vegetable stock, mayonnaise, burger sauce, pancake mix, and Himalayan Salt.
That’s a pretty revealing list, isn’t it? Fill your house with snacks, high-fat, highsugar stuff, and you will eat that stuff. Add even more of it at a lower price, and you’ll eat more.
Costco will rightly say it sells more than bulk packs of the kind of food and drinks that you should consume only rarely. It does stuff like nappies, toilet paper, booze, electronics, and more.
Maintaining health, like doing well with money, means setting up systems that work for you.
Part of that involves making it harder to stuff things up.
Make a meal plan, and shop to a list, we are told. Why? So we avoid food waste, and being tempted into buying stuff we don’t need, or which is bad for us.
Costco famously has a ‘‘treasure-hunter’’ design in its stores. It wants customers to wander, find ‘‘treasure’’ and buy it on impulse.
Habits I have which help defeat my propensity to eat and drink things that are bad for me include not keeping booze in the house, no lollies, no soft drinks, and if anyone wants biscuits, they have to bake them.
Sure, criticise me for a lack of selfrestraint, but think of it this way: retailers of stuff that’s bad for you want to remove as much ‘‘friction’’ as possible from you buying it.
Keeping a fridge, larder and freezer free of the bad stuff is me creating friction in my life to keep me healthy.
I do wonder whether I will have much use for my Costco card, but I’ll go at least once when the Auckland Costco opens. It’ll be an interesting experience.
Happily, if I find the place has no place in my life, I can cancel my card, and Costco will refund my money.