Costco in Australia!
Australia Travelog #18
Casula, NSW - Wed, 27 Dec 2023, 6:30pm
You're in a foreign country. You're 7,500 miles from home. You've got a car and a free hour in your schedule. What do you do? ...You go to Costco! 🤣
The funny thing is we didn't need anything at Costco. I'm not sure many people ever need to buy mustard a gallon at a time, ever. But going to Costco is always at least partly about the novelty of going to Costco. And even more so about satisfying my curiosity. How different would Costco in Australia be from the US?
It was by the same token that I ate at a McDonald's in Japan, once, on my first visit to the country. I wanted to see, first hand, how different it was. Would the burgers be different? Would there be weird things on the menu? Would the fries be 1/3 the size of the monstrous portions served in the US?
We'd already spotted a few differences in common American brands in Australia. For example, Burger King here is called Hungry Jack. It's a trademark issue. I haven't been quite curious enough to try eating at one to see how the food differs. It was enough to satisfy my curiousity looking at the menu and seeing Whoppers; I didn't need to buy one or eat it. Ditto McDonald's- which is actually called McDonald's, though all the locals refer to it as "Maccas".
Anyway, today the cultural comparison study is Costco.
Just finding a Costco was a bit of a challenge. I know there are Costcos in Australia... but Costco's app doesn't.
The Costco app says the nearest store is in Kauai, Hawaii, US... over 5,000 miles away!
We had to resort to finding a Costco using Google Maps. There are three around Sydney, and one's right along our route from our last hiking trek ( Carrington Falls, previous entry in this series) to our hotel tonight in the Blue Mountains. So it seems worth a brief visit- in the name of cultural learning. 🤣
So, what's different? Surprisingly little, it turns out.
1. For starters, just entering the store is the same experience. There's one door, beneath their big logo (see first photo above), and door checkers checking ID cards.
I showed the gal in the uniform my digital ID card, and she didn't know what to do with it.
"Oh, it's US only," I volunteered. "That's probably why it thinks the nearest Costco is 5,000 miles away in Hawaii."
"Kauai!!!" the person standing next to her shouted, unprompted, with a knowing laugh.
2. Inside the store, the layout is the same. There are basically two layouts to Costcos, the clockwise layout and the counterclockwise layout. This Casula, NSW, AU store is the counterclockwise type.
3. Most of the brands and items are the same. This one surprised me the most. I thought that 7500 miles away, on a different continent halfway around the world, Costco would have to source different brands for a lot of stuff. I mean, it's obvious that popular worldwide brands are worldwide, so it's not surprising that the same Sony headphones are sold everywhere. Nor is it surprising that food made by international conglomerates is branded and packaged similarly worldwide. Like, Ghirardelli Chocolates, which you might think of as eponymous with San Francisco (they opened their first store here in 1850), is actually owned by Swiss conglomerate Lindt, so the two chocolates brands are sold alongsde each other around the world now. (I guess the only surprise there would be if you thought Ghirardelli was still a local business instead of part of an international conglomerate.) But I was surprised to see 90%+ of the same Kirkland brand products, including frozen foods.
3½. Even Costco's food court is mostly the same. Largely the same products and same sizes. Only the prices are different...
Eagle-eyed Costco loyalists will be, like, "LOLWUT? $1.50 hot dog combo is now $1.99?!?! Could this be iNfLaTiOn?!?!" Nope, it's just currency differences. Australian Costco's $1.99 AUD hot dog combo is the equivalent of $1.36 USD. So really it's a bargain compared to our classic buck-fifty... though there's the question of how much less an "ALL PORK" hot dog is worth compared to US Costco's all-beef variety. (And, seriously, who advertises "ALL PORK"? Like, what's that better than? "NOW ONLY 50% SOYBEAN"?)
Casula, NSW - Wed, 27 Dec 2023, 6:30pm
You're in a foreign country. You're 7,500 miles from home. You've got a car and a free hour in your schedule. What do you do? ...You go to Costco! 🤣
The funny thing is we didn't need anything at Costco. I'm not sure many people ever need to buy mustard a gallon at a time, ever. But going to Costco is always at least partly about the novelty of going to Costco. And even more so about satisfying my curiosity. How different would Costco in Australia be from the US?
It was by the same token that I ate at a McDonald's in Japan, once, on my first visit to the country. I wanted to see, first hand, how different it was. Would the burgers be different? Would there be weird things on the menu? Would the fries be 1/3 the size of the monstrous portions served in the US?
We'd already spotted a few differences in common American brands in Australia. For example, Burger King here is called Hungry Jack. It's a trademark issue. I haven't been quite curious enough to try eating at one to see how the food differs. It was enough to satisfy my curiousity looking at the menu and seeing Whoppers; I didn't need to buy one or eat it. Ditto McDonald's- which is actually called McDonald's, though all the locals refer to it as "Maccas".
Anyway, today the cultural comparison study is Costco.
Just finding a Costco was a bit of a challenge. I know there are Costcos in Australia... but Costco's app doesn't.
The Costco app says the nearest store is in Kauai, Hawaii, US... over 5,000 miles away!
We had to resort to finding a Costco using Google Maps. There are three around Sydney, and one's right along our route from our last hiking trek ( Carrington Falls, previous entry in this series) to our hotel tonight in the Blue Mountains. So it seems worth a brief visit- in the name of cultural learning. 🤣
So, what's different? Surprisingly little, it turns out.
1. For starters, just entering the store is the same experience. There's one door, beneath their big logo (see first photo above), and door checkers checking ID cards.
I showed the gal in the uniform my digital ID card, and she didn't know what to do with it.
"Oh, it's US only," I volunteered. "That's probably why it thinks the nearest Costco is 5,000 miles away in Hawaii."
"Kauai!!!" the person standing next to her shouted, unprompted, with a knowing laugh.
2. Inside the store, the layout is the same. There are basically two layouts to Costcos, the clockwise layout and the counterclockwise layout. This Casula, NSW, AU store is the counterclockwise type.
3. Most of the brands and items are the same. This one surprised me the most. I thought that 7500 miles away, on a different continent halfway around the world, Costco would have to source different brands for a lot of stuff. I mean, it's obvious that popular worldwide brands are worldwide, so it's not surprising that the same Sony headphones are sold everywhere. Nor is it surprising that food made by international conglomerates is branded and packaged similarly worldwide. Like, Ghirardelli Chocolates, which you might think of as eponymous with San Francisco (they opened their first store here in 1850), is actually owned by Swiss conglomerate Lindt, so the two chocolates brands are sold alongsde each other around the world now. (I guess the only surprise there would be if you thought Ghirardelli was still a local business instead of part of an international conglomerate.) But I was surprised to see 90%+ of the same Kirkland brand products, including frozen foods.
3½. Even Costco's food court is mostly the same. Largely the same products and same sizes. Only the prices are different...
Eagle-eyed Costco loyalists will be, like, "LOLWUT? $1.50 hot dog combo is now $1.99?!?! Could this be iNfLaTiOn?!?!" Nope, it's just currency differences. Australian Costco's $1.99 AUD hot dog combo is the equivalent of $1.36 USD. So really it's a bargain compared to our classic buck-fifty... though there's the question of how much less an "ALL PORK" hot dog is worth compared to US Costco's all-beef variety. (And, seriously, who advertises "ALL PORK"? Like, what's that better than? "NOW ONLY 50% SOYBEAN"?)