The Last Honest Hot Dog

90-second read

If you have a moment, I’d like to tell you something I found while reading about Costco’s hot dog.

Costco introduced its $1.50 hot dog combo in the mid-1980s.

They haven’t changed the price since.

Folks, we live in an age of wealth extraction. It’s the era of shrinkflation, price gouging and being charged a “service fee” for performing the service yourself online. Companies do these things so often that they barely pretend anymore.

I was watching the Las Vegas F1 Grand Prix, a street-circuit race. Apparently, the organisers were so strict that restaurants with views of the track had to cover them. If someone riding an escalator could see the race without a ticket, security guards were stationed at the top to keep them moving.

I mean, how dystopian is that?

Then there’s Toblerone. In 2016, they widened the gaps between the chocolate peaks. The packaging looked roughly the same. The price stayed the same. But you got less chocolate.

BMW tried something even more direct: charging customers a monthly subscription to activate heated seats that were already installed in the car.

Airlines, hotels, streaming services. Everyone’s in on it. It’s the same playbook, and a rabbit that looks smaller every time it comes out of the hat.

A lot of companies seem unable to understand the value of goodwill. They focus on the share price, the next quarter and how much more they can squeeze out of the ordinary consumer.

Which brings us back to the humble $1.50 hot dog.

Yes, it gets people through the door. You lose a little money in one place and make it somewhere else. But after forty years, it has become more than a cheap lunch. It is a small promise that Costco has chosen not to break.

In a world where everything is being marked up, downsized or repackaged as a subscription, the Costco hot dog is the last remaining sign that capitalism could, theoretically, behave itself.

It won’t.

But it could.